Political Coercion Research Articles

Critical ethnography and the neoliberal city: The US example

In the United States, the economic and political crises of the 1970s brought an end to what Robert Beauregard (2006) terms the ‘short American century’, the robust period of relatively egalitarian industrial expansion and consensual Keynesian politics following the Second World War. What has followed is more than a quarter century of intensive restructuring – evident both in economic organization and regimes of governance. Economically, restructuring has been characterized by the globalization of finance capital, the decline and displacement of the industrial economy, the withering power of organized labor, a decades-long stagnation of real wages and increase in job insecurity, widening economic inequality, and the rise of a ‘new economy’ characterized by finance, high-tech innovation, and cultural industries. These trends have been accompanied in the political realm by an ideological shift, symbolized by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and penetrating in various ways all levels of the fragmented US political system, involving progressive delegitimization of the postwar welfare state, increasingly punitive tactics directed at the poor, and the exaltation of the market economy as the principal arbiter of desirable political outcomes. An early protagonist of this ideological system, Milton Friedman (1962), argued that it was nothing more than a restoration of classic liberalism, the return of the free individual to the supreme position in the social cosmos. For Friedman, as for Freidrich von Hayek, centralized planning by the state in managing the economy or providing for social welfare would inevitably lead to political coercion, if not totalitarianism. Apart from setting monetary

Social contracts and authoritarian projects in post-Soviet space: The use of administrative resource

Drawing on evidence from Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, this article analyses the use of a tool of political coercion known in the post-communist world as adminresurs, or administrative resource. Administrative resource is characterized by the pre-election capture of bureaucratic hierarchies by an incumbent regime in order to secure electoral success at the margins. In contrast to other forms of political corruption, administrative resource fundamentally rewrites existing social contracts. It redefines access to settled entitlements—public infrastructure, social services, and labor compensation—as rewards for political support. It is thus explicitly negative for publics, who stand to lose access to existing entitlements if they do not support incumbents. The geography of its success in post-communist states suggests that this tool of authoritarian capacity building could be deployed anywhere two conditions are present: where there are economically vulnerable populations, and where economic and political spheres of life overlap.

Buenos Aires en armas: La revolución de 1880

Buenos Aires en armas: La revolución de 1880

The Role Political Connections Play in Access to Finance: Evidence from Cross-Listing

What role does political influence play in access to finance? Using a comprehensive cross-country dataset, I characterize how and why domestic political connections affect firms’ ability to access all types of finance — exploiting firms’ cross-listing activity as a source of empirical identification. The results extend our understanding from recent single-country studies focused exclusively on domestic bank finance. First, political influence improves firms’ access to finance beyond domestic (bank) debt markets — political connections also improve access to foreign, equity finance. Second, the mechanism through which political influence works to improve access to finance is broader than political coercion of local bankers — political connections function as a firm-level substitute for strong national property rights, reducing connected firms risk premiums vis-a-vis unconnected peers.

Justice and boundaries

Michael Walzer has argued that `distributive justice presupposes a bounded world', but what counts as a relevant boundary? The article criticizes two arguments holding that boundaries should not count at all: a negative argument that there is no relevant difference between human relationships within and across state borders and a positive argument that principles of justice must, as a matter of logic, be universal in scope. It then examines three rival accounts of the bounded scope of distributive justice: the cooperative practice view, the political coercion view, and the common identity view. Although each has plausible arguments to support it, none turns out to give necessary and sufficient conditions for principles of distributive justice to apply. Importantly, however, the idea of social justice has emerged within political units (nation-states) that to a large extent combine the three features in question. To the extent that this overlap breaks down, we will need to develop new theories of transnational justice.

Graduated Consent Theory, Explained and Applied

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to yes or no. In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This article reviews how a wide range of authorities regard consent, discovering that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. By abstracting from that evidence, we can outline a theory of graduated consent. This article concludes by testing a graduated consent theory against such problems as enforcing standardized agreements, justifying political coercion, and reading a constitution. In those and other applications, a theory of graduated consent can contribute to legal, moral, and economic reasoning.(Part II of this paper materially revises and expands on material first presented in, The Scale of Consent, a working paper available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1322180.)

The Scale of Consent

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to yes or no. In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This working paper reviews how legal and other authorities regard consent, revealing that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. The scale described here plays a vital role in a larger project, one that will also explain consent's importance and apply graduated consent theory to such longstanding puzzles as the enforceability of standard form agreements, the justifiability of political coercion, and the meaning of a constitution. As a preliminary to that project, this working paper explains how consent and justification vary by degree and covary in value.

Coercion as Enforcement

This essay provides a positive account of coercion that avoids significant difficulties that have confronted most other recent accounts. It enters this territory by noting a dispute over whether coercion has to manipulate the will of the coercee, or whether direct force inhibiting action (such as manhandling or imprisoning) is itself coercive. Though this dispute may at first seem a mere matter of taxonomic categorization, I argue that this dispute reflects an important divergence in thought about the nature of coercion. Though it has rarely been noted, there are two significantly different ways of theorizing coercion found in recent writing on coercion. One focuses on the ability of the coercer to inhibit actions by the coercee through techniques such as force, violence, and like powers, or threats based in such powers. The other approach restricts coercion to cases where coercion manipulates the will of the coercee, though widens it to include any sort of threat that puts pressure on the coercee's will and alters the coercee's intentional choice of action. The former, enforcement approach used to be widely assumed by many political theorists who discussed the place of coercion in law and politics, though it has been largely supplanted by the latter, pressure approach. I show that these approaches are indeed quite distinct, and argue that the enforcement approach is in several ways superior to and more fundamental than the pressure approach for recognizing and understanding coercion in ethics and political and legal philosophy. I also consider and respond to a number of objections to the enforcement approach, showing that it can deal with some puzzle cases such as bluffs, blackmail, inefficacious threats, oblique threats, and economic coercion.

Incertitude, rationalité et institution

Résumé Keynes et Simon parcourent tous deux, à cinquante années de distance, un chemin épistémologiquement très proche. Tous deux élaborent une théorie de l’action rationnelle présentant des caractéristiques communes (intuitive, empirique, non calculatoire). Cette théorie les amène à prendre conscience du rôle des institutions sur le plan cognitif et, partant, sur celui de la coordination. Enfin, leurs deux théories se bouclent sur une même défense du rôle d’une certaine coercition sociale et politique, quoique sous une forme très différente. Ce parcours parallèle nous indique la voie à suivre : prendre davantage en compte la dimension éthique des institutions.

Some Responses to Globalisation in Uzbekistan: State Authoritarianism, Migrant Labour and Neo-traditionalism

Uzbekistan offers a case study of a country that has blocked the liberalisation of its economy and that is being marginalised in the world market as well as in the international community. Even still, two typical expressions of globalisation processes can be identified: first, an attempt to reconstruct the legitimacy of the state through the reinvention of a 'national identity', and, second, the elimination of a specific form of protected salaried work that had arisen during the Soviet era, along with a concurrent proletarianisation of the population, in particular in the rural areas. The research shows that political coercion and the inculcation of a nationalist ideology, on the one hand, and the economic degradation of living standards, on the other, result in the reinforcement of family ties and repression of individuality, in spite of huge labour migrations and a (minimal) introduction of the market.

Coercion in psychiatry: still an instrument of political misuse?

The issue of misuse of psychiatry as a means of political coercion is invariably linked to the history of the Soviet Union after the Second World War. It was at the end of Stalin's reign that a system of political abuse of psychiatry was developed, whereby political and religious dissidents were diagnosed to be of unsound mind and sent to psychiatric hospitals, often for many years of torturous treatment. The practice became an almost exclusively socialist practice: it took on a systematic form in Romania, and quite a few cases were found in other countries of the Eastern Bloc, in Cuba in the early 1990s and, much more recently, in the People's Republic of China. With the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s most of the regular practice of using psychiatry to suppress political opponents ceased to exist. Some cases surfaced recently in Central Asia, and in Russia several years ago the authorities tried to use a psychiatric diagnosis to keep an Army colonel out of prison after he was charged with raping and killing a Chechen girl. Still, in most of the former Soviet republics the history of political abuse of psychiatry has not been condemned by the psychiatric associations and the establishment, and in Russia most of those in power in psychiatry try to downplay the practice by referring to it as merely an issue of different approaches or hyperdiagnosis. The shadow of Soviet forensic psychiatry still looms heavily over psychiatric practice today. In most former Soviet republics forensic psychiatry is still a purely Soviet affair, with hardly any new concepts introduced, and forensic psychiatry is widely used to avoid long prison sentences or to get rid of undesirable relatives. Attempts to change this are met with fierce resistance both by corrupt psychiatrists, their political protectors and the criminal community. At the same time, the practice continues in China, although recent critical comments by Chinese bodies give hope that also here the practice might come to an end. However, as long as the concepts and attitudes do not change, there will always be sufficient psychiatrists who are willing to squander their oath and medical ethics in exchange for personal gain or protection. Only long-term, intensive and all-encompassing support programs for the development of an ethical and independent forensic psychiatry can help avert such abuse in future.

Tax Regimes and Special Interest Politics

In this paper a simple model of pubic-good provision is considered. The economy consists of two individuals (principals) who have fixed endowment in private good and a government (agent) that has the monopoly of political coercion. In such a model, if the government is benevolent, the choice of tax system (i.e. proportional, lump sum, etc) is irrelevant to the provision of the public good. On the other hand, in case the government is also a rent seeker, the choice of tax system becomes important. A uniform tax system that restricts the government's ability to redistribute income is superior from the point of view of individuals.

Political Coercion and the Scope of Distributive Justice

A prominent position in the global justice literature holds that claims of distributive justice are only ‘activated’ by the densely coercive institutional apparatus of states. I dispute this view in three ways. First, I argue that coercion is either justified by its results and rationale or it cannot be justified at all; as a result, coercive institutions do not demand an independent justification via distributive justice. Second, I contend that because the shape of coercive institutions is the result of political choices that have distributive implications, one cannot make normative judgements without asking why coercive institutions have the shape that they do. Third, even accepting (for the sake of argument) the claim that coercive institutions must be justified by a special focus on distributive justice among those subject to them, I argue that the resulting position does not justify restricting distributive justice to state borders. If (any of) these arguments are correct, it is a mistake to think that a concern with the coercive nature of political institutions legitimates restricting claims of distributive justice to compatriots.

The Rights of the Guilty

In this essay I develop and defend a theory of state punishment within a wider conception of political legitimacy. While many moral theories of punishment focus on what is deserved by criminals, I theorize punishment within the specific context of the state's relationship to its citizens. Central to my account is Rawls's “liberal principle of legitimacy,” which requires that all state coercion be justifiable to all citizens. I extend this idea to the justification of political coercion to criminals qua citizens. I argue that the liberal principle of legitimacy implicitly requires states to respect the basic political rights of those who are guilty of committing crimes, thus prohibiting capital punishment.

Usefulness of Acupuncture and Hypnosis for Anesthesia–Reply–I

We appreciate Dr Belshe's interesting observations about acupuncture and hypnosis. Although hypnotic suggestion and political coercion might have influenced clinical experience in Maoist China, we do not believe these were significant factors in our placebo-controlled trial of acupuncture for fibromyalgia. Nevertheless, we thank him for writing to share his experiences and views, which contribute to the discussion and debate regarding these modalities. Usefulness of Acupuncture and Hypnosis for AnesthesiaMayo Clinic ProceedingsVol. 82Issue 1PreviewTo the Editor: I enjoyed reading the exchange of views by Bartecchi1 and Martin2 regarding the article by Martin et al3 on improvement of fibromyalgia symptoms with acupuncture. I am a retired anesthesiologist, but the first 20 years of my professional life were spent in general practice and general surgery. During that time, I used hypnosis for obstetric procedures and minor surgeries. Full-Text PDF

Why Terrorism Does Not Work

This is the first article to analyze a large sample of terrorist groups in terms of their policy effectiveness. It includes every foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. The key variable for FTO success is a tactical one: target selection. Terrorist groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumber attacks on military targets do not tend to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature. Contrary to the prevailing view that terrorism is an effective means of political coercion, the universe of cases suggests that, first, contemporary terrorist groups rarely achieve their policy objectives and, second, the poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself. The bulk of the article develops a theory for why countries are reluctant to make policy concessions when their civilian populations are the primary target.

RESPONSIBILITIES FOR HATEFUL SPEECH

This essay consolidates some fragments of the contemporary theory of expressive freedoms, bringing together scattered conceptual distinctions (e.g., hurting and harming, tolerating and legitimating) and moves (e.g., the need to rectify hateful speech and to constrain harmful actions legally) into an account that is sensitive to the needs of abused groups but faithful to the libertarian tradition associated with Mill's harm principle. Accepting this principle as the fundamental condition warranting legal control of action, we explore legislative responsibilities for protecting expressive freedoms through three additional presumptions. The chief of them is an expectation of epistemic rationality that limits occasions of harm requiring legal action. A presumption of enablement over punishment shows that criminal sanctions for hateful speech are almost never appropriate. A presumption of multiple responsibilities accepts that social sanctions may be appropriate where political coercion is not.

Missile Defenses in a “Deuces Wild” Context: Proliferation, Terror and Deterrent Disorder

Optimists hoped that the end of the Cold War and the dawn of the twenty-first century would see the marginalization of nuclear weapons as instruments of mass destruction and political coercion. After the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the American homeland, visions of terrorist attacks with nuclear weapons, and the likely destruction attendant to such attacks, haunted Bush administration officials and preoccupied prominent scholars and analysts. In particular, some hoped that after 9–11 the danger of nuclear weapons spreading to terrorists and “states of concern” would mobilize governments in favor of nuclear containment and disarmament.

The ICTY, war crimes enforcement and Dayton: The ghost in the machine

Commitment to detaining war crimes suspects, particularly through military operations, was the key factor in Bosnia's post-Dayton development. The decision in the mid-1990s to take arrests forward was the single most important element of the international strategy of peace implementation, with detentions in 1997 prefiguring and signposting the way for firm civilian implementation of the Bosnian peace by the High Representative, using authority strongly confirmed by the Peace Implementation Council's Sintra and Bonn meetings. Detention operations changed the strategic dynamic. While Bosnian progress remained slow, the war crimes action helped to create space for political cooperation and development, as well as for the kind of political coercion by the High Representative that would emerge half a year after the first detention operation. Without such action, international strategic momentum and credibility would not have been established, and Bosnia's peace agreement stasis would probably have remained. The war crimes issue was therefore the ‘ghost in the machine’ driving the positive evolution of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Dayton peace accords.

Governance, Development and State Building

The article presents a survey of the arguments relating development and governance to the prospects of successful state formation. Political institutions that are accountable, good governance and economic development indeed enable central governments to let minorities share in the gains in wealth and security. The political allegiance of minorities thus acquired is likely to strengthen the process of state building. Conversely, poor governance implies that the state fails to satisfy collective needs and fails as an arbiter in civil conflict. If so, a central government has to rely more on the political and economic coercion of minorities and thus increases the probability of violent escalation of civil conflict. L'article passe en revue les debats reliant developpement et gouvernance dans la perspective du succes de la formation d'un Etat. Il est montre que des institutions politiques responsables, une bonne gouvernance et le developpement economique permettent effectivement a des gouvernements de laisser...