Repression Works (Just Not in Moderation)

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231152778
• Author: Yuri M. Zhukov
• Date: 01 September 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(11) 1663–1694

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140231152778

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Repression Works

(Just Not in Moderation)

Yuri M. Zhukov

1



Abstract

Why does government violence deter political challengers in one context but

inf‌lame them in the next? This paper argues that repression increases op-

position activity at low and moderate levels but decreases it in the extreme.

There is a threshold level of violence, where the opposition becomes unable

to recruit new members, and the rebellion unravels—even if the government

kills more innocents. We f‌ind empirical support for this proposition in

disaggregated data from Chechnya and a meta-analysis of sub-national conf‌lict

dynamics in 71 countries. The data suggest that a threshold exists, but the level

of violence needed to reach it varies. Many governments, thankfully, are

unable or unwilling to go that far. We explore conditions under which this

threshold may be higher or lower and highlight a fundamental trade-off

between reducing government violence and preserving civil liberties.

JEL Classif‌ication: D74, F51, H56.

Keywords

repression, political violence, mass killing, conf‌lict, meta-analysis, threshold

effect

Repression is the use of violence and intimidation to maintain political

power.

1

When confronting behavioral challenges to their authority, govern-

ments often respond by threatening and punishing suspected dissidents and

1

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Yuri M. Zhukov, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382, USA.

Email: zhukov@umich.edu

rebels. The coercive purpose of these actions is to compel challengers to stop

their f‌ight, and to deter others from joining it. The intensity of repression can

vary greatly. To reestablish control in Chechnya after 1999, for example, the

Russian government used methods ranging from house demolitions and

targeted killings to shelling and indiscriminate sweeps. Rebels’responses

ranged from quiet acquiescence in one village to violent escalation in the next.

Why does government violence sometimes deter political challengers, but

other times inf‌lame them?

2

The dominant view in political science is that

violent efforts to maintain power can create grievances that embolden the

regime’s opponents.

3

Others disagree, noting that repression can deter re-

bellion by making it unacceptably costly.

4

These perspectives are not necessarily at odds. We argue that what rebels

do depends on how much violence the government uses: repression inf‌lames

opposition activity at low and moderate levels, but deters it in the extreme.

There is a threshold level of violence, at which repression outpaces the

opposition’s ability to recover losses. If the government can escalate violence

past this point, civilians will believe that supporting the opposition is costlier

than supporting the government, and will generally not rebel—even if the

government is more responsible for civilian suffering. If the level of repression

falls short, repression will invite new and more aggressive behavioral

challenges.

We f‌ind empirical evidence of this threshold at the sub-national and cross-

national levels. We begin with a disaggregated analysis of violence in Russia’s

Chechnya region. We examine Chechnya due to its prominence in recent

literature on political violence (Lyall, 2009,2010;Toft & Zhukov,2015), and

its geopolitical signif‌icance as a “test case,”whose lessons other governments

have sought to learn (e.g., Ukraine, Kazarin, 2014) and emulate (e.g., Syria,

Hill, 2013). To ensure that the threshold is not unique to Chechnya, we

evaluate the generalizability of these results with a meta-analysis of four

widely used conf‌lict event datasets, covering 71 countries.

The idea of a threshold effect is not new. A rich literature on contentious

politics and social movements has hypothesized an “inverted-U”relationship

between repression and dissent (Bwy, 1968;DeNardo, 2014;Feierabend et al.,

1972;Gurr, 1970;Khawaja, 1993;Muller & Seligson, 1987;Olivier, 1991).

The scope of this research, however, has been mainly on protests and forms of

resistance short of armed conf‌lict. Most empirical tests, moreover, have relied

on macro-level data, and indirect measures of coercion. This article’s con-

tribution is to unpack the theoretical logic behind the threshold effect, and to

conduct the most comprehensive empirical test yet f‌ielded in the literature. We

demonstrate that the threshold effect holds at the sub-national level and is

robust across multiple estimation strategies, countries, and datasets.

Beyond showing that the threshold effect exists, our paper contributes to

recent research on why states don’t always resort to such extreme measures

1664 Comparative Political Studies 56(11)

(Conrad & Ritter, 2013;Tyson, 2018). In many cases, mass repression does

not occur because it is infeasible. A government may simply lack the resources

to do it: the intensity of violence needed to reach the threshold exceeds what

the state is capable and willing to produce. In such instances, repression is

strictly inf‌lammatory and never achieves a deterrent effect.

In other cases, mass repression may not occur because it is unnecessary. If

the government has highly accurate information on rebels’identities and

whereabouts, it shouldn’t need to resort to overwhelming force. If the gov-

ernment can isolate rebels from sources of external support, the rebels become

more sensitive to coercion. If the government can restrict freedom of ex-

pression, the opposition will have more diff‌iculty making positive appeals to

supporters. Under each of these scenarios, the government can reach its

threshold at a lower level of violence. Yet these “solutions”all come at a price:

coercion becomes less lethal, but the population becomes less free, and the

government less publicly accountable. This builds on work by Young (2009),

Ritter (2014), and others who have explored how expectations of political

survival impact the use of repression.

Governments who defeat their challengers through repression are likely to

govern by these same means. A central implication of our argument is that for

a government to maintain its monopoly on the use of force, the policies used to

achieve this monopoly must remain in place. Any effort to dismantle the

police state—or to tie the regime’s hands by, for example, ratifying human

rights treaties—risks upsetting this fragile equilibrium, should an opportu-

nistic challenger arrive. This result explains why violence in Chechnya re-

emerged in the 1990s despite two centuries of Soviet and Russian efforts to

suppress it, from forcible disarmament to mass deportation.

The logic of two-sided coercion pushes governments to repress massively

or not at all. We present tentative evidence that this dilemma—between in-

action and mass murder—creates a need to limit the amount of violence

needed for governments to stay in power. The resulting institutions (e.g., mass

surveillance, travel restrictions, and censorship) curtail civil liberties and may

explain the emergence of autocracy after civil war.

A Theory of Coercion in Civil Conf‌lict

The scope of this inquiry is on the dynamics of an armed civil conf‌lict, def‌ined

as the sustained use of organized violence, by at least two groups of actors

within the same state, toward the pursuit (or maintenance) of political power.

5

We do not seek to explain the original causes of rebellion or repression (ala

Collier & Hoeff‌ler, 2004;Fearon & Laitin, 2003;Hegre et al., 2001). Rather,

our interest is in the subsequent violent interaction between political actors,

and their competitive efforts to build a base of support. The narrative begins

after government forces and rebels fail to reach a bargain that both prefer to

Zhukov 1665