Authoritarian Repression Research Articles

Sanctioning Electoral Opposition: Repression and the Growth of German Social Democracy

Elections and repression are complements under authoritarian governments, not substitutes. However, we know relatively little about the effects of repression on political parties and electoral outcomes. I argue that parties are an example of a hierarchical network, and can sustain collective action when leaders are removed by targeted repression. I illustrate this logic in the case of Germany, where from 1878-1890 some local governments expelled social democratic leaders from their home districts. I estimate the effects of expulsions on electoral outcomes using a difference-in-difference research design which leverages variation in their timing and severity. I find they diminished the SPD's success at the polls. However, effects were restricted to the first election post-expulsions. I find only weak evidence that this is due to declining numbers of socialists expelled over time within districts. These findings show that authoritarian repression of leaders significantly impedes the electoral success of opposition parties. However, they also suggest the robustness of unified, hierarchical networks to targeted repression.

The Nouvelle Droite in Portugal: a new strategy for the radical right in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy

ABSTRACTMarchi examines how the French Nouvelle Droite (ND) was introduced into Portugal at the end of the Salazarist regime and during the transition to democracy. The relevance of the Portuguese case lies in the fact that the early diffusion of the ND in Europe coincided with the profound crisis of the radical right in Portugal as it faced the liberalization of the authoritarian regime and repression during the revolutionary transition. For that reason the far right in Portugal, in comparative terms, can be seen to have been subject to historical constraints quite different from those in Spain and other Western European democracies. Marchi describes the groups on the Portuguese radical right, and certain figures who were inspired by the ND and disseminated its ideas in Portugal. His analysis of their main publications, their statements and the media campaign to promote the ND from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s highlights the different reasons for and ways in which Portuguese radicals engaged and dealt with the ND. Marchi also looks at the reactions of the national right-wing milieu to the spread of ND ideas. As part of his paper’s contribution to comparative studies on the transnational radical right, it also provides new evidence, derived from the Portuguese case, of the way in which one of the most important schools of right-wing thought at the end of the twentieth century has influenced extreme-right milieux all over Europe. In light of Tamir Bar-On's analysis of the ND's cultural and pan-European impact, the findings presented here confirm its transnational character while drawing on this and other cases from southern Europe to question the French movement's long-term effectiveness in reorienting the culture of the right-wing milieu.

Youth uprising and the quest for political reform in Africa

Frustrated by decades of authoritarian rule, political repression, economic mismanagement, poverty, soaring unemployment and other related injustices, the youth in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya rose up against the state, while Algeria and Morocco narrowly escaped the events of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. This quest for political reform is an indication of a great collective shift that has the potential to reverberate throughout the African continent. However, to what extent can the youth succeed in bringing about the much-desired transition to democracy? This article focuses on the North African youth uprising and the quest for political reform in Africa. It examines the core issues of the youth uprising and the challenges to the attainment of political reform. A youth uprising can lead to genuine political reform if the major challenges in building new democratic forms of governance which can address economic disparity, protection of human rights, justice and security, can be overcome.

Moscow in movement: power and opposition in Putin's Russia

Moscow in Movement is the first exhaustive study of social movements, protest, and the state-society relationship in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Beginning in 2005 and running through the summer of 2013, the book traces the evolution of the relationship between citizens and their state through a series of in-depth case studies, explaining how Russians mobilized to defend human and civil rights, the environment, and individual and group interests: a process that culminated in the dramatic election protests of 2011-2012 and their aftermath. To understand where this surprising mobilization came from, and what it might mean for Russia's political future, the author looks beyond blanket arguments about the impact of low levels of trust, the weight of the Soviet legacy, or authoritarian repression, and finds an active and boisterous citizenry that nevertheless struggles to gain traction against a ruling elite that would prefer to ignore them. On a broader level, the core argument of this volume is that political elites, by structuring the political arena, exert a decisive influence on the patterns of collective behavior that make up civil society-and the author seeks to test this theory by applying it to observable facts in historical and comparative perspective.Moscow in Movement will be of interest to anyone looking for a bottom-up, citizens' eye view of recent Russian history, and especially to scholars and students of contemporary Russian politics and society, comparative politics, and sociology.

Landholding Inequality, Political Strategy, and Authoritarian Repression: Structure and Agency in Bismarck’s “Second Founding” of the German Empire

Canonical works and recent studies posit that authoritarian repression, like that targeting Social Democrats during the “Second Founding” of the German Empire, depends on structural factors such as landholding inequality. However, at this juncture, the role of these variables was more complex than that in the “grand sweep” of German history. Liberal support for the 1878 Antisocialist Law was the result of an interaction between the strategy of the government and structures in society at large. Public outcry surrounding an assassination attempt on the Kaiser was provoked by the Chancellor through the press, and utilized as a political instrument by calling new elections. Liberals contesting districts with high landholding inequality came under conservative pressure led by landed aristocrats, and were forced to take up stances supporting repression. This first step in the “Second Founding” of the Empire marked an important move away from liberal governance which precluded democratic reform in Imperial Germany.

Waiting for a Meaningful State Apology: Has Brazil Apologized for Authoritarian Repression?

This article discusses whether the Brazilian State's 1995 official apology for its systematic human rights violations during the military dictatorship (1964–1985) qualifies as a “meaningful” state apology. A meaningful state apology—an act that publicly recognizes the state's wrongdoings and expresses regret—changes the social relations between the state and groups of victims and introduces new human rights values. However, numerous post-1995 public statements (law decrees, legal appeals, Supreme Court verdicts, and official statements) effectively deny the Brazilian State's responsibility for human rights crimes. This article asks: Who wants an apology, and why? Who are the winners and losers in this contest, and why? In Brazil, it concludes, a comprehensive social and normative change within all state institutions has yet to occur. Moving beyond the criterion of the apologizer's sincerity, empirical evidence from Brazil contributes to a theory of state apologies by adding a new criterion: A state apology is meaningful if it is authoritative and supported, rather than undermined, by other sectors of the state apparatus. The final report of the Brazilian Truth Commission, which is due in 2014, presents a golden opportunity to reissue a meaningful apology, endorsed by all state institutions.

Judiciary Involvement in Authoritarian Repression and Transitional Justice: The Spanish Case in Comparative Perspective

Why have some democracies made considerable progress in prosecuting dictatorship-era human rights violations or in publicly exposing the truth about repression while others still have amnesty laws that prevent, or at least hinder, even the judicial review of such abuses? This article compares Spain, Chile and Argentina to understand the impact of their contrasting histories of repression on how they have dealt with their violent pasts. I assess whether a greater degree of legal repression and direct judicial involvement in repression explains why there is more resistance to prosecuting those responsible for human rights violations, establishing truth commissions or annulling the political sentences of the past during democratization. Once democracy has been consolidated, different dynamics may emerge, but this history of judicial complicity has proved to be a key factor in understanding the continuous lack of judicial accountability in Spain.

Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile: Testimony in the Aftermath of State Violence

There is a large and still-growing literature on traumatic memory in Chile. Nearly 40 years after the coup and over 20 since Augusto Pinochet left power, the powerful psychological effects of political violence remain painfully relevant. The academic literature has gradually though incompletely responded to understand it. In Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile: Testimony in the Aftermath of State Violence, Michael Lazzara grapples with some of the most difficult aspects of memory through a series of interviews with Luz Arce.The case of Luz Arce is unsettling and tragic, not only because of the suffering she depicts but because she forces all of us to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions about how we would react under extreme duress. As she detailed in her book El infi-erno (published in Chile in 1993, with an English translation, The Inferno, in 2004), she became part of Salvador Allende’s inner circle in 1972 and worked as a militant in the Socialist Party. The military government abducted her in 1974, tortured, raped, and shot her, then worked to make her a collaborator. She subsequently provided not only details about the structure of leftist organizations, but also specific names. She became a formal employee of the dictatorship’s notorious intelligence agency, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), and its successor, the Centro Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). That book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the depth of repression of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.Lazzara begins with an abridged version of her statement to the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1990, which is essentially a boiled-down version of The Inferno. He follows with seven thematic chapters consisting of interviews he conducted with Arce from 2002 to 2007. It ends with a discussion by a number of participants in a 2008 forum in Santiago based on the book, which was first published in Spanish but then updated and expanded in an English version.It isn’t easy reading, because of course the interviews probe the very architecture of authoritarian repression in all its naked brutality. When confronted by the reality that her work with the DINA led directly to four deaths, she quickly responds that “as a functionary I bore no responsibility for deaths linked to the detention of people or to torture” and that “I was forced to be a functionary” (p. 80, emphasis in original). She struggles to reconcile her personal need for catharsis by writing the book in the first place with the fact that she worked for the DINA for an extended period of time, an experience she admits was not entirely negative.What the book demonstrates is the need for a framework within which we can better understand not only memory but also collaboration. The complexity of Steve Stern’s trilogy on memory in postauthoritarian Chile (The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile) attests to the difficulties inherent in explaining the experiences even of those who did not switch sides. When perpetrator and victim get blurred together, analysis is even harder. For example, the forum itself demonstrates how problematic the term “collaboration” can be. The discussants — one of whom suffered the loss of her husband because of Luz Arce — differ greatly in their treatment of Arce and come to no agreement about how to determine where the line can be drawn between victim and active participant. Rather than acting as a real conclusion, the forum is characterized by the raising of multiple and sometimes contradictory questions. Arce’s testimony reflects the fact that her answers to such questions change over time. When asked whether she felt that she was a victim, she responds that initially she did not, but then later did, especially after talking to the Rettig Commission (p. 87).Ultimately, then, this is a book that seeks not to answer questions but to leave them open intentionally. In the introduction, Lazzara notes that he hopes the book can serve a pedagogical function (p. 9). Of that, there is little doubt. For an instructor, it would be a useful addition to courses on Latin American politics or on authoritarian rule more generally for the issues it forces the reader to contemplate.

Contracting on Violence

Why does the military intervene in the politics of some countries but remain under firm civilian control in others? The paper argues that the origins of military intervention in politics lie in a fundamental moral hazard problem associated with authoritarian repression. Dictators must deter those who are excluded from power from challenging them. When underlying, polity-wide conflict results in threats to the regime that take the particular form of mass, organized, and potentially violent opposition, the military is the only force capable of defeating them. The military exploits this pivotal position by demanding greater institutional autonomy as well as a say in policy, and it threatens to intervene if the civilian leadership departs from a subsequent compromise on these issues. A game-theoretic analysis of such contracting on violence implies that the likelihood of military intervention in politics should be greatest at intermediate levels of mass threats. Original, large- N data on military intervention support these claims.

Claiming Heritage, Renewing Authority

This article discusses the role and status of Sufi groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina today, an issue where Turkish influences are unavoidable, irrespective of whether the focus is on conceptions of the Balkans’ Ottoman legacy or on contemporary arenas for religious alternatives in public life. Today old Sufi establishments face competition from groups with roots abroad both in terms of community leadership and the relationship between the individual groups and the state administration. Sufi-orientated activities play a role within the established Muslim congregations, the ritual aspects in particular attracting previously non-practicing Muslims. Many aspects of the Sufi theme can and should of course be related to the region’s Ottoman past, the authoritarian repression of religion in the Yugoslav Federation, and the war in the 1990s. These particular features have had an impact on religious practices as well as on the institutional organisation of Islam in the region. The attraction of the Sufi groups active today in Bosnia comes from two sources: first, references to authentic tradition, charismatic leaders, fellowships and groups that offer lifestyles in line with Muslim conduct, and secondly, their tools for establishing independent theological interpretations and for highly individualised spirituality. Bosnian Sufi identity balances between national heritage (with or without political connotations) and a search for spirituality (with or without affiliation to a group or an order); it connects to the contemporary world and its specific issues in a way that is relevant for Bosnians today, as well as being symptomatic of late-modern religion worldwide.

Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Natural Law in <i>Billy Budd, Sailor</i>

Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Natural Law in Billy Budd, Sailor Philip Loosemore (bio) Hans Morganthau [sic]: What are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? Where is your position within the contemporary possibilities? [Hannah] Arendt: I don't know. I really don't know and I've never known. And I suppose I never had any such position. You know the left think that I am a conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn't care less. I don't think that the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing. 1 Near the opening of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), the great moral parable and political allegory left unfinished at Herman Melville's death in 1891, the naive and good-hearted merchant sailor Billy Budd, a so-called Handsome Sailor whose one "imperfection" is a liability to stutter under the stress of "sudden provocation," is pressed into service aboard the Bellipotent, a massive warship fighting against the fleet of the French Directory in the summer of 1797 under the command of the strict but upright Captain Edward Vere. Anxiety is elevated and discipline harsh aboard the ship, for it is just a few months since the mutinies of the Spithead and the Nore. Though Billy is generally very well liked in the service, for mysterious reasons he arouses antipathy in the Bellipotent's master-at-arms, John Claggart, who proceeds to "lay little traps" for Billy, including sending an afterguardsman one night to provoke him with whispers of mutiny. At length, Claggart lays before Vere a false accusation of Billy's suspicious behavior and intention to mutiny. When Vere arranges for Claggart to repeat the accusation to Billy's face, a tongue-tied Billy unintentionally kills the master-at-arms with a blow to the head that substitutes for the utterance he cannot make. Cognizant [End Page 99] of the potential for rebellion among the crew, Vere coerces his drumhead court into delivering a guilty verdict and sentence of execution. Despite everyone's compassion for the fundamentally loyal Billy Budd, the latter, exclaiming "God bless Captain Vere!" at the penultimate moment, is hanged at dawn. It would never be possible to determine once and for all whether Billy Budd, Sailor sympathizes more with the commencement and expansion of radical reform in the name of the revolutionary rights of man, or with its containment; whether the novella is finally Melville's "testament of resistance" or "testament of acceptance." 2 Much as Billy Budd himself is at once the embodiment of British loyalism (upon his "forced enlistment," he "with . . . loyalty makes no dissent") and also the exemplary figure or "jewel" of the Rights-of-Man, so the novella as a whole seems to stand on both sides of the opposition between antiradical or "old" Whig ideology and French revolutionary theory that Melville reconstructs, an opposition alluded to in the narrator's well-known reference to Edmund Burke (antiradical defense of the achievements of the Glorious Revolution) and Thomas Paine (defense of the natural rights theory of political authority): "The hardheaded Dundee owner [of the Rights-of-Man] was a staunch admirer of Thomas Paine, whose book in rejoinder to Burke's arraignment of the French Revolution had then been published for some time and had gone everywhere." 3 Melville at once sympathizes with and closely interrogates both of his most direct political intertexts. Setting the novella in the immediate aftermath of the Nore mutiny, he also draws out the implications of the British debate from the perspective of 1797 and the unleashing and harsh repression of revolutionary terror, employing the mutiny as a trope for radicalism ("the enemy's red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt" [BB, 54]) and the reaction as a trope for authoritarian repression ("Final suppression, however, there was" [55]). But if, in the novella, monarchical authority repeatedly wins out over popular uprising, Melville's concern is clearly with the ways in which the currents of revolution and counterrevolution, popular sovereignty and authoritarian order, the violence of radical liberty and the...

Contracting on Violence: Authoritarian Repression and Military Intervention in Politics

Why does the military intervene in the politics of some countries but remain under firm civilian control in others? I argue that the origins of military intervention in politics lie in a fundamental moral hazard problem associated with authoritarian repression. Dictators must deter those who are excluded from power from challenging them. When underlying, polity-wide conflict results in threats to the regime that take the particular form of mass, organized, and potentially violent opposition, the military is the only force capable of defeating them. The military exploits this pivotal position by demanding greater institutional autonomy as well as a say in policy, and it threatens to intervene if the civilian leadership departs from a subsequent compromise on these issues. I develop a theoretical model of such contracting on violence and show that the likelihood of military intervention in politics is greatest at intermediate levels of mass threats. I examine original, large-N data on military intervention and find support for my claims.

De Radio Omroep-Vereeniging voor Arbeiders (ROVA)

Revolutionary Socialists of the National Workers (Labour) Secretariat (NAS) as well as the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and after 1935 the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (RSAP) were - just like other organizations - eager to use the media (in this case the radio) for propaganda. In 1929 the NAS founded the rova the Revolutionary (later Radio) Broadcasting Company for Workers. However the ROVA was blocked by the confessional political elite that governed the country in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. The public authorities went on the defensive by using authoritarian repression and by deliberately strengthening their own power. After suppressing a mutiny on the iron clad <em>De Zeven Provinciën</em> by bombing it in 1933 they banished all extremist sounds on the air because of a fear of fascism and communism. In that political climate the RSAP felt compelled to set up a pirate radio transmitter <em>De Rode Omroep</em> [<em>The Red Broadcasting Corporation</em>]. Dick de Winter reconstructs the history of the ROVA. He investigates among other things the archives of the Postal Telegraph and Telephone Company (ptt) - a state company - of the NAS, RSP and RSAP and journals of the NAS, RSP and RSAP.

Betrayal of the Innocents: Desire, Power, and the Catholic Church in Spain by Timothy Mitchell

Betrayal of the Innocents- Desire, Power, and the Catholic Church in Spain. By Timothy Mitchell. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1998. Pp. vii, 178. $39,95 clothbound; $16,50 paperback.) Interpretations of the past sweeping over the centuries often make fascinating reading. But for historians moved by the traditional evidentiary canons of their craft, such grand sallies are the cause of some discomfort. This provocative study by a highly regarded social anthropologist combines the insights of his field with psychological theory and a dose of history to argue that Spanish Catholicism developed over the centuries a powerful set of values identified as authoritarian sexual repression. The imposition of these values on society, he maintains, was damaging to individuals and encouraged patterns of sexual abuse by the clergy ranging from the use of the confessional in the sixteenth century to seduce penitents to cases of clerical sexual abuse brought to light in contemporary Spain. That such cases occurred in the distant and recent past is beyond dispute. Nor is there any doubt that the Spanish Church's traditional dark and pessimistic view of human nature in its sexual dimension verged on the obsessional, perhaps more so in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in earlier times. To what extent this obsession was a uniquely Spanish phenomenon, as the author argues, is less certain. Similar concerns with upholding rigorous morality in sexual matters were scarcely absent from Protestant Europe until it was submerged by the powerful secularizing currents of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The thesis that the five centuries considered in some detail in this study are connected through an unchanging pattern of authoritarian sexual repression and the clerical abuse that accompanied it rests primarily on psychological arguments that may well have merit, although difficult to prove from an historical perspective. It is more difficult to see a direct historical connection between the abuse of the confessional brought to light by the Inquisition in tile sixteenth century and recent cases of sexual abuse by priests. The author appears to assume that the clergy formed an undifferentiated mass over the centuries when, in fact, it underwent as dramatic a transformation as civil society during the nineteenth century. 711-ie chaotic recruitment of priests, the vastly uneven levels of clerical education, the extraordinarily diverse social backgrounds of the clergy and the attraction of the priesthood for those inspired less by religious motives than the prospect of having a roof over one's head and food on the table in early modern Spain stand in sharp contrast to the more tightly controlled clerical caste formed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would have been useful for the legitimate indictment of abuses to have been placed in the context of the socio-economic back-grounds of priests and the particular social conditions of each period discussed. The fact is that historians know little of the state of the lower clergy for both the early modern and modern periods. …

U.S. Policy toward the Demise of Yugoslavia: the “Virus of Nationalism”

The future of this part of the world is both auspicious and dangerous. I am reminded of the famous medical case of “Uncle Toby,” who suffered from a thyroid malfunction which reduced his metabolic rate to almost zero, effectively putting him in cold storage for seven years. When he was cured, it turned out that he had a malignant form of cancer which, after being dormant for those seven years, spread and quickly killed him. Eastern Europe, awakening from the cold storage of authoritarian repression, must now contend with the dangers of virulent nationalism. Yugoslavia is not immune. U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmermann

Sociological Realism: Partition for South Africa?

The existing pattern of race relations in South Africa, characterized by authoritarian repression of nonwhites, provides an unstable social climate. This paper examines currently discussed alternatives and finds them wanting in terms of their practicality. A realistic appraisal of the global situation of South African society suggests that the equitable partition of South Africa into two viable autonomous states may be the optimal solution.