Here, you will find my new book Repression 101, co-created with Matthew Bremer. I figure that you might want to look at/glance over the cover, front matter, intro and table of contents but download and read the chapters that follow it. I will offer the separate chapters as individual pdfs at some point. Read. Pass it on. Send me comments/suggestions. It's on.
Later, I'm getting to "Mobilization 101" (where I discuss different forms of resistance, rebellion and revolution) and then "Contentious Politics 101" (where I discuss the dynamic interaction between what states do to control people and what people do to avoid/stop/transform what states are trying to do as they seek a better life/world).
For now, let's start with the beginning.
Later, I'm getting to "Mobilization 101" (where I discuss different forms of resistance, rebellion and revolution) and then "Contentious Politics 101" (where I discuss the dynamic interaction between what states do to control people and what people do to avoid/stop/transform what states are trying to do as they seek a better life/world).
For now, let's start with the beginning.
Cover
Front Matter
Intro
I began this book about 15 years ago with a dear friend of mine who passed a few years ago - Will Moore. We had come out of graduate school at the same time in the 1980s studying state repression. Immediately, we became aware of the fact that there were not many of us doing this (there was probably about 5 or 10 of us at the time) and we eventually found one another. We would talk whenever we had the chance and very quickly a couple of themes emerged. First, it was repeatedly identified that most humans were somewhat aware of the topic because they had either lived through some repression, saw it in the media as well as in popular culture or they heard about it somewhere. Second, it was also constantly being brought up thought that most were not aware of the increasing amount of theorization, data and analysis that was being developed on the relevant topic. Indeed, we would repeatedly talk about how horrible we were in communicating to people outside of our small group and that something had to be done to get our insights into the mainstream public. The solution emerged: let’s create a popular book… Repression 101.
With this in mind, we laid out chapters and a division of labor:
- Will was going to work on the “Who” of state repression addressing agents and agencies involved because he started thinking about precisely which actors were involved.
- I was going to work on “What” since I had started focusing on “repertoires” (i.e., diverse things that governments could do) and “trajectories” how things evolved over time.
- Will was going to work on “Why” as he had already developed some interesting ways for framing government strategies in the tradition of what is called “rational choice”; I would likely chime in a little here as I was working through my own systems dynamics approach.
- I was going to work on “When” as I was doing some work on temporal patterns, aftereffects, what was taking place around elections, around challenges as well as around regime changes.
- I was going to also work on “Where” as I started to spatially disaggregate government actions looking at specific street addresses in Oakland and Detroit where the police tried to deal with Black Nationalists as well as villages/communes in Rwanda as diverse government agents tried to eliminate Tutsi a and Hutu.
- We would both chime in regarding emerging puzzles and we concluded that we definitely needed to say something on how to stop state repression because that was the whole reason that we were studying the topic to begin with.
- We were not quite sure how we would write this book in terms of tone or look but the broad strokes identified above seemed clear enough.
We never quite managed to get around to working on the book though as other projects and scholarship got in the way (e.g., we had a collaboration on torture [which spun off a paper I was doing with David Armstrong], and we engaged in something called the “Conflict Consortium” which attempted to bring together diverse scholars throughout the field of Political Conflict and Violence across types of institutions, subfields and approaches and we did something called "Mindfields" where younger conflict/violence scholars interviewed older ones). Then Will passed and I put this idea of Repression 101 away (perhaps far away). I didn’t want to do it without him. It wasn’t the same. For the longest time, I couldn’t even look at our notes.
This changed after a while. Every now and then though something would happen in the world that would make me think about the need for the book (e.g., the police response to the Black Lives Matter protests and the lack of understanding about what was taking place as well as why, the curtailment regarding the right to protest experienced throughout the United States following this period as well as why different states were taking different stands on the topic, discussions about the increased militarization of protest policing and how it might/might not impact what was done on the ground, the continued coercion and force by Paul Kagame in Rwanda as well as why this guy just seemed to never stop, the growing awareness of what is called “transnational” state repression and the shift in repression scholarship away from the macro to individual cases as well as away from studying indices to individual forms).
Additionally, it was readily apparent that the field of state repression had grown immensely over time with seemingly every tactic and country garnering some attention. Differing from when we started in the 1980s and 1990s, now repression had seemingly joined the list of socio-political phenomenon that people could study as a legitimate topic. This was an immense change for the better. At the same time, despite the development of scholarship, popular awareness of the great work being done and the insights provided within it were no better distributed throughout the population. People everywhere started talking about the topic as though they understood what it was but few had even glanced at what had been done.
In this space, I returned to the topic. I returned to the original notes, started compiling everything I had ever written on the topic, tossed that aside and then just thought about facilitating a conversation about the topic. We wanted the book to be something that anyone could pick up. I wanted it to be free with nobody making any money off of it. Will was not sure about this, thinking that we needed to have some publisher fronting for us. We both wanted the book to be useful. And, I wanted it to be visually appealing. Will just kind of yielded on that one. So, here it is.
Deeply drawing upon but largely ignoring academic jargon, this books seeks to assist individuals in understanding state repression by identifying “who” (which actors) and “what” (which action) is involved, “why” it occurs (what theories are used to explain it), “where” and “when” it takes place (what data reveals about patterns and determinants) and “what (if anything) can be done to stop it” or at least lessen its use.
Peace
Christian (with a little Will)
Table of Contents
"Cover" through "What, 1.0"
- File
Some Background reading to "What, 1.0" (hyperlinks coming)
- Schmid, Alex P. "Repression, state terrorism, and genocide: conceptual clarifications." In State organized terror, pp. 23-37. Routledge, 2019.
- Earl, Jennifer. "Tanks, tear gas, and taxes: Toward a theory of movement repression." Sociological theory 21, no. 1 (2003): 44-68.
- Boykoff, Jules. "Limiting dissent: The mechanisms of state repression in the USA." Social Movement Studies 6, no. 3 (2007): 281-310.
- Oliver, Pamela. "Repression and crime control: Why social movement scholars should pay attention to mass incarceration as a form of repression." Mobilization: An International Quarterly 13, no. 1 (2008): 1-24
"Who"
- File
Some Background reading to "Who"
- Stavro, Martin, and Ryan M. Welch. "Does Police Militarization Increase Repression?." Journal of Conflict Resolution 68, no. 5 (2024): 964-992.
- Eck, Kristine. "Repression by proxy: How military purges and insurgency impact the delegation of coercion." Journal of Conflict Resolution 59, no. 5 (2015): 924-946.
- Loyle, Cyanne E., and Christian Davenport. "Some left to tell the tale: Finding perpetrators and understanding violence in Rwanda." Journal of Peace Research 57, no. 4 (2020): 507-520.
- McPherson, Alan. "Sub-Perpetrators in the Chilean Security State." The Latin Americanist 66, no. 3 (2022): 272-301.
- Carter, Erin Baggott, Jonghyuk Lee, and Victor Shih. "Who Represses? Career Incentives and the Geography of Repression in China." (2025).
- Davenport, Christian. "Introducing DyoRep: A database of perpetrator–victim dyads within repressive spells." In Quantitative Human Rights Measures and Measurement, pp. 117-137.
Routledge, 2023.
