Rethinking Authoritarian Resilience and the Coercive Apparatus

Abstract

A state's coercive apparatus can be strong in some ways and weak in others. Using interview data from security personnel in China, this study expands current conceptualizations of authoritarian durability and coercive capacity to consider a wide range of security activities. While protest response in China is centrally controlled and strong, other types of crime control are decentralized and systematically inadequate in ways that compromise the state's coercive power and may ultimately feed back into protest. Considering security activities beyond protest control exposes cracks in China's authoritarian system of control—an area where it is typically perceived to thrive—and calls into question our understanding of regime resilience as well as our current approach to assessing the role coercive capacity plays in authoritarian resilience elsewhere.