International organisations and arrested democratisation: Equatorial Guinea and the accession to the CPLP

Abstract

There is considerable academic consensus that international organisations (IOs) help to support and foster the dominant regime type of its respective members, and that more democratically dense organisations will boost democracy within. Less is known, however, when authoritarian states apply to join democratic IOs and fail to meet expectations of internal change, leading to cases of arrested democratisation. We explore the impact of these unsuccessful outcomes by focusing on the accession of autocratic resilient Equatorial Guinea to the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries. Though presented in 2014 as a membership bid that would foster a subsequent democratisation process, ten years after, any semblance of progress at the national level remains open-ended. This article argues that failure to lock-in a democratising path in such cases requires considering the role of regime survival tactics and the quality of institutional inducements when unpacking the inductive effect of IOs on authoritarian applicants.