Authoritarian Repression Research Articles

Harassments, Assaults and Murders: The Travails of Ghana’s Libertarian Press

ABSTRACT For almost three decades, Ghana had built and maintained an enviable feat of liberal democracy and press freedom among its peers in Africa and much of the developing world. However, recent developments in the media landscape seem to be rapidly eroding this exemplary record. This reinforces the question: To what extent is Ghana fulfilling its obligation in nurturing a liberal media atmosphere, three decades after political liberalisation? Accordingly, this study finds various violations of media freedom in Ghana including arbitrary or selective shutdown of media houses, physical attacks, seizure and destruction of equipment, arbitrary arrests and detentions, threat to life and even murder of journalists. Perpetrators of these abuses include members of the security services, ruling party supporters, public officials and unidentified assailants. Consequently, the study concludes that this creeping authoritarian repression violates the hitherto libertarian media ecology and undermine media freedom and democratic governance.

Helping a f(r)iend in need? Rethinking the role of linkages in authoritarian covert repression

ABSTRACT Covert repression techniques, such as the use of digital technologies in surveillance, censorship and disinformation, have become a pervasive tool of autocracies worldwide. This research note discusses one of the possible explanatory factors fostering covert repression: autocratic linkages. Building on policy-learning, autocratic regional integration and linkages literature: How can strong linkages with each other help autocracies achieve high levels of covert repression? By using Kazakhstan as a typical case of an informational autocracy, three possible causal channels through which autocratic linkages could impact covert repression are proposed: policy-learning, preferential trade in repression tech and preferential provision of expertise. In doing so, the note aims to encourage more comparative and process-tracing-based research on the role of autocratic linkages in authoritarian repression.

Private violence, public justice: addressing intimate partner violence in truth commissions

ABSTRACT Despite being the most prevalent form of violence in transitional settings emerging from armed conflict or authoritarian repression, intimate partner violence (IPV) has not been explicitly addressed in the mandate or investigation of any truth commission to date. Yet, using my original Gender Violence in Truth Commissions (GVTC) database, I shockingly found that one quarter of all truth commissions include references to IPV in their final reports. This article explores the tension between the lack of explicit inclusion of IPV in transitional justice processes such as truth commissions and the appearance of these references. I first outline the theoretical argument for why IPV should be included within transitional justice mechanisms. Obstacles to explicit inclusion of IPV are then identified, such the belief that it is a “private” form of harm unrelated to armed conflict or authoritarianism. By analyzing GVTC data, I show that IPV theoretically should and practically can be addressed within transitional justice processes, at least within truth commissions, and reveal characteristics that have enabled IPV to emerge within final reports. This article is the first systematic cross-national analysis of IPV within transitional justice, and the first work specifically on IPV and truth commissions.

Revolutionary resistance against full autocratization. Actors and strategies of resistance after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar

Resistance against autocratization is an important contemporary issue that calls for increased scholarly attention. The global wave of autocratization has generated a proliferation of research on the drivers of autocratization, but fewer studies on the possibilities, strategies, spatialities, and effectiveness of resistance. This article responds to these knowledge needs through a case study of revolutionary resistance against full autocratization in Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. The article examines the junta's strategies for autocratic control, trace the development of the resistance movement and analyze its strategies, spatialities and effectiveness. The article shows that the coup has been followed by a mass resistance movement that is remarkably successful in countering the regime strategies for authoritarian consolidation and survival. We argue that this effectiveness rests on the movement's ability to deploy mutually reinforcing strategies of economic, symbolic, political, and armed resistance to contest the military's claims on state authority, legitimacy, economic resources, and monopoly of armed force. The Myanmar case thus confirms the centrality of civil resistance under full autocratization, but also points to the importance of insurgent political institutions and armed resistance to counter authoritarian repression, legitimation, and co-optation strategies. The case study also shows that the spatialities of resistance strategies – being both embedded in places and territories and extended through spatial networks and scalar strategies – are key contributors to the effectiveness of the movement. This broad mobilization behind a common revolutionary goal offers the best prospect for defeating military dictatorship in Myanmar and provides relevant lessons for similar cases elsewhere.

The bureaucratic politics of authoritarian repression: intra-agency reform and surveillance capacity in communist Poland

Abstract Coercive institutions' internal structures remain poorly understood. Bureaucratic reorganizations within security institutions cause significant variation in their behavior, however. Intra-agency reforms interact with officers' careerist incentives to cause changes in coercive capacity or repression. In this paper, I test the effects of intra-agency reforms on surveillance capacity. I exploit a rare source of exogenous variation in the structure of the secret police in communist Poland. Difference-in-differences models find that when security headquarters were duplicated through an administrative reform, the proliferation of higher-level posts within the service caused a large and statistically significant increase in the number of informants it employed. Intra-agency reform substantially altered the agency's coercive capacity. Previously overlooked dynamics within coercive institutions have important effects on authoritarian repression.

Type of Violence and Ingroup Identity: Evidence From the Spanish Civil War

Wartime violence and authoritarian repression against civilians take various forms. Past research has explored the causes and consequences of violence, but no previous work simultaneously assessed the long-term effects of different types of violence on political identities. This paper contends that indiscriminate attacks can reinforce ingroup identity, whereas the role of civilian agency in selective violence may have a detrimental impact. Equipped with original data capturing municipality-level exposure to both selective and indiscriminate violence during the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) in Biscay (Basque Country), this study examines its legacy on voting behavior (1983–2015). Results indicate that fascist airstrikes increased Basque nationalism while selective violence diminished the popularity of Basque parties. Individual and community-level evidence suggests that airstrikes fostered the intergenerational transmission of political attitudes. Violence can boost national identities, but it can also erode them: it depends on the type.

Exposing Repression Behind the Scenes

Exposing Repression Behind the Scenes Yao Li (bio) In the post–Cold War era, incumbents in authoritarian regimes have increased their toolkit for repression. In addition to blatant, forceful forms of repression (such as making mass arrests and shooting protesters), less visible, more sophisticated means of coercion have become vital components of a regime's repertoire to stifle unrest. Joining a bourgeoning literature on authoritarian repression, Lynette H. Ong's book Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China presents a rigorous account of how the Chinese state takes advantage of nonstate actors to impose violent and nonviolent methods of social control. In particular, the book elaborates on how authorities hire private agents (e.g., thugs and gangsters) and rely on grassroots brokers (including local elders and members of urban residents' committees) to neutralize social protests against land appropriation and housing demolition in urban and rural China. Outsourcing Repression is highly relevant for anyone seeking to understand state repression, urbanization, and Chinese politics. Regarding violent acts carried out by thugs-for-hire, Ong describes these thugs' typical profile and the conditions under which they operate. She argues that such everyday repression is a lower-cost strategy that can minimize the likelihood of social protest and violent backlash—as long as any violence remains low-intensity, severe casualties or significant confrontations do not result, and no overt government complicity is involved. Yet, once any of these conditions fails to be satisfied, thugs-for-hire are no longer a low-cost repressive measure but a liability to the hiring authority. This paves the way for the state to increasingly turn to brokers and nonviolent tactics to resolve conflicts in demolition projects. These brokers are classified into three types (political, social, and economic), depending on the sources of their brokerage—whether their power or legitimacy stems from their state or quasi-state status, their social capital, or their role in bridging information asymmetry between state and society. [End Page 172] Correspondingly, these brokers play varying roles in mobilizing the masses, extracting compliance, and lowering the cost of state repression. For instance, with the help of social capital and emotional mobilization, social brokers employ persuasion to neutralize resistance to demolitions; in this sense, the brokers' social standing helps legitimate their actions and decrease the chance of backlash. Economic brokers (or huangniu), by contrast, bridge negotiations between the state and disgruntled residents by facilitating the matching of residents' demands with supplies of special favors by officials. These brokers expedite reaching a deal between the two parties in which official compensation is higher than that mandated by government policy or what residents are normally granted. Through nearly ten years of multi-site field research in China, spanning from the last year of the Hu-Wen era to the Xi administration, Ong has captured regional and temporal variations in state repressive actions and contention in the country. As she illustrates, incidents of forced evictions by thuggish violence have waned over time and become less prevalent in urban areas than in rural ones. In parallel, the frequency of persuasion and other nonviolent tactics being deployed has taken on increased prominence since 2011, and they are more prevalent in metropolitan areas than in smaller inland cities. Revealing changes across region and time indeed contribute to a dynamic and sophisticated narrative of state repression in demolitions. That said, the picture would be even more complicated by a systematic examination of social factors that may impact the deployment of outsourced repression and strategies for mobilizing the masses. These factors could include types of communities, forms of resistance (i.e., collective vs. individualized resistance), social groups with different resources, and the role of media and public attention. For instance, are inhabitants on the margins of urban areas more likely to be victims of everyday repression and be forcefully evicted by thugs-for-hire than those in urban centers? Do the resources and capital that citizens possess affect the state's choice of repression tactics? Does media or public attention help reduce the use of outsourced repression but boost that of persuasion or other nonviolent tactics? As outsourcing repression and mobilizing the masses have come to the fore in land appropriation and housing...

Long-term effects of political violence on political trust: Evidence from the case of the Gwangju Massacre in South Korea, 1980

What are the long-term effects of authoritarian repression on political trust in a post-democratization context? Using the Gwangju Massacre in South Korea as a case study, this article finds that indirect and direct experience of state-perpetrated violence of the critical-period cohort—who were aged 17–25 during the incident—can have long-term negative effects on trust levels towards the government. Difference-in-difference analysis of national survey data collected in 2008 and 2012 reveals that experience with violence has long-term negative consequences on government trust. Results are robust even when including significant covariates of institutional theories and cultural theories, such as interpersonal trust, evaluation of government performance, as well as satisfaction with the economy. Drawing from memory studies, this article argues that the effects are due to collective memory formed during the critical period.

Authoritarian Repression and Electoral Opposition: Mobilization under Germany's Antisocialist Law

We know little about repression's effects on opposition party mobilization under electoral authoritarianism. I argue that targeted repression of opposition leaders has both direct negative effects on mobilization and indirect effects on activist and voter support. However, party organizations and ideological leadership can adapt to mitigate targeted repression's effects. In Germany, from 1878–1890 the social democratic party was banned and its leaders were expelled from their home districts. I estimate difference- in-differences models that leverage variation in expulsion timing and frequency to estimate their effects on electoral outcomes. Expulsions caused declines in social democrats' electoral support. However, their effects diminished with each additional expulsion and after the first election post-expulsions, as local party organizations adapted to maintain mobilization in electoral districts despite targeted repression.

Political Competition and Authoritarian Repression

abstractAuthoritarian regimes repress to prevent mass resistance to their rule. In doing so, regimes’ security forces require information about the dissidents who mobilize such resistance. Political competition, which fuels partisan rivalries, offers one solution to this problem by motivating civilians to provide needed information to security forces. Yet civilians share information about any political opponents, not just dissidents, which creates a challenge for regimes that want to target dissidents. Drawing on novel archival data from the immediate aftermath of the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, a period that included civilian collaboration with repression, this article presents evidence that close pre-coup political competition is associated with more frequent repression and more targeting of non-dissidents. The author uses pre-coup democratic elections to measure political competition and addresses the challenge of estimating political preferences unaffected by repression. Qualitative evidence and further quantitative tests probe implications of the partisan rivalry mechanism and account for alternative explanations.

Hindu Nationalism: From Ethnic Identity to Authoritarian Repression

This article reflects on the relationship between Hindu nationalism and democracy and how the former emerges from within democracy only to subvert it. The essay outlines important conceptual issues in the relationship between Hindu nationalism and democracy, discusses the relationship between the idea of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and ‘Hindu Rajya’, and delves into the complex interplay between Hindu nationalism and caste. This article ultimately argues that Hindu nationalism’s alignment with authoritarianism in a political style does not simply corrode democracy, but it also undermines all values. The objective of this analysis is not to provide a comprehensive explanation of the rise of Hindu nationalism, as much as to reflect on the ways in which its ideology operates at multiple levels.

Propaganda and authority in José Ricardo Morales’ play Los culpables (1964): a connection with the Chilean context

ABSTRACT Throughout recent history, Chilean society has suffered severe socio-political events, such as the advent of authoritarian regimes like Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1989) disseminating propaganda to defend political power and control citizens. This article critically analyzes and discusses the issue of military regimes performing authoritarian power and political repression against their citizens, which, in turn, is connected with the Chilean context of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. Using a discourse analysis approach, this study examines José Ricardo Morales’ play Los culpables to critique the emergence of an authoritarian political-military system disseminating political montage against innocent citizens throughout the twentieth century. The analysis of the play reveals an avant la lettre discourse on authoritarianism, which is relevant to shed light on a new interpretation of the current use of propaganda and violence as a form of political action by the Chilean government.

Ethnic Ties, Organized Opposition and Voter Defection in Authoritarian Elections

AbstractExisting studies of ethnic voting mainly focus on democratic elections. In electoral autocracies, politically subordinate ethnicity can help citizens coordinate against the incumbent. However, we argue that collective action will be constrained when the group grows large, as it becomes costly for its members to form common behavioural norms and carry out effective sanctions through shared ethnic ties under authoritarian repression. Drawing on unique historical surveys in Taiwan, we study how Taiwanese ethnicity and local ethnic demography jointly induced voters' defection against the hegemonic KMT regime. We find that the pro-defection or anti-incumbent effect of Taiwanese ethnicity fell as the share of Taiwanese citizens in a township increased. However, the relative size of the Taiwanese group no longer undermined pro-defection ethnic voting after the KMT lifted the ban on opposition parties. Our results illustrate that formal organizations play a critical role in sustaining the informational salience of ethnicity in the elections.

Censorship and the Impact of Repression on Dissent

AbstractWhat is the impact of repression on opposition to authoritarian rule? Studies of repression and dissent have yielded contradictory results. Some research suggests that repression reduces popular resistance while others show that it creates backlash and more dissent. In this article, we present an informational theory of repression to account for such divergent findings. We argue that the impact of repression hinges on the degree of censorship. Where alternative media is present, violence is more likely to increase support for opposition. By contrast, where alternative sources of information are limited, repression may reduce support for opposition and actually increase support for incumbents. We test and confirm these expectations with an original dataset that combines the results of a panel survey that spanned the authoritarian repression of electoral protests in Moldova in 2009 and geocoded data on the subnational variation in repression and alternative information availability. The hypothesized interaction between repression and censorship is corroborated in cross‐national analysis of repression, censorship, and government support (2005–16).

Dissenting non-dissenting: ‘resistance through culture’

Putting into question its central presupposition of ‘inner freedom’, this paper deconstructs the ‘resistance through culture’ of the Păltiniş School of dissident thinkers in Romania under communism in the 1970s and 80s. The philosopher Constantin Noica, and his follower Gabriel Liiceanu, argue that resistance to authoritarian repression and dictatorial regimes is best achieved by preserving culture by schooling selected individuals in that culture rather than through direct political action or publicly speaking out. Adducing precisely which cultural values underpin the arguments of these thinkers – values such as purity, exceptionalism, individualism and genius – I show that the culture propounded by them is essentially patriarchal and, further, that this culture is complicit with the very tyranny it seeks to resist: philosophically, ideologically and in practice. This is evidenced by the exclusion of women from the culture espoused. Additionally, by focussing on a fairly recent debate between Liiceanu and Nobel prize-winning author Herta Müller, herself an exile from communist Romania, I delineate two opposing philosophies of language which might best be described as “birth of the word is in the head” versus “birth of the word is on the page”, effectively re-staging a problem going back to early defences of liberty, for example in Spinoza and Mill, the relationship between freedom of thought and freedom of expression. Only by understanding selves as linguistic bodies whose language is socialised and shared through affective relations to others and to oneself do we arm ourselves with the resources to resist censorship, repression and tyranny.

The Collective Promotion of Democracy and Authoritarian Backsliding: The Organization of American States in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Honduras

Liberal institutionalist and constructivist IR scholars have emphasized the reliable role that ROs play in promoting democracy. This article finds that by examining the Organization of American States (OAS) role in recent cases of authoritarian backsliding, those theories encounter significant barriers in explaining OAS pro-democracy actions in the Americas. By evaluating authoritarian backsliding in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Honduras, I argue that authoritarian repression makes OAS members consider initially these undemocratic actions in backsliding cases. However, repression by itself falls short to induce members to promote democracy. Only when repression occurs at the same time that most members are ideologically and politically distant from autocratic countries will the OAS collectively promote democracy in backsliding cases. Consequently, because the OAS depends on this complex interaction between repression and ideological-political distance to promote democracy in the hemisphere, institutionalist and constructivist theories face important limitations in the Americas context.

Assaults on capitalism and democratic backsliding: Evidence from Asia

It is generally assumed that stable democracies depend on sufficient economic freedoms that support ideas of individual independence and that shift resources from state to society. The growth and consolidation of economic freedoms under capitalism has been empirically linked to the growth and consolidation of democracy. Asia as a region has generally conformed to this theory, albeit with delayed democratic transitions due to the state-directed nature of development. This article revisits the capitalism/democracy relationship in East and Southeast Asia with a particular focus on contemporary concerns with global democratic backsliding. It shows the enduring analytic and empirical utility of capitalism to explain structural pressures on democratic development. It also shows how assaults on capitalism have predictive and descriptive value as indicators of authoritarian repression and democratic backsliding. The article highlights the continued relevance of capitalism for understanding democratic development, and underscores the significance of Asia to broader debates on democratic backsliding.

Copts and the Security State: Violence, Coercion, and Sectarianism in Contemporary Egypt

Copts and the Security State: Violence, Coercion, and Sectarianism in Contemporary Egypt

Interrogating Ethnic Stacking: The Uses and Abuses of Security Force Ethnicity in Sudan

ABSTRACT African elites commonly recruit co-ethnic soldiers into state security institutions, a practice known as ethnic stacking. Ethnic stacking has recently received considerable attention from scholars and been linked to authoritarian repression, coups, and political violence. This article employs evidence from Sudan to argue that ethnic stacking is not one coherent tactic but several, and can manifest across multiple identities, multiple institutions, and at different points in the security force hierarchy. Moreover, the effects of ethnic stacking can be mediated by which institutions are stacked and whether stacking is restricted to the leadership or encompasses an entire security force.

Country size and the survival of authoritarian monarchies: developing a new argument

ABSTRACT This article combines the literature on authoritarian regime survival with that on small states to propose a new explanation for the survival and breakdown of authoritarian monarchies. To develop the conjecture that monarchy tends to survive in small countries into a theoretically and empirically sound argument, I follow the process of iterative induction. I first inspect all authoritarian monarchies between 1946 and 2018 and find that countries with monarchic survival have a significantly smaller population size than countries where monarchy broke down. Second, I develop a theoretical explanation for this relation: the feeling of vulnerability, the social proximity, and institutional centralization, which are all typically ascribed to small countries, facilitate the stability of monarchic regimes. I conceptualize this stability with Gerschewski’s model of three pillars of authoritarian stability, co-optation, repression and legitimation; and I argue that smallness enhances each of these three via several channels. Third, to illustrate the plausibility of this explanation I compare two most likely historical cases of monarchies with diverging outcomes: Jordan and Egypt. Fourth, I inspect deviant cases, particularly Bhutan, Maldives and Tonga, to refine and finalize the argument. The main finding is that smallness prevented the violent breakdown of monarchic regimes since 1946.