Political Repression Research Articles

Public opinion effects of digital state repression: How internet outages shape government evaluation in Africa

ABSTRACT 1 Internet shutdowns have become a popular instrument for repressive regimes to silence dissent in a digitized world. While authorities seek to suppress opponents by imposing Internet outages, we know little about how the public reacts to such incisive measures. The regime might face anger and resentment from the public as a response to Internet deprivation. Why do regimes still use Internet shutdowns when they do not only face economic but also societal losses? In this paper, I argue that Internet shutdowns lower the public’s evaluation of the political leadership as citizens blame the government for the service outages. For the analysis, I combine fine-grained data on Internet outages with survey data from the Afrobarometer and apply an “unexpected event during survey design.” Results show that citizens do not hold the government accountable for Internet disruptions, thus making Internet shutdowns a powerful tool for autocrats to silent dissent digitally.

The Impact of Spanish Repression on the Evolution of the Catalan Networked Public Sphere During the Post-Referendum Crisis (2017–2022)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the impact on the Catalan networked public sphere of the Spanish repression that unfolded following the organisation of a referendum on Catalonia’s independence in 2017. Grounded in nearly a decade of Twitter data, it reveals significant shifts in public attention towards state repression. Initially marginal, it gained prominence after the police operation started, surpassing general topics until COVID-19 emerged. Yet, its focus remained temporally limited compared to the persistent independence theme. Network analysis highlights media, political, and civil society actors’ influential roles in shaping the Catalan networked public sphere, with a prominence of white, cisgender, male crowdsourced elites leading the conversations.

A Recreation Mechanism for Refugee Memories to Get through the Betrayal and Trauma in The Hungry Tides by Amitav Ghosh

Mental stress is an inevitable part in the life of a refugee, especially when they have to struggle through many political oppression, war, and migration. Refugees are the individuals who are forced to leave their land because of extremely disturbing external factors. Refugees go through all the struggles in the hope of having a better life, which they may not have in their homeland. This would lead to mental and physical torture as they have to go through traumatic experiences while being an immigrant like loss of property, livelihood, malnutrition, identity crisis etc. The way of recalling the past events through one's perspective is memory. Memory is also a way of remembering the painful past, which could be the cause of preventing oneself from healing the trauma. This research will look at how memory or recalling the past is used as a tool to understand the mental stress of the refugees. This research will analyse the novel “The Hungry Tides'' by Amitav Ghosh to see the use of memory and will also try to understand whether recalling painful events is a way to cope with the past and how the memory of a person can be manipulated to manage past trauma. Through textual analysis of the novel, the researcher uses the theory of betrayal trauma and the Pavilion method of fear extinction to help in understanding the usage of memory to change the trauma of a person. The article will show how memory can be manipulated by forgetting and recreating the events in a way so that the refugees can be relieved from their stressful situations and traumatic events.

Resilience and Resistance in Athol Fugard’s Play No Good Friday

Athol Fugard, acclaimed as the greatest South African playwright in the English-speaking world, is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid. In his play No-Good Friday (1958) he presents the burning zeal of an incipient black revolutionary against the exploitation faced by the blacks. At the surface level, the play appears to be a mere representation of the conditions of the blacks; but at deeper levels, it records the helplessness of the blacks in the face of exploitation by their own fellow men during the conditions of the apartheid. Fugard presents the oppressive politics working on the life of the people of Sophia town in various forms by portraying the complex and evolving nature of submissiveness in the face of oppression and how the characters struggle to find a balance between survival and resistance. The play ultimately underscores the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of resistance in the face of oppressive systems.

Témoigner aux procès après une catastrophe sociale : une tentative de restauration des garants métasociaux démocratiques

ContextThis study explores the subjective and group repercussions of forced disappearance in the context of Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s. To comprehend the dynamics of such state violence, the study draws on a psychoanalytic approach of groups and institutions. The political repression during this era leads to a “social catastrophe” (Puget et al., 1989): following the collapse of democratic meta-social guarantors, the socio-political and institutional context becomes unrecognizable. In the aftermath of numerous crimes legitimized by the juntas, relatives of the disappeared have been fighting for decades against the impunity of the culprits, demanding justice be served. ObjectivesThe study aims to explore the various functions associated with testifying in trials for relatives of the disappeared. MethodAs part of a qualitative study, we interviewed twenty-nine relatives of disappeared people living in Switzerland. We analyzed the semi-structured interviews using thematic content analysis. We present some of the results of the cross-sectional analyses, illustrating them with a case study emblematic of the whole. ResultsFor relatives of the disappeared, testifying in a trial seems to be a royal road to actively participate in the restoration of democratic meta-social guarantors. In doing so, these relatives seek support from a collective and particularly from institutions, especially when these institutions regain their protective function against state violence. By testifying, they contribute to revitalizing narcissistic contracts and, more broadly, attempt to humanize not only the disappeared person but also their relatives and the perpetrators. InterpretationMemory work and the struggle for justice appear to be prevalent in the practices undertaken by close relatives of the disappeared, even fifty years later. Some of these relatives feel invested with a mission to memorialize and denounce political crimes in order to place them within history and to combat systematic erasure of crimes. This mission also allows them to symbolize, as far as possible, the catastrophe and their own history. This research is of course limited by the number of participants and the unique research interview. Further studies on the subjective and group repercussions of such state crimes and their transgenerational impact would be relevant to promote clinical listening to the relatives of the disappeared and their descendants.

The Social Prison: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as Postanarchist Critical Utopia

ABSTRACT Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic work of anarchist literature, The Dispossessed (1974), is preoccupied with the issue of imprisonment. This is hardly surprising given anarchism’s longstanding critical engagement with the prison as state apparatus. For classical anarchists, the prison represents one of the most vile and visible examples of state repression. However, while the abolition of prisons constitutes one of the fundamental goals of anarchism, the alternatives put forth by classical anarchist thinkers risk perpetuating the underlying power relations of carceral justice by encouraging social shaming and the policing of norms. The anarchist society of The Dispossessed uses these techniques to discourage the accumulation of power in order to create an egalitarian society. Unfortunately, these same techniques encourage a conformity that hinders other anarchist values, such as creativity and individual self-determination. In essence, the anarchist society depicted in the novel replaces the literal prison with a different form of imprisonment—the social prison, which continues the repressive function of the state through different means. By creating an “ambiguous” anarchist utopia, Le Guin anticipates the critiques of classical anarchism formulated by poststructural and postmodern anarchist theorists. These critiques are most evident in the theme of imprisonment that threads throughout the novel.

A Techno-Docility Approach to the Repression and Surveillance of Uyghurs

A significant body of research examines the Chinese government’s mass atrocities against Uyghurs and various forms of state repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. However, scholars do not clearly address the interplay of traditional and technological repertoires of repression in the region. This article presents a focused, well-documented treatment of how traditional and technological repression interact in the Chinese government’s policies toward Uyghurs. Using a novel techno-docility approach, it shows that the government adopts a complex, pervasive, and all-encompassing form of repression to create obedient citizens and a unitary society. The article also highlights the increasingly dangerous and intricate nature of repression, which crosscuts multiple disciplines and hence is best addressed through interdisciplinary efforts.

Historical consciousness and the consolidation of the opposition: uses of the history of revolution and dissent in Russian protest art, 2008–2012

ABSTRACT The protests against election fraud in Russia in winter 2011–2012 were the first in the post-Soviet period that were attended by a united opposition, and attracted hundreds of thousands of previously apolitical citizens. This article seeks to explain mass participation in the protests by focusing on uses of the history of revolution and dissent in Russian protest art. The article investigates whether a common historical consciousness, which could have made it possible to unify previously fragmented opposition and mobilize previously apolitical citizens, was manifested in protest artworks created by artists with differing political ideologies. The conclusion is that the official historical narrative promoted by the state – of a spiritual unity between a strong state and the people – was challenged and undermined by protest artists, who have characterized Russian history as a continuous struggle between an oppressive state and civil society. This finding indicates that a common historical consciousness was manifested in protest artworks.

Beyond fallacies: violent conflicts globally and in muslim countries

This article explores the relationship between key economic development indicators and the occurrence of violent civil conflicts. It examines public policy failures and mistakes which link with onset of conflicts. Two sets of 160 countries are included to empirically analyse the determinants of conflicts. This analysis extends to two distinctive subsets of Muslim countries. The paper establishes that the classification procedure of violent conflicts matters—varying classifications offer dissimilar values to similar predictors. Here, our conclusions are contrary to the much emphasized ‘greed motivation’ to rebel, which dismisses strong linkages of ‘grievances’ like low income, economic development failures and political repression with intrastate violent conflicts. The paper also infers limitations in country level data—which cross-country studies employ—income and unemployment data are non-reflective of conflict regions and of horizontal inequalities. We stress region and country specific research.

The Chinese Character as an Interface for Artistic Creation: Re-Cognition of Graphics and Phonetics

ABSTRACT This article examines two modern artistic explorations of the Chinese character. It takes Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy and Jonathan Stalling’s Sinophonic English Poetry as examples and investigate how contemporary art reimagines and reconstructs the “potential” of Chinese characters and what ideological and political implications these processes may have for transcultural communication in today’s world. Situating the production of both works in Xu’s and Stalling’s respective creative experiences and larger sociocultural conditions, this article shows how both works, which deploy the graphics and the phonetics of the Chinese character as interfaces, engage in the politics of transcultural art creation and communication, and achieve their generative effects. Through this investigation, it hopes to illuminate the critical power of the Chinese character used as an interface in challenging linguistic, ideological, and cultural “norms” and questioning racial, national, and political prejudice.

Egyptian queer women’s quiet activism within repressive contexts in the Middle East

ABSTRACT This study highlights an unconventional form of LGBTQIA activism within restrictive contexts in the Middle East. Building on the triangulation of data findings obtained from activists’ social media accounts from 2014 until 2022, this study argues that Egyptian queer women mobilized quiet activism as a safe form of individual engagement within a repressive and anti-queer context fuelled by social disdain. Tracking women’s individual life stories, this study revealed an unfamiliar strategy of action that has been overlooked by scholarship addressing the LGBTQIA advocacy as a collective action in the Middle East. While scholars have entrenched the LGBTQIA advocacy within a logic of collective activism and organized cyber/groundwork, this study underlined quiet activism as a coping mechanism with state repression in order to contest the state persecution of queer citizens and violation of individual rights and freedom. Being at the intersection of individual engagement, transformative events and personal emotions, quiet activism is an adaptive form of entanglement with repressive contexts through non-confrontational and unchallenging tools of action, such as personal encounters and emotions.

Protecting the Last Wild River in Europe from Hydropower Development in Albania: An Environmental Movement Strategy in a Flawed Democracy

In 2014, as anti-hydropower plant protests in Albania intensified, an initiative to protect rivers in the Balkans known as “Save the Blue Heart of Europe” launched the Vjosa River Campaign in Albania to save what is known as the “Last Wild River in Europe.” The Campaign’s main goals consisted of preventing the construction of hydropower plants and turning the Vjosa into Europe’s first “Wild River National Park,” a status that would severely limit future development. But, this Campaign would not be easy. Albania is a highly centralized, fragile democracy with a long history of political oppression and economic struggle whose top-down government is still generally inaccessible to public interest groups or influence. The country relies entirely on hydropower for its electricity production, leading to high uncertainties in energy security, especially in face of increasing periods of drought. The Campaign organizers and activists would have to strategize carefully and creatively to navigate the Albanian political landscape to reach its goals. What did they do? What worked or didn’t work along the way? Finally, would hydropower, considered a renewable energy source with low carbon emissions, enhance the country’s energy security? Or, would hydropower development on the Vjosa just not be worth it as a national and cultural treasure is destroyed alongside local livelihoods related to fisheries, agriculture, and tourism? Upon reading this case study, readers will learn about how environmental campaign organizers and activists mobilize in the face of the complexities of hydropower development in Albania, a struggling democracy.

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.

Giving a Voice to the Silenced Women of Francoist Spain

During the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship that followed, women were shielded from the public eye. Their predetermined social role was that of submissive and devoted wives to their husbands as well as homemakers and childcare providers. There are few artistic works that suggest otherwise. However, during the Civil War and after, many women were in fact politically active. They occupied important positions in the resistance and were present along with the men in the trenches. Spanish graphic novels have managed to create many works of fiction based on the Civil War, mainly drawing on (auto)biographical accounts. There are so many significant works dealing with the war and Francoist repression that they represent a genre of their own. Nevertheless, the authors of these works, as well as their main protagonists, are usually men. This is true despite the fact that after the war, during the four decades of the Franco dictatorship, many women suffered from political persecution. The aim of this article is to analyze the role of women outside the domestic space as it appears in selected graphic narratives set in the period of Franco’s regime. Given the extent of the regime’s repression, these works are frequently set in the prisons around Spain where female prisoners were incarcerated and tortured. The narratives we analyze are based on real testimonies from real victims. Their individual experiences are joined together in a collective whose voice has long been silenced until recently.

Student protest, violent interactions, and state repression

Why do states use violence to repress dissent? When do opposition groups escalate conflict by employing violent tactics? We argue that not all opposition groups are created alike, and that understanding who is involved in protest is important for event outcomes. Because of their age and social status, student protesters are more likely to adopt confrontational behaviors, even when engaged in nominally peaceful protest. As such, students are more likely to be seen as threats by security forces tasked with responding to social unrest. Although frequently unplanned, spontaneous interactions between dissidents and regime forces can lead to an escalatory spiral. As such, we expect that student protests are more likely to escalate to violence than protests by other actors, and that security forces are more likely to use repression against students. This relationship will be especially pronounced when youth unemployment is high, leading to heightened grievances and fewer social constraints. Using event data combined with actor information on protest dynamics across seven countries in Africa and Latin America from 1990 to 2016, we find that although student groups are not more likely to engage in riots at the outset, when they do protest, violent interactions with police are more likely. Moreover, youth unemployment significantly increases the potential for violence.

Honouring Uncelebrated Heroes in Maaza Mengiste’s <i>The Shadow King</i> and <i>Beneath the Lion’s Gaze</i>

This paper examines literary representations of marginalised, uncelebrated heroes in two novels by Maaza Mengiste: The Shadow King and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. The central argument is that Mengiste excavates and portrays the overlooked heroic contributions of select male and female protagonists to honour their legacy and illuminate their vital yet under-recognised roles in constructing Ethiopian national identity. By adopting close textual analysis, the paper examines the conception of ‘heroism’ to characters derived from Mengiste’s fictionalised historiography centred upon Ethiopia. Furthermore, the sociocultural and ideological factors engendering the marginalisation of these heroic figures shall be scrutinised within the novels’ specific narrative contexts. Incorporating critical theoretical perspectives, the efficacy of violence as a liberating praxis against political oppression shall be evaluated through the lens of Frantz Fanon. At the same time, Marxian theories of alienation are employed to elucidate the subjective motivations compelling certain protagonists towards heroic but uncelebrated deeds. Methodologically, the paper is grounded in a close literary analysis of the theme of unheralded heroism within the two primary texts. A synthesis of supplementary scholarly perspectives bolsters this paper’s central thesis regarding unrecognised heroic narratives. The paper argues that despite contributing substantially to anti-oppressive struggles, Mengiste’s marginal protagonists remain uncelebrated within Ethiopia’s dominant historical discourses due to their race, class, gender, and ideological positionality.

Navigating a ‘Shrinking Space’: Selective In/Visibilities and EU Engagement with Civil Society in Azerbaijan

In a context of legal and political repression, wherein even EU funding came to be politicised, Azerbaijan’s civic space has been shrinking. This article problematises EU engagement with civil society in the neighbourhood by examining its on-the-ground negotiation in a complex field of visibility. It argues that human rights groups in Azerbaijan strategically activate selective in/visibilities to navigate the competing understandings of civil society's role mobilised by the European Union and the authoritarian state. While EU support deepens the dichotomy of independent versus government-organised civil society, the emergence of new subject positions beyond the NGO realm prefigures a critique of neoliberal donor–recipient ties.

Reinvented acts of citizenship in Hong Kong: young people's pursuit of democracy through autonomy in everyday life

This article examines the political imaginaries of youth activists in Hong Kong in the period between the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the mass protests that began in 2019. Drawing on interviews with young people involved in a range of political movements, it traces the emergence of what I call reinvented acts of citizenship, which emphasise autonomous everyday life practices in the community as a form of citizenship and democratic participation. These are driven by the reflexive practices that are applied in daily life, which tend to inspire a communitarian type of citizenship. Even before the repression of the democracy movement through the 2020 passage of the National Security Bill, young people engaged in this form of citizenship had decided that the pursuit of autonomy in everyday life was a preferable and realistic alternative to struggles which sought to change the structures of representative democracy and rule in Hong Kong. The article charts the emergence of these reinvented acts of citizenship, considers their relationship to other forms of mainstream and activist citizenship in Hong Kong, and speculates on their future prospects as state repression takes hold in contemporary Hong Kong after the imposition of the National Security Law.

The Role of Multistakeholder Initiatives in the Radicalization of Resistance: The Forest Stewardship Council and the Mapuche Conflict in Chile

AbstractMulti‐stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) that address sustainability concerns have grown in importance in recent years. These private governance measures involving market, state and civil society actors aim to resolve disagreements between stakeholders through stakeholder engagement practices. However, our empirical study of the Mapuche conflict in Chile shows how a multi‐stakeholder initiative contributed to the radicalization of a protest movement leading to an escalation of violence that left all actors worse off. The implementation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification scheme, perhaps the best known MSI, exacerbated existing political discontent among the Indigenous Mapuche peoples who were resisting the expansion of industrial forest on their lands in southern Chile. Our findings indicate that MSIs cannot address the needs of marginalized stakeholders and may further undermine their interests. Our analysis enhances our understanding of the outcomes of MSIs by describing processes of radicalization as well as the role of the state in conflicts. The FSC certification scheme was incapable of addressing the key Mapuche demand for land rights. Instead, it raised false expectations, which coupled with corporate irresponsibility and state repression led to an escalation of violence. The increasing reliance on private governance measures in natural resource management, especially in countries of the so‐called Global South, can further exacerbate existing conflicts and hence it is important to understand how and why MSIs lead to negative outcomes.

The Death and Life of State Repression: Understanding Onset, Escalation, Termination, and Recurrence by Christian Davenport and Benjamin J. Appel

<i>The Death and Life of State Repression: Understanding Onset, Escalation, Termination, and Recurrence</i> by Christian Davenport and Benjamin J. Appel