Coercive Apparatus Research Articles

Ruling the Borderlands: An Ethnography of the Pakistani State’s Everyday Practices in Dir

ABSTRACT This article analyses how and why the northwest borderland region of Pakistan has become one of the world’s most heavily militarised regions. Before 9/11, the area was a historical colonial frontier, experiencing significant militarism and violence during the Cold War. After the 9/11 attacks and the American and allied forces’ invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, however, the Pakistani military undertook a massive intervention and deployment in the region and established a chain of checkpoints aimed at filtering and disciplining the local population. Consequently, local inhabitants have endured severe treatment from the military and other coercive apparatuses. Using an ethnographic method, this article documents the daily experiences of the local people amidst pervasive militarisation. It contends that recent instances of state violence and militarisation cannot solely be attributed to 9/11 but are deeply rooted in the region’s historical treatment as a buffer zone during colonial times. In this context, Pakistan’s postcolonial state has heavily relied on its violent methods and securitised infrastructure to regulate both the region and its people.

The Fortress State: Extreme Militarization in Jordan

Abstract Jordan is one of the most militarized states in the world. Why? Traditional explanations hold that the kingdom’s bloated armed forces and security institutions reflect authoritarian dynamics and frequent regional wars. However, such popular arguments falter. Jordan has not been a primary combatant to any major conflict for a half-century, and it is no more authoritarian than other Arab autocracies. This essay instead suggests that militarization begets militarization. In political terms, Jordan’s coercive apparatus underpins the tribal coalitional bargain that sustains the Hashemite monarchy. It also paradoxically breeds the very domestic insecurity that it purports to prevent. By exhausting the economy, extreme militarization has spawned public unrest spurred by high unemployment and fiscal crises. And by necessitating a pro-Western foreign policy, it has attracted regional terrorism and triggered further domestic dissent. In sum, Jordanian militarization persists not from exogenous structural forces, but the deliberate choices of its political architects.

State Coercive Power and the War on Cults in China

As a high-capacity authoritarian regime, China has made immense efforts to exterminate the Falun Gong and other “evil cults.” However, cult activities persist throughout the country. This article seeks to explain why the extensive government repression in China failed to achieve its goal of eliminating “evil cults.” By examining how economic reforms in China have created a relatively safe space for illegal activities, the article highlights the importance of going beyond a focus on the conventional coercive apparatus, and adopting a broad concept of coercive capacity for understanding authoritarian durability. State penetration facilitated by grassroots institutions provides a particularly important foundation for the regime’s coercive power. This study draws on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative study analysis uses a dataset compiled from 5,852 judicial cases in which 8,785 cult activities were prosecuted. The qualitative analysis is conducted as a case study based on fieldwork in a medium-size city in Hunan province.

Courts, the state, and democratization in the United States

AbstractThe United States is facing an era of acute democratic fragility. The Supreme Court is often understood as a key countermajoritarian institution that often impedes democratization. But adopting an interbranch perspective, we show that the court has been a stronger champion of democratization in the United States than is typically recognized. National power has generally been necessary to overcome antidemocratic subnational policy, and national state power requires both standard setting and coercion. Using an original dataset of Supreme Court rulings on civil rights and racial equality, we show that the court was an earlier and more consistent champion of racial democratization than is generally understood but that in the absence of cooperation from the rest of the federal government's coercive apparatus, the court's standard‐setting rulings had little impact. These findings suggest the conditions under which the protection of democratic gains might be possible.

The low self-efficacy trap: why people with vulnerabilities experience prolonged periods with payment problems

IntroductionSocieties place a responsibility on individuals to pay what they owe on time, establishing a coercive apparatus for debt collection and enforcement when they do not, coupled with consumer protection and debt resolution measures to protect the vulnerable.MethodsAn analysis of in-depth interviews with 28 people with both payment difficulties and vulnerabilities from ill-health, using Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory to explore the experiences of vulnerable defaulters as they try to exercise the personal responsibility placed on them by society.ResultsIt finds that they encounter barriers in exercising the personal responsibility which primarily arise in encounters with inflexible and bureaucratic routines – of creditors, debt enforcement agents and even money advisers whose role is to help vulnerable people. These systematically undermine defaulters' self-efficacy, and leaving them facing prolonged periods of payment difficulties.DiscussionThe findings are discussed in the light of Bandura's Theory and lessons drawn for the policies and practices of creditors, debt enforcement bodies, and money advisers.

Stop, in the Name of Law!: The Restructuring of Police Force in the Early Republican Turkey

ABSTRACT This study aims to analyse the strategic decisions made by the foundational cadre during the establishment of homeland security in the early years of the Turkish Republic and their consequential impact on the institutional capacities of the state’s coercive apparatus. To achieve this objective, this article primarily focuses on the evolutionary trajectory of homeland security institutions during the final stages of the Ottoman Empire and the founding period of the Turkish Republic. A central thesis posited herein contends that political considerations were the driving force behind the establishment of police organizations and the subsequent professionalization of policing, particularly since the 1930s. This study also elucidates the political directives issued to the police organization by the government, the successive phases of police training, and the legal framework governing the restructuring of the police institution.

Surviving revolution and democratisation: the Sudan armed forces, state fragility and security competition

AbstractSudan has for decades been one of Africa's most fragmented polities. Yet arguably the single most consequential actor in its recent history is among the least well studied: the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). For most of post-independence statehood, Khartoum has been ruled by generals. This article places SAF in a longitudinal context of the expansion and contraction of state power and the functions of the coercive apparatus in these processes. It situates SAF in institutional logics, driven by historically contingent ideas about the nature of the polity, the role of the army within it and its likely partners and enemies. Doing so historicises the strategic calculus of SAF during the 2018–2019 December Revolution which mobilised millions but ended with a new coup in October 2021. I underscore how institutionalised rivalry between SAF and other security services has moulded patterns of regime change and consolidation: from Ja'afar Nimeiri and Omar Al-Bashir to Abdelfatah Al-Burhan today, anxieties over security competition and state fragility shape SAF's willingness to break with regimes it once dominated and its subsequent subversion of revolutionary change and democratisation.

Workshopping Water Justice: linking struggles from the Cape Flats to the rest of the Continent

ABSTRACT Drawing insight and inspiration from our comrade Aziz Choudry, in this paper, we explore the role of political education and knowledge making in social movement struggles to contest the state and capital around access to water and other public services. Drawing on a decade of organising work in the city of Cape Town and at wider scales, we highlight the importance of learning and knowledge generation in social movements and the everyday strategies of organising movements use to overcome divisions based on ‘race’, gender, class and nationality, and to confront those obstacles presented or exacerbated by exclusionary governance arrangements, commodified service delivery and the coercive apparatus of the state. Rejecting elite led organising in favour of working-class self-organisation, these strategies seek to build individual and organisational solidarity across the diverse and fragmented experiences of those living on the margins of capitalist society.

Transformation and Growth of the Coercive Apparatus in Putin’s Russia

The article describes the transformation of the Russian coercive apparatus (comprising security services and the military) after Vladimir Putin came to power. The different forces charged with ensuring domestic and external security of the state are one of the cornerstones of Putin’s presidency. The first stage of the changes saw them consolidated and brought under tighter control of the president’s camp, whilst during the second – following Putin’s re-election as president in 2012 – they were much expanded and modernised. Looking mainly at the normative acts from that period, the article discusses the scope and nature of these changes as well as their wider political context related to the development of a centralised, authoritarian power system in Russia. It also focuses on the parallel process of changes introduced in the prosecutor’s office and the justice system whose aim – like in the case of the coercive apparatus – was to extend the power of the president and strengthened the state’s control over society.

Reconfiguring Authoritarianism: Post-Crisis Regime Consolidation in Algeria during the 1990s

Cezayir rejimi 1990’larda bir demokratikleşme çabası ve bir iç savaşla sarsılmıştı. Ancak takip eden süreçte rejim oldukça dirençli bir hale gelmeyi başardı. Her ne kadar 2000’lerden sonra başta Arap Baharı ve Hirak isimli toplum hareketleri olsa da Cezayir rejimi protestoları yatıştırmanın ve hayatta kalmanın yollarını bulabildi. İstikrarsız geçen 1990’ların ardından Cezayir rejim elitleri nasıl oldu da bu kadar dirençli bir otoriter rejim geliştirebildiler? Rejim 1990’larda içine düştüğü siyasal krizden nasıl bir dönüşümle çıkmayı başardı ve bu dönüşüm rejimim hayatta kalma dinamiklerini nasıl etkiledi? Bu sorulara yanıt verirken bu makale Cezayir’de otoriter rejimin dönüşümünü vaka analizi yoluyla incelemekte ve bulgularını saha araştırması sırasında yapılmış mülakatlarla desteklemektedir. Buna göre rejim 1990’lar öncesinde hayatta kalmak için kullandığı araçlar daha sınırlı olmuştur. Ancak 1990’larda rejim bir yandan bazı eski araçlarını yeniden yapılandırırken bazı yeni araçları kullanıma sokarak hayatta kalma araçlarını çeşitlendirmiştir. Bu çerçevede rejimin 1990’larla beraber hayatta kalmak için farklı ihtiyaçları daha iyi karşılayabilen araçları üç grupta ele alınabilir. Birincisi doğal kaynak gelirleri gibi eskiden beri kullanılan araçlar, ikincisi baskı aygıtlarını güçlendirilmesi ve meşruiyetin yeniden tanımlaması yoluyla yenilenen ve geliştirilen araçlar, üçüncüsü ise siyasal liberalleşmeyi aktif bir şekilde kullanmaya başlamak ve muhalefetten gelebilecek tehditleri kontrol edebilmek için çok partili seçim sistemi yerleştirmekle geliştirilen yeni araçlardır. İşte bu yeniden yapılanma sayesinde Cezayir rejimi 1990’larla beraber dirençli ve modern bir seçimli otoriter rejime dönüşmüştür. Bunun sonucu olarak da rejim 2000’lerle beraber yükselen tehditlere daha başarılı bir şekilde yanıt verebilecek hale gelmiştir. Cezayir vakası üzerinden ilerleyen bu makale bir yandan ülkedeki rejimin dönüşümünü gösterirken bir yandan da yakın dönemde dünyanın dört bir yanında otoriter rejimlerin yaşadığı dönüşümlere de bir örnek sunarak literatürle bağlantılar kurmaktadır.

Camouflage in the Streets: Emergency Powers, the Military, and the Philippines’ COVID-19 Pandemic Response

Abstract With emergency powers, President Rodrigo Duterte mobilized and deployed military and police to enforce lockdown measures in Metro Manila and Cebu City. For several months in 2020, the deployed forces ran quarantine control points in borders and city wards, and enforced curfew and liquor bans. This article examines how said deployment affected civilian control by the President and local civil-military dynamics. The heightened visibility of uniformed personnel in these urban spaces, and subsequent arrests and detention of quarantine violators came under heavy criticism. Against the backdrop of ex-military dominated national Inter Agency Task Force for Infectious Diseases (IATF), the militarized lockdown failed to stem the virus’ spread and expanded the military’s reach into civilian domain. Its involvement in law enforcement operations alongside the police poses dangers to local civil-military balance and to democracy. President Duterte’s reliance on the state’s coercive apparatus to carry out the pandemic response enabled him to assert control over local governments and to repress dissent.

Endgames: Military Response to Protest in Arab Autocracies

Endgames: Military Response to Protest in Arab Autocracies

Аgricultural cooperation from a historical perspective

The purpose of the article is to show that cooperation conducted in a «voluntary-compulsory» manner only discredits the idea of cooperation in rural areas and leads to food crises in society. The research uses the method of historical analogies. The article examines the processes of agricultural concentration, including in the form of cooperation, from a historical perspective; an assessment of current trends is given by comparing them with similar processes that took place in the Soviet era in the conditions of the administrative economy. Statistical materials from official sources, party-Soviet documents were used for the analysis. The content of V.I. Lenin's article «On Cooperation», to which the former and current ideologists of the cooperation of the peasantry refer, allows for a very twofold interpretation of the ideas of the leader of the revolution. On the one hand, Lenin's position presupposes a link between the city and the countryside on the basis of a new economic policy. On the other hand, his remark that «the system of civilized cooperators with public ownership of the means of production... – this is the system of socialism,» clearly indicates that Lenin considered the collective farm form as the highest form of peasant cooperation. This form of cooperation objectively leads to the use of the state coercive apparatus with all the ensuing consequences. This form of cooperation objectively leads to the use of the state coercive apparatus with all the ensuing consequences. It is shown that the basis of failures in the development of cooperation in modern agriculture of Kazakhstan is the prevalence of administrative and bureaucratic methods of solving the problem. Author summarizes that only reliance on the initiative of the peasants themselves, their personal interests and motivation are the main condition for the successful promotion of ideas of cooperation in rural areas.

Democratic Waves in Arab World: Ideology and Typology

The term “Arab World” is used to denote the geographical and nation-state entities in the modern West Asian and North African region popularly referred in its abbreviated version WANA. Democratic waves encapsulate the popular civilian uprisings, revolts, resistance, revolutionary upsurge, rebellion taking place from time to time in Arab world leading to political - regime transitions and profound convulsions in economy, society, culture ,literature, art and ideas. The contemporary WANA took birth in the interregnum of two world wars involving the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and emergence of new nation-states as designed by the European colonial masters. The new political restructuring fundamentally replaced the ancient tribalism. The characteristics of modern states like bureaucracy, organized army, police force and other coercive apparatuses, hierarchical judicial system, municipal administrative units made their historic appearance.
 Across the Arab world, the political system has been largely authoritarian and dictatorial in nature. The implanted monarchies referred to as the Sheikhdoms, military dictators usurping power through bloody coups and individual dictators based on popular revolutionary upsurge have been the characteristics of regimes of the Arab world. The popular democratic sentiments were crushed by the state apparatus leading to large scale bloodsheds. The modern Arab political history is replete with such instances of popular civilian democratic waves impacting the entire spectrum of their society. Undoubtedly, these upsurges didn't take place in any vacuum but were largely conditioned by contemporary political and economic changes. Besides this, these democratic waves were based on ideological frameworks containing the elements of Marxian socialism, Arab nationalism and Islam. These democratic waves have also been approached by construction of some typologies involving regional pattern, economic system and regime types.
 This paper is an humble attempt to understand those ideological frameworks inspiring, instigating, guiding and reinvigorating democratic sentiments and revolutionary movements against authoritarian regimes demanding freedom, liberty, rights, equality, justice, rule of law, representative institutions, responsible and accountable governance. Further, it also endeavors to analyse patterns and typology of those democratic waves convulsing the polities, economies and societies of the Arab world.

Uneasy partnerships: Prisoner re-entry, family problems and state coercion in the era of neoliberalism

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of prisoner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering individuals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on problems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protective services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state. Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the strains faced by former prisoners' households and the tactics they used to deal with them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements.

Policing a Pandemic: Understanding the State and Political Instrumentalization of the Coercive Apparatus in Duterte’s Philippines

As the world was mired in distress, some leaders saw opportunities to exploit the pandemic and further consolidate their grip on power. It is, thus, the objective of this article to discuss how, when, and why the state’s coercive apparatus has been instrumentalized by its leader amid a crisis. It will also explain how such apparatus has shaped both the aura of invincibility of the state and social order within the polity. The deployment of the Philippine National Police by President Rodrigo Duterte will be analyzed and discussed. The main argument of the article is that while the police has been given extensive powers to amplify the state’s power and assist in administrating a crisis-stricken society, they have also been instrumentalized to bolster an illiberal regime. In particular, the police were bestowed positions of authority within the state’s pandemic response apparatus, provided a broader leeway to wield violence through a contentious anti-terrorism law, and mobilized to unfairly enforce government-imposed measures. Thus, amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Duterte’s Philippines, civil liberties were violated, cultures of violence and impunity worsened, and the executive powers were consolidated.

Election Violence and Voter Turnout in 2019 General Elections: What Role for Political Parties?

This study examines the incidence of electoral violence and its resultant effects on voter turnout in the 2019 general elections in Nigeria, with the role of political parties as the focal point of discussion. A review of election data shows; voter turnout has been on the decline from 69% in 2003 to 35% in 2019. While a handful of factors could be responsible, the study ascribes its prevalence to the antic’s political parties (incumbent and opposition) and politicians who deliberately deploy violence as an electoral strategy. To account for the relationship between, political parties, electoral violence and voter turn-out, the study builds on theories of voter mobilization in and advanced and emerging democracies. Against this, it concludes in the absence of enduring party-voter relations in Nigeria, political parties and politicians alike, resort to vote buying, mobilization of political thugs and in other times deployment of state coercive apparatus to intimidate opponents all of which culminates into electoral irregularities which has the potency to instigate electoral violence. This in turn has in amongst others adversely affected voter turn-out as rightly observed over five electoral cycles.

"Legality" of the Legal Order in Postwar Serbia From 1944 to 1946: Organization and Work of the Judiciary

The judiciary in Serbia is heir to a long tradition of political influence, which was particularly visible during the communist regime after World War II. Violations of the presumption of innocence, retroactive sentencing and a denial of basic human rights are just some of the features of the work of the postwar “judiciary” in Serbia, between 1944 and 1946. This paper analyzes the implications of revolutionary legislative activity, the structure and organization of the Military Court and the Court of Honor, and examines to what extent the dominant political culture, implemented through the state coercive apparatus, influenced judicial adjudication. The paper elaborates on Radbruch’s idea of “statutory lawlessness”, Fuller’s notion of “procedural natural law” and “internal morality of law” and argues that the postwar law of communist Serbia did not exercise formal and procedural justice, and cannot be called a legal system in the full sense of the word.

Contentious activism and political trust in non-democratic regimes: evidence from the MENA

ABSTRACT This study discusses the relation between political trust and contentious activism in non-democratic regimes, via quantitative and qualitative analysis of three countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia. In this article I add to the debate on repression and dissent, by linking political trust in the coercive apparatus to contentious activism. Are activists more inclined to contest their regimes, when they have low political trust levels, especially in the coercive apparatus? I demonstrate that low political trust, especially in the coercive apparatus prompts contentious activism in non-democratic regimes.

Three Decades of Bangladeshi Politics (1990-2019): The Emergence and Collapse of the Political Settlements

This paper explores the tumultuous political history of Bangladesh since it embarked on democratization process in 1991 after two decades of civilian and military authoritarianism, using the political settlement framework. Political settlement, in this paper is understood as, an agreement among elites and other social forces regarding ‘distribution of benefits supported by its institutions consistent with the distribution of power in the society’ (Khan, 2010). At the political level the arrangement is expected to ensure that the system would not unravel by conflict and violence. In the past decades, the country not only experienced repeated episodes of violence but also hopes of a democratic transformation have faded. Bangladesh has moved towards a non-inclusive political system. The paper argues that the period in question is marked by the emergence and collapse of a political settlement among political elites. It explores the nature and scope of the political settlement that emerged in the 1980s and collapsed by 2010, and demonstrates that by 2014, an exclusionary authoritarian settlement has emerged characterized by a lack of inclusivity and coercive apparatuses’ heightened role. The breakdown of political settlement was predicated by the nature of the settlement, its implications for the elites in the challenger coalition, and the degree of inclusivity of the dominant coalition. The exclusionary political settlement provides a semblance of ‘stability’ for a limited period but fails to contain the tension in the long term even when it delivers economic growth.