CEI-Iscte researchers Pedro Seabra and Ana Lúcia Sá are the authors of the article entitled ‘International organisations and arrested democratisation: Equatorial Guinea and the accession to the CPLP’, recently published in the scientific journal Contemporary Politics, a reference publication classified Q1 in the field of Political Science.
The article analyses the impact of authoritarian states joining international organisations of a democratic nature, focusing on the case of Equatorial Guinea and its process of joining the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) in 2014. Although it was presented as a promising step towards the start of a democratisation process, a decade later there has been no significant domestic progress.
The authors argue that these cases of ‘suspended democratisation’ call for a deeper analysis of the survival strategies of authoritarian regimes and the quality of the institutional mechanisms for democratic induction offered by international organisations.
This work contributes to the debate on the limits of external influence in the political transformation of authoritarian regimes and reinforces CEI-Iscte’s research in the areas of international relations, international institutions and political transition processes.
The article is available online via the journal Contemporary Politics: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569775.2025.2502275