Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict

7. Dissent, Repression, and Inconsistency

The authors would like to thank David Cunningham and Irfan Nooruddin. Comments from Erik Gartzke and Will Moore on earlier drafts of this project were also helpful. Of course, any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. Dissent, Repression, and Inconsistency Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham and Emily Beaulieu Chapter 7 States of all kinds repress dissent—both violent and non-violent protest. What are the effects of such repression? Much attention has been devoted to understanding whether repression increases or decreases dissent in general and whether repression of specific protest strategies, violent or non-violent, can induce dissidents to change tactics. Findings have been mixed, with support found for both the ideas that repression quells dissent and encourages it, and that when targeted at a specific kind of dissent , repression can make dissidents change tactics.1 Although these existing works all focus on the importance of repression by the state, none look systematically at how this repression takes place. To date, studies of the effect of repression largely ignore the extreme variation in consistency with which states repress dissenters. States frequently respond in what appears to be an erratic fashion to dissidents, sometimes ignoring their activities and other times repressing the same activities ruthlessly. In this chapter, we enter the debate about the effects of repression, looking specifically at the “substitution hypothesis,” which is that repression of violent or non-violent dissent can induce dissidents to switch tactics . We argue that the effects of repression in this context will be conditional on the consistency with which states employ repression. We test this empirically on event data from dissent and repression in Europe. The 1. See Douglas A. Hibbs, Mass Political Violence: A Cross-National Causal Analysis (New York: Wiley, 1973); Mark Irving Lichbach and Ted Robert Gurr, “The Conflict Process: A Formal Model,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 1981), pp. 3–29; Eduard A. Ziegenhagen, The Regulation of Political Conflict (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1968); Ronald A. Francisco, “Coercion and Protest: An Empirical Test in Two Democratic States,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 4 (November 1996), pp. 1179–1204; Christian Davenport, “State Repression and Political Order,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol.10, No.1 (June 2007), pp.1–23; and Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991). 174 | rethinking violence novelty of this approach is twofold. First, the role of consistency has largely been ignored in studies of dissent behavior, and we will fill a critical gap by examining it here.2 Second, most of the literature on dissent examines the choice to use violence as dichotomous—dissidents are violent or not. We focus on the related choices to use violent and non-violent tactics by dissidents, allowing for the possibility of a mixed strategy of dissent. There is no reason to think that dissidents will not use both violent and non-violent tactics at the same time. Thus we frame our research question to ask: How does the use of repression affect dissident choices to use more or less violent or non-violent dissent? By allowing for dissidents to mix types of dissent in their overall strategy, we gain a more accurate understanding of how repression affects dissent behavior. The chapter proceeds as follows. We present the theory in three steps. First, we introduce a basic Rational Actor (RA) model which lays out how dissidents make strategic decisions about how to challenge the state.3 In this model, dissidents weigh the costs and benefits of dissent as they determine how much effort to put into violent and non-violent tactics. The state is assumed to be the main source of the costs and benefits that inform dissident choices. Second, we introduce the concept of consistency of repression , explaining why states are likely to be inconsistent and how this will affect dissident choices about protest behavior. We then argue that the effect of repression on dissent will be conditional on the consistency with which it is used, and we specify hypotheses that follow from our theory. Following this, we provide empirical evidence through a quantitative study of minority dissent in Europe and a qualitative examination of dissent in Northern Ireland. The final section offers concluding thoughts. A Theory of Dissent Choice Disaffected citizens protest in a number of ways—for example, lobbing bombs into buildings, hunger strikes, marches, or sit...