ABSTRACT
Authoritarian states exhibit three distinctive characteristics. Firstly, they are anti-pluralist – with the exclusion of a wide range of political interest groups through substantial barriers to contestation across the different branches of government. Secondly, they are anti-liberal, imposing significant restrictions upon the core political liberties of their citizens. Thirdly, they are governed by executives with unchecked powers – whereby the non-executive branches of government, and the population at large, have very limited practical recourse against executive overreach or abuse. Empirically, the injustices perpetrated by authoritarian states include mass violence, large-scale economic extraction, and sociocultural exclusion and erasure. Yet authoritarianism is no monolith – there exist wide variations across such states. In advancing a theory of reparative justice in authoritarian states, the most constructive approach is to focus on a subset of minimally decent authoritarian states, which do not practise extensive surveillance, coercion, and violence against a significant plurality of its citizens, lack complete control of all information sources, and enjoy a degree of general popular support.
