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

Abstract

Myanmar’s decades-long systematic discrimination against its non-Buddhist minorities is inherently repressive. India’s new marginalization of its 200 million Muslims is clearly repressive. Ethiopia’s invasion and war against Tigray counts as state repression. So do Sudan’s past and possible ongoing genocidal acts in Darfur. Equatorial Guinea’s leaving its mainland inhabitants without access to human and economic rights is repressive. When Mozambique excludes its northernmost citizens from schooling and medical care, that is also repressive. Madagascar’s long neglect of its coastal inhabitants, favoring the lighter-skinned inhabitants of the central plateau, is also repressive.State repression is governmental behavior “that is enacted by … designated agents of … authority” who employ coercive power to compel national inhabitants to do what the state (and the leader of the state) wants them to do irrespective of their own individual, or even cultural and group, preferences. When Mao sent Chinese elites (including Xi Jinping) into the countryside to be “re-educated,” and culturally subordinated, he and his security forces were clearly repressing. Likewise, Stalin’s many gulags were repressive, just as Putin’s punishment of Alexandre Navalny and others is repressive and meant to be controlling.This tightly argued book focuses squarely on “government behavior that … historically” has unleashed violence against “large amounts of population” (148–149). The authors are interested in what they call repressive “spells” of reasonable duration. They seek to detail how those “spells”—an odd concept with diverse meanings—begin and are sustained.Large-scale, systematic repression is driven, the authors say, by domestic more than international considerations. Political threats are obvious triggers. When they lead to the onset of repression, the forces of the ongoing repression resemble a slow-moving juggernaut that accelerates relentlessly in a self-reinforcing fashion. The ruling cohort imagines that its interest lies in insulating and digging into earlier positions, “reinforcing the application of government repression even further” (34).Once it is well underway, halting repression is difficult. Indeed, as the authors assert, once a campaign of repression has begun any cancellation or relaxation of the repressive juggernaut is almost impossible absent countervailing internal opposition or concerted international action. Think of extreme cases such as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, Ne Win’s Burma, or Sukarno’s Indonesia. Juggernauts cannot easily be disturbed (35).The dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid-driven repressive institutions after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and Africans were allowed to vote obviously marked the end of an era of repression. “Electoral democratization,” this book declares, “reduces repression.” Indeed, democratization obliterates repression, or should, because the availability of choice usually implies that the state has become responsive to peoples’ will, not to the dictates of a repressively inclined despot. The authors are clear: “Electoral democratization has the most powerful impact” on avoiding, modifying, and terminating episodes of repression—even very lengthy ones (150). But the authors are much less clear on how repressed populations have or may overturn their repressors and gain the benefits of democratization. This book is analytic in service of policy prescription. But the path to beneficial outcomes is unlit.Over the universe of this book’s roughly 250 cases, it is evident that states turn repressive when there is no meaningful electoral, judicial, or political democracy. Likewise, when those forms of democracy are modified or removed, repression becomes more likely. The tendency to compel rather than to persuade populations to follow a ruling elite’s policy preferences or its self-interests always lurks within state houses or military barracks. Bullies are everywhere, and their instincts are coercive.This well-argued examination of repression ought to assist historians who seek to enrich the understanding of repression as a phenomenon and examine repressive regimes of the past. It includes only a handful of detailed case studies, however, so historians may have to employ the methods developed in this book on their own cases, retrospectively.