Vision Documents, Nation Branding and the Legitimation of Non-democratic Regimes

ABSTRACT

Documents play a vital role in constructing political regimes and their geopolitical relations. In this article, we analyse a particular type of document – the 21^st century national vision – and examine its political work. Often glossy (digital) documents featuring simple slogans, fantastic plans, and claims to global relevance and prestige, national visions make specific futures present and close off room for alternative interpretations. Combining work in critical geopolitics with research on nation branding and authoritarian legitimation, we argue that national vision documents are productive – rather than merely reflective – of geopolitical scripts and the future they make possible. Analysing this practice in three image-savvy non-democratic regimes – Kazakhstan, Qatar and Thailand – we show how such scripts are simplified in national vision documents and displace the complexity of the spaces they claim to represent. The oversimplified abstractions they present then resonate widely in national and public discourse, where they obscure struggles over national identity, directions of economic development, and the nature of political orders. Rather than superficial branding documents, national visions are key documents for the making of authoritarian regime legitimation claims today.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the British International Studies (BISA) Annual Conferenence in June 2021. We would like to thank the participants and discussants of the panel ‘Metaphors in Internationational Security’, as well as Nadia Kaneva, Duncan McCargo and Richard Freeman for their insightful comments. At Geopolitics, we thank the Editors and Reviewers for their guidance and suggestions to improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. National vision documents are employed regularly in scholarly analysis of foreign policy and economic, social, and urban development. For example, see Sullivan (2018), 121–136; Scharfenort (2012), 209–230; Peera (2020), 408–419.

2. In the Gulf, Qatar was the first state to publish a national vision in 2008. This was followed by Bahrain’s Vision 2030 later that year, the United Arab Emirate’s Vision 2021 in 2010, and most recently, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 in 2016 (see Eggeling 2020, 92).

3. Browning and Ferraz de Oliveira’s use of the term ‘geopolitical script’ resembles how the term was originally introduced into the study of geopolitics by Tuathail et al. (1998), Tuathail (1996) in his work on writing global space.

4. Nation-branding has been studied across regime types in case studies from the global north, south, east and west. The relation between political branding and non-democratic rule has become a key concern in recent literature on authoritarian legitimation. For a discussion see Eggeling (2020), 40–50.

5. Positioning itself in relation to classical geopolitics (itself a subfield at the intersection of political science and geography with a complicated and contested legacy), critical geopolitics highlights that geography matters in world politics, but not quite in the classical geopolitical sense as given territorial capabilities and immutable material realities. For more on critical geopolitics, see Moisio et al. (2015).

6. On the notion of intellectuals of statecraft, O’Tuathail and Agnew (1992, 193) write: ‘since the development of the modern state system in the sixteenth century there has been a community of intellectuals of statecraft. Up until the 20th century, this community was relatively small and restricted, with most intellectuals also being practitioners of statecraft. In the 20th century, however, this community has become quite extensive, and internally specialised’. There are different types of intellectuals of statecraft; including ‘defence intellectuals’ (associated with defence contractors and weapon systems), ‘security intellectuals’ (often staff of foreign affairs think tanks), ‘public intellectuals’ (like former top government officials, Kissinger or Brzezinski), and other members of political society. All of those who ‘design, articulate and order foreign policy from the top to those actually charged with implementing particular foreign policies and practicing statecraft (whether military or diplomatic) on a daily basis … can claim to be intellectuals of statecraft’ (O’Tuathail and Agnew 1992, 193).

7. Historians have argued that the mismatch between central planning and actual performances of state economies contributed to the faltering of communist rule throughout the 1980s (White 1986, 464).

8. For more on authoritarian developmentalism, see Adaman and Akbulut (2021), 285–286; Sinha (2021), 327; Arsel, Adaman, and Saad-Filho (2021), 262–264.

9. Petra Alderman spent a total of 16,5 months in Thailand (September 2009-June 2010, June 2016-November 2016, March 2019); Kristin Eggeling spent a total of 15 months in Qatar (September 2013-April 2014 & September 2015-March 2016) and 5 months in Kazakhstan (March 2016-July 2016).

10. This framework is inspired by Hansen (2006).

11. Both citations are from the MFA phone app, retrieved from https://www.gov.kz/memleket/entities/mfa?lang=en (last accessed February 7, 2017).

12. For an early assessment of the feasibility of Kazakhstan 2050, see Linn’s (2014).

13. It also has two designated websites, one on an American domain (.com) and one on a Kazakhstani domain (.kz), the latter functioning as a more extensive ‘review and analytical portal’, see Strategy 2050: Review and Analytical Portal. 2020. Accessed June 4, 2021. https://strategy2050.kz/en/.

14. Shiekh Tamin signed the foreword of the National Vision 5 years before he became Emir (Kamrava 2013, 181).

15. Qatar was the first among the Gulf States to outline such a vision, which was followed by Bahrain’s Vision 2030 later that year, the United Arab Emirate’s Vision 2021 in 2010, and most recently, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 in 2016.

16. The website is accessible at http://nscr.nesdc.go.th/ns/.

17. Personalised developmental models are a common feature in other authoritarian regimes, such as Erdoğan’s Turkey or Modi’s India. See, Adaman and Akbulut (2021) on Turkey; Sinha (2021) on India.