Why do authoritarian regimes use intense and indiscriminate violence against their citizens at some times and some places, but not others? Despite a wave of recent interest in authoritarian politics, social scientists lack an understanding of what drives variation in the scope and intensity of violent repression. Although we tend to think of authoritarian regimes as uniformly repressive and dependent on coercion to maintain power, the actual level and kind of force employed to do so varies widely. What explains this variation?
The project attempts to answer the question posed above by analyzing patterns of state violence in pre-democratization Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines, with reference to a larger set of cases of autocracy. Drawing on new statistics and original archival and interview evidence, the project chronicles the origins and evolution of the internal security apparatus in these three countries since 1945. It focuses on the organizational dynamics of coercive institutions and their effect on patterns of state violence, testing the hypothesis that how violence is organized has important implications for how it is employed. Preliminary research suggests that the theory explains variation in the scope and intensity of state violence over time and across these three countries in Asia; the current project will collect and analyze data to test whether the theory also explains additional variation observed at the sub-national and cross-national levels.
The project's intellectual merit lies in its contributions to the study of authoritarianism and violent repression. A fuller understanding of the role played by coercive institutions in repression and state violence will inform contemporary scholarly and policy debates on authoritarian stability and democratization, human rights, and internal conflict. The project's broader impacts are associated with its potential importance not only to the scholarly community but also to policy-makers and practitioners promoting democratization.
Authoritarian regimes comprise a significant fraction of the world’s countries, both in historical terms and at present. They rule over around half of the world’s population, dominate critical regions of the globe, and lead several of the world’s great powers. Popular imagination depicts these regimes as overwhelmingly repressive and dependent on coercion -- from Stalin’s ‘Gulag archipelago’ to Tiananmen Square to the 2011 crackdowns in Bahrain and Syria. Where that coercion is unopposed, some of the world’s worst human rights abuses can come to pass. Where it is resisted, the struggle can metastasize into insurgency or even civil war. Abuses committed by states against their citizens are an important source of political violence in the world today. The conceptualization of authoritarian regimes as monolithically repressive, however, ignores a critical element of variation: the different levels and types of violence that they use to maintain power. In reality, the type and level of force that authoritarian regimes use to maintain power varies widely across time and space. In some places and at some times, regimes rely on low-intensity forms of repression like surveillance and intimidation, while at other times they turn to high-intensity violence like mass killing. What explains this variation? To answer this question, my dissertation chronicles the origins and operations of the internal security apparatus in three Cold War anti-communist authoritarian regimes – Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea – and compares them to similar processes in Communist authoritarian regimes in North Korea and China. I find that a critical factor affecting variations in authoritarian state violence is the design of coercive institutions: the set of institutions collectively responsible for intelligence and internal security. The project demonstrates that under certain conditions, and facing certain threats, autocrats are likely to create more fragmented and socially isolated security forces. These forces, however, lack the intelligence capacity to engage in discriminate repression, and also have incentives to engage in higher levels of violence. The project draws on new archival evidence from the U.S. and Asia, statistical and geographic data, and material from elite interviews to provide a view inside authoritarian "secret police" use of surveillance, coercion, and violence. A fuller, more accurate understanding of the role played by coercive institutions can inform scholarly and policy debates on authoritarian stability, democratization, human rights, and internal conflict. It will help policymakers and the public predict where instability is most likely to emerge, and suggests new initiatives to promote better treatment of citizens worldwide.
