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This chapter discusses how authoritarian regimes come to repress their opposition in different ways. It offers evidence for how differences in colonial coercive institutions in the Middle East conditioned coercive institutions in their independent counterparts in the post-colonial period, and thus how this specific type of colonial legacy influences the nature of repression used by the regimes that follow. The chapter then theorizes the colonial origins of coercive institutions, the path dependence of these institutions, and the constraining nature of inherited institutions for leader behavior and the prospects of institutional reform. It considers how the interaction between the centrality of coercion and variation in the nature of colonial projects provides significant explanatory power for the coercive institutions inherited by Middle East political leaders in the mid-twentieth century upon independence, and then lays out a typology of coercive institutions and the nature of state repression. Finally, the chapter traces the historical development of coercive institutions in Egypt and Tunisia to demonstrate institutional continuity and path dependence through independence.

State repression, under authoritarianism, is so frequently taken for granted that its deeper ramifications are rarely studied. The Arab region has witnessed a rising interest in women's issues at both the state and the regional levels. Arab thought has developed in response to authoritarianism. The nationalist military coups of the 1950s and 1960s divided the Arab world into nationalist progressive republics (such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Algeria) and nationalist conservative monarchies (such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Morocco). In addition with the disintegration of the nationalist project in the late 1970s, a single political model rose to dominance in the Arab world, namely, the authoritarian neoliberal model. This regional development was reinforced by sea changes on the global level.

The fifth chapter considers some of the dangerous and dispiriting aspects of social movement participation. It underscores the importance of external forces, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state police, in shaping the development of social movements, as well as lifestyle politics. State repression led to incarceration, death, and demobilization; but even as activists added new names to the roster of political prisoners and prisoners of war, they also rethought their beliefs and ideas, and used the harms they experienced generate their collective political agenda. Chapter five, therefore, clarifies how New Afrikans thought about and acted as the result of hostility and violence, even as they pursued their goals.

This chapter presents the relationship between ongoing conflict and the eruption of nationalist violence, violent and non-violent conflict in the French empire, and French repression in colonial Morocco from 1934 to 1956. According to some scholars, social movements turn violent at moments of weakness, whereas violence can erupt from an ongoing conflict via state repression. In this book, the author tries to establish that most nationalist conflicts do not spark violence. France was stubborn about maintaining colonial rule, provoking a nationalist movement, both violent and nonviolent, in twentieth-century French colonies like Algeria, Cameroon, Morocco, Syria, and Vietnam. Moreover, the French decision to exile the Moroccan sultan and the behavior of French settlers in Morocco provoked nationalist violence there.

This chapter discusses the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna; CŻKH) in Poland, from its establishment in 1944 to its shutting down by the communist authorities in 1947. By bringing the suffering and anti-Nazi resistance of Poland’s Jews into public consciousness, indeed by showing that the Nazi destruction of the Jewish minority was an integral part of Poland’s wartime violation, the commission activists—several of whom had begun careers as historians in interwar Poland and had been affiliated with Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archives in the Warsaw ghetto—sought to reaffirm their self-understanding as a national minority and to help rebuild their own community. Nonetheless, the persistence of violent anti-Semitism, growing politicization, and the mounting state repression by the communist regime led most activists to believe that Poland held no future for Jews, causing them to emigrate west in search of security and better living and working conditions.

This chapter examines shifts in the tactics and approaches of radicalism and the general political and economic climate under the military rule of Paul Magloire. It depicts the Magloire years as a period defined by great economic strife and increased state repression. New sources are brought to bear on the controversial election campaign of 1956–1957, which signaled the end of this period of radicalism.

This chapter focuses on the second of the three waves of protest in mid-Qing China. It details the genesis and development of select representative cases of protest in 1776–1795, which were predominantly state resisting. Following the case studies, it discusses how these late-eighteenth-century resistances helped fuel the outbreak of large-scale, sustained armed uprisings, which peaked at the turn of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the 1740s and 1750s, when villagers and city dwellers alike frequently engaged the paternalist and activist state to request intervention or to influence state action to enhance their interests and rights, state-engaging protests declined in the 1776–1795 period. The reason for this decline is that the popular expectation of what the state could do for society slid with the state's falling capacity. Simultaneous to this decline was the rise of state-resisting violence, which could be broken down into three main categories: tax resistance, resistance to state intervention in social conflicts, and outlaws' resistance against state repression.

In Fall 1970, the Young Lords again occupied the FSUMC church, in response to the shocking death of one of their own, Julio Roldan, who after a false arrest was found hanged in the Tombs, NYC’s notorious detention center. The occupation happened against the backdrop of a prisoner uprising in the Tombs, a precursor to the Attica Rebellion. At the occupied church, the Young Lords mounted a precursor to contemporary movements against mass incarceration and for abolition. They launched a legal defense center to aid poor Black and Latino prisoners; challenged the politics of bail; denounced state repression of the left; the politics of law and order, and the hyper imprisonment of people of color. They identified structural violence, poverty, and racism as root causes of social problems and supported the redistribution of resources and wealth through the revolutionary overthrown of capitalism. The group’s radical actions led to the first official investigation of the death of a single prisoner, Julio Roldan. Roldan’s arrest and arraignment offered a window into the botched legal process that, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, exponentially increased the arrest and jailing of people of color living in urban centers.

Chapter 5 explores the interactive dynamics of indigenous-state relations during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It begins by outlining the brutality of state repression, the consequences of the land division law of 1979, and the significance of the emergence of a large ethnic-based Mapuche organizational network (the Mapuche Cultural Centers) in opposition to this law. The main sections, however, concentrate on Mapuche and Chilean cultural production and state cultural policy in order to show that resistance could entail some strategic negotiating. And, vice-versa, we see that collaboration involved moments of defiance. The chapter also stresses how, even under a military dictator, government discourses on the “indigenous question” were multiple and often inconsistent.

This chapter examines how one of the two imaginary cum governmental configurations that, according to the book’s argument, compose Venezuela’s ‘monumental governmentality’—I’e’, The Fragile Collection or Gallery of Notables—first became historically instituted in the 1830s as a regime of notables forever pitted against an excluded, threatening outside. For this purpose, it offers an overview of the vast repertoire of means, from the theatre, literary genres and historiographical productions to forms of state repression, that made possible such an outcome.

The results Chapter 6 have shown that Internet technology suppresses the occurrence of protest, but how does the technology affect the persistence of protest once it has started? This chapter revisits theoretical arguments for how Internet technology can affect the continuation of protest by facilitating the spread of information about ongoing protest, but also about violent repression by the government. It presents empirical tests of how Internet connectivity relates to the persistence of anti-regime protest. The results show that while the technology lowers the chance that protest occurs in the first place, it makes the continuation of protest more likely once it has started. The chapter also uncovers important heterogeneity in the catalyzing effect of Internet technology: it fuels future protest only if the autocratic regime did not respond with violent repression to the previous instance of unrest. In other words, information about ongoing protest disseminated online can catalyze protest, but the government’s repressive response crucially mediates this effect.

This afterword shifts the book’s methodological imperative—to read emerging sexual and gendered identities through the lens of nationalism—from the turn of the twentieth century in Britain to the turn of the twenty-first in the United States. It situates the rise of transgender identities alongside post-September 11, 2001, nationalism and state repression in the United States through a reading of transgender author and activist Leslie Feinberg’s novel of “genderqueer” antiwar solidarities Drag King Dreams. In this dialectical novel of solidarity and struggle on the streets of New York City following September 11, Feinberg draws nationalist oppressors against a multicultural and multinational mix of genderqueers, drag kings, and straight and gay immigrants. Sexual and gender identities become the means through which U.S.-born characters can work in solidarity with recent immigrants, and their resistance to the state allows articulations of complex gender and sexual identities. Like the wartime and postwar novels discussed in the previous chapters, Drag King Dreams relies on structures of nationalism and struggle to produce queer inversions.

Competitive political elections are frequent objects of cynicism, but also carriers of great transformative expectations. This chapter reviews the comparative literature about their transformational power in three realms. It discusses the democratizing power of multiparty elections in electoral authoritarian regimes; the capacity of elections to deepen the democratic quality of minimal democracies; and their civilizing power in the face of democratic state repression and societal violence. In all three areas, the balance is sobering. The mere existence of competitive elections does not lead to either democratizing or civilizing progress. Their actual transformative power depends on the willingness and capacity of democratic actors to exploit the institutional opportunities they offer.

This chapter focuses on the leaders who carried on the Tonghak legacy following Ch'oe Cheu's execution. Tonghak was profoundly marked by state repression, Catholic persecution, and experiences in opposition. The chapter shows how shifting political context influenced new iterations of Tonghak teachings. Under Ch'oe Sihyŏng, these iterations emphasized nonviolence in order to protect the community from the government. The chapter also explains how Tonghak leaders molded a spiritual message into one with nationwide overtones in 1894. The Tonghak uprising sprang partly from government suppression of a community that rallied around new narratives and doctrine that spoke to the needs of followers. Faced with ongoing heterodox status, some followers chose to rebel to protect their ability to practice in public in the changing religious environment of the late nineteenth century.

During the Great Terror, youth faced suspicion not only for their connections with supposed enemies of the people but because of alleged acts of degeneracy like drinking. Thousands of young people found themselves accused of hooliganism, a malleable crime that encompassed various forms of social disorder. In the Komsomol, the arrest of youth leaders as Trotskyist degenerates impressed upon young communists that their social behavior was part of their political identity. The older cohort of Komsomol members, the pererostki, also fell under suspicion for subscribing to the old norms of youth activism. Among youth, the Great Terror became a moral panic that aimed to shape young people’s behaviour.

This book explores the issues arising from the paramilitary-style raid launched by Texas state police and the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) on April 3, 2008, against the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado. The Yearning for Zion Ranch is a community of 800 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a Mormon sect known for its practice of polygamy. State officials claimed that the raid was conducted in response to allegations of a “widespread pattern and practice” of child sexual abuse and underage marriage within the FLDS. The book analyzes the Texas raid in a broader sociological context by comparing it with other government raids on new or minority religions both historically and across cultures. It argues that the Texas raid was only one example of social intolerance and state repression of unpopular minority faiths in general, and the FLDS in particular.