Repression and Mobilization (review)

Political events after September 11 make Repression and Mobilization a timely and prophetic book. "Repression" and "mobilization," scientific euphemisms perhaps, refer to the way researchers study violent interactions at a collective level that compromise legitimacy and evoke the pathos of "contentious politics." Revolutions, strikes, ethnic conflicts, and social movements are examples. The essays in the collection follow from a conference at the University of Maryland in the summer of 2001 and are edited by Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol Mueller. Charles Davenport thoughtfully introduces the book's essays in the introduction, and in the last two chapters Charles Tilly and Mark Lickbach provide a theoretical overview of the collection.

The authors demonstrate a tight loyalty to the rigors of an empirical epistemology. While studying their subject, they wrestle reflectively with methodological issues in research and the processes of empirical investigation. The book is abstract because of an excessive concern for positivistic legitimacy and a shunning of theoretically general accounts. Charles Tilly, for instance, insists, "coherent explanations are possible—but not in the form of general laws."¹ The codings, typologies, descriptions, and explanations throughout the book are indeed logical and coherent, but they remain somehow unsatisfactory. Tilly says again, "[This research project] does not, however, call for summing of whole classes of episodes (e.g., revolutions, strikes, ethnic conflicts, and social movements) in pursuit of their common properties. It aims at explaining change and variation, not at discovering uniformity."²

Repression and mobilization are two poles in a confounding dichotomy, a paradox locked in a tit for tat logic that appears to researchers to be causal. Repression involves the efforts of authorities (often violent) to inhibit and suppress activity by potential or actual opponents. Mobilization involves a group's polling of resources with respect to shared interests and political action in a given direction. As the authors explain, repression can shape mobilization and mobilization repression. Tilly indicates that it is necessary for social researchers to do more to transform this dichotomy into a fruitful dialectic, albeit with a disheartening qualification: "But those interactions do not conform to covering laws; at the most general level, for example, repression sometimes flattens resistance, but sometimes magnifies it. How and why?"³ The statement is discouraging. What is needed to explain how and why repression sometimes flattens resistance and sometimes magnifies resistance is also taken off the table. Can researchers, without reference to general laws, answer the pressing question that Tilly raises? I think not. A consequence of September 11 is hopefully not an amnesia within social science of the concepts of legitimacy and social order.

The authors are sophisticated on the methodological and epistemological issues, but they are less so on the theoretical ones. The writing of Theda Skocpol helps depict the problem, albeit in a negative way. In States and Social Revolutions Skocpol makes the following statement: "not only does an organizational, realist perspective on the state entail differences from Marxist approaches, it also contrasts with non-Marxist approaches that treat the legitimacy of political authorities as an important explanatory concept."⁴ Skocpol's approach toward the study of the state contrasts with not only Marxist approaches but also non-Marxist approaches. Skocpol's approach does not treat the legitimacy of political authorities as an important explanatory concept, which is what non-Marxist approaches such as Max Weber's do. Skocpol goes on to explain the reasoning behind her realistic approach: "If state organizations cope with whatever tasks they already claim smoothly and efficiently, legitimacy––either in the sense of moral approval or in the probably much more usual sense of sheer acceptance of the status quo—-will probably be accorded to the state's form and rulers by most groups in society."⁵ Notice that concepts such as rational-legal authority, traditional authority, or charismatic authority are of no importance to this analysis of the nexus between repression and mobilization. Normative moral orientations such as human rights are also irrelevant...