From Pariah to Partners - Why Aggressive Regimes Can’t Be Contained, They Must Be Transformed

Contemporary international affairs are increasingly shaped by a pattern of structural aggression. From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Israel’s protracted and intensifying military operations in Gaza, from Iran’s strategic adventurism to Afghanistan’s reversion to Taliban rule, the global security environment is marked not only by violent events, but by the persistence of regimes that instrumentalise violence as a mode of governance. Standard responses, such as sanctions, isolation, deterrence, are no longer adequate. They address symptoms while leaving the deeper conditions untouched. If peace is to be more than the temporary suspension of conflict, foreign policy must develop a more ambitious framework: one that links long-term stability to internal political transformation.

“Strategic behaviour in such contexts tends to be shaped less by calculated interest in stable outcomes and more by imperatives of regime survival, identity consolidation, or ideological containment.”

This is not to suggest that all conflict is reducible to domestic governance failures. The international system remains characterised by asymmetries of power, contested norms, and the persistence of unresolved historical grievances. But the relationship between authoritarian governance and external aggression is neither incidental nor novel. As research from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, Freedom House, and the Carnegie Endowment has shown, authoritarian regimes are not only more prone to repress dissent at home, they are often more likely to pursue destabilising policies abroad, particularly when domestic legitimacy falters. Strategic behaviour in such contexts tends to be shaped less by calculated interest in stable outcomes and more by imperatives of regime survival, identity consolidation, or ideological containment.

Russia under Vladimir Putin exemplifies this trajectory. What began as a hybrid regime has, over the course of two decades, evolved into a deeply personalist autocracy in which nationalism, historical revisionism, and institutional dismantling have converged. The war in Ukraine is not merely an act of geopolitical aggression; it reflects the logic of a regime that has exhausted other sources of legitimacy. The same structural logic can be observed, albeit in differing forms, in Iran’s external posture, where proxy warfare and nuclear escalation have become tools of both deterrence and domestic distraction. In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s consolidation of power has reversed decades of social development and ejected the country from meaningful international cooperation. And in Israel, sustained insecurity and the erosion of democratic norms have facilitated the rise of coalitions increasingly indifferent to judicial independence, pluralism, or restraint.

None of these cases are equivalent in cause or consequence, but they underscore a shared dilemma: in each, the nature of the regime is not incidental to its external behaviour. Yet foreign policy often stops at the point of behaviour, rather than pursuing a sustained engagement with regime type. Containment, deterrence, and economic penalties have their place, but absent a framework for supporting internal reform, these strategies risk entrenching rather than mitigating the pathologies they seek to counter. As scholars such as Sheri Berman and Thomas Carothers have argued, democratic resilience and international peace are not parallel tracks—they are structurally linked.

“While democratisation cannot be externally imposed, it can be externally enabled.”

This raises a question that liberal democracies have long struggled to answer: is it possible to support political transformation within authoritarian states without replicating the failures of interventionist overreach or the paternalism of liberal triumphalism? The post-Cold War period is replete with examples of miscalibrated engagement - from the naïve market liberalisation of post-Soviet Russia, which helped create conditions for autocratic retrenchment, to the overreach of state-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which overestimated institutional readiness and underestimated societal complexity.

Yet there are also instructive counterexamples. In post-communist Central and Eastern Europe, the European Union’s accession process provided a model of conditionality that linked economic and political integration to institutional reform. While imperfect, it catalysed a set of reforms (judicial independence, civil liberties, anti-corruption measures) that contributed meaningfully to regime transformation. In Latin America, democratic transitions in countries such as Chile and Argentina were shaped by domestic mobilisation but supported by international pressure and transitional justice mechanisms. And in East Asia, South Korea and Taiwan exemplify cases where gradual democratisation occurred in tandem with economic growth, under external security umbrellas but without coercive liberalisation.

These precedents suggest that while democratisation cannot be externally imposed, it can be externally enabled. This demands a shift in strategic thinking: away from episodic crisis response and toward patient, multilateral, civic-oriented engagement. It requires a reallocation of resources—not simply toward state-to-state diplomacy or military deterrence, but toward civil society, educational exchange, media plurality, and legal aid. It also requires engaging diaspora communities and exiled reformers not as geopolitical tools, but as participants in long-term institutional reconstruction. In regions where democratic aspirations persist despite repression, this kind of scaffolding may not yield immediate results but it builds capacity for eventual transition.

“Peace is not an event—it is a structure. And structures, like regimes, are shaped over time.”

It also calls for a reframing of peace itself. Peace is often defined negatively—as the absence of war. But this definition is inadequate. The political scientist Johan Galtung distinguished between “negative peace” (the absence of direct violence) and “positive peace” (the presence of justice, inclusion, and democratic governance). Without the latter, the former is unlikely to endure. Peace, in this conception, is not an event - it is a structure. And structures, like regimes, are shaped over time.

Of course, there are serious limitations to this approach. Authoritarian regimes often co-opt civil society, suppress dissent, and manipulate reform discourse for international legitimacy. External engagement can be resisted, instrumentalised, or rendered futile by conditions on the ground. Moreover, the global context has shifted. Rising powers in the Global South, many of which are wary of Western-led governance frameworks, have justifiably challenged the universalisation of liberal models. Their skepticism is often grounded in historical memory of imposed institutions, uneven development, and selective enforcement of international norms.

These objections must be taken seriously. Any strategy aimed at fostering political transformation must be grounded in humility, historical awareness, and context-specific engagement. It must prioritise horizontal partnerships over top-down directives and recognise that the legitimacy of reform cannot be imported, it must be claimed by domestic actors. But that does not mean external actors have no role. Rather, it means that role must be carefully defined: one of enabling, not engineering; of listening, not prescribing.

What this demands of liberal democracies is a form of intellectual and political discipline. Foreign policy must be consistent, not just in rhetoric, but in structure. It cannot celebrate democracy while arming autocrats, or denounce repression while maintaining impunity. And it must treat peace not as a tactical objective, but as a long-term political and civic project, one rooted in the idea that the internal configuration of power matters. Regimes that rely on repression, polarisation, and external conflict for survival are unlikely to produce sustainable peace. This is not an ideological claim, it is a structural observation borne out by empirical research and historical experience.

There is no blueprint for democratic transformation. Nor is there a linear path to peace. But foreign policy that fails to engage with the internal dynamics of authoritarian regimes risks becoming a mechanism for crisis management rather than conflict resolution. To address the security challenges of our time, liberal democracies must move beyond containment and toward an architecture of peace that begins not at the border, but at the foundation of the state.

Sources

Berman, S. (2007). The primacy of politics: Social democracy and the making of Europe's twentieth century. Cambridge University Press.

Carothers, T. (2007). The "sequencing" fallacy. Journal of Democracy, 18(1), 12–27.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (n.d.). Democracy, conflict, and governance program.

Diamond, L. (2008). The democratic rollback: The resurgence of the predatory state. Foreign Affairs, 87(2), 36–48.

Freedom House. (2024). Freedom in the World 2024: The mounting damage of disinformation and authoritarian resilience.

Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191.

Kaufmann, C., & Pape, R. A. (1999). Explaining costly international moral action: Britain’s sixty-year campaign against the Atlantic slave trade. International Organization, 53(4), 631–668.

Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge University Press.

Mechkova, V., Lührmann, A., & Lindberg, S. I. (2017). How much democratic backsliding? Journal of Democracy, 28(4), 162–169.

Varieties of Democracy Institute. (2024). Democracy report 2024: Defiance in the face of autocratization. University of Gothenburg.

Wolff, J. (2020). International democracy promotion: A review of methods and effectiveness. Third World Quarterly, 41(7), 1132–1153.