[adventured]

They're the exact opposite of stable. That's why they're so oppressive. They're constantly fighting against high levels of instability that never leave the system. All dictatorships and authoritarian systems have a lack of stability to varying degrees based on their systems. If you have stability, you don't have to oppress, murder, purge people to maintain power.

They play whack-a-mole with the constant instability.

People get this backwards very commonly. It's not stability they always have, with occasional instability. They always have instability, it's a constant, and the regimes exist in never ending fear of the population because of that. Their actions are the process of removing the greater extremes of instability as they creep up to threaten their power or as they become threatening enough to be noticed.

The most common example of this I see, at least over the past ~20 years, is Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. There is a forever stream of claims that: hey, at least Iraq had stability before the war. No they didn't, they had the exact opposite of stability. They had extreme oppression, extreme instability. If you have to constantly oppress people to keep your power, it means your system is wildly unstable. Saddam had to constantly murder and purge people, even within his own ranks, to fight for keeping control against the never ending instability that his regime prompted. Saddam could never stop fighting against that instability, or it would have toppled him rapidly.

[sharken]

The constant instability can also be seen in Afghanistan, where a strong regime such as the Taliban can impose stability.

Where it gets hard, is what are the underlying reasons to the constant instability.

Poverty and a very religious population seem to be two factors that go hand in hand.