State Repression

Why does state violence sometimes fail to crush a secessionist movement and instead facilitate international support for the separatist cause? Based on the literature on the international recognition of secessionist entities and on the impact of state repression against social movements, this paper develops an argument according to which the timing of certain repressive events make them more likely to generate an international backlash and thus facilitate external support for secessionists. To backfire internationally, state violence must occur at the right time-that is, when the secessionists have gained sufficient media attention, put in place an appropriate organizational structure, and have abandoned violent tactics for a nonviolent campaign. Using the secession process of East Timor as a case study, this paper shows how the international moral outrage that followed the Dili massacre (1991),combined with a changing geopolitical context, have boosted the foreign support of the secessionist movement in East Timor and allowed it to obtain important concessions from Jakarta.

Social Reproduction Theory, as advanced by scholars such as Bhattacharya (2017) and Ferguson (2019) is at its core a theory of the revolutionary capacity of "unproductive" workers such as teachers, nurses, and social workers who are disproportionately women and disproportionately employed by the state. However, Social Reproduction Theory overlooks the contradictory and antagonistic role of the state in the lives of people, as the reproduction of labor-power in capitalism proceeds via antagonism and state repression. The task of teachers, nurses, and social workers is the production of not just any life but that of a docile, exploitable worker.

A vast literature has considered the proactive use of law as a tool by progressive social movements, but far less attention has been paid to the way activists respond to involuntary engagement with law as a result of repression and criminalization. This dissertation explores the legal support infrastructure of grassroots protest movements in Canada and
the US by tracing the evolution of contemporary activist legal support through two periods. The tactic of jail solidarity and an emerging legal collective model are highlighted as the key features of the global justice organizing era (1999-2005) while in the second age of austerity era (2008-2018), I discuss evolving approaches to law collective work in various protest movements and highlight a renewed focus on anti-repression as a framing praxis of both organizing and legal support. Grounded in my own activist legal support work over more than two decades, this research rests on data arising from detailed interviews and
analysis of more than 125 archival documents.

I develop two areas of inquiry. First, I trace critiques of movement lawyering in the legal literature to demonstrate that those critiques are often shared by legal support organizers. Divergent opinions on the appropriate role of lawyers and norms of professional ethics in law collective practice reflect long-standing contradictions in progressive lawyering practice. Accordingly, I argue that the legal work of non-lawyer activists ought to be understood as a complementary – if also sometimes disruptive – model of movement lawyering. Second, I demonstrate that an analysis of radical legal support speaks to the
post-arrest experiences of protesters and the impact of such repression on mobilization – phenomena largely absent from the literature on state repression of social movements. I consider this dynamic through the lens of legal mobilization, arguing that the pedagogical work of law collectives, understood as a site of social movement knowledge production, plays a significant role in mediating the complex relationship between repression and mobilization. I conclude by exploring the legal consciousness of activist legal support organizers and argue that the education and organizing praxes of law collectives are evidence of a form of prefigurative, counter-hegemonic legality.

本文試圖透過《青谷專案》建立「監控」的概念，對政治檔案的內容與產生過程進行討論與分析。監控可分為「監視」與「控制」兩面向，前者包含檔案中的情報來源、情報內容、情報傳遞與情蒐模式，後者則指涉情治機關對於情報的運用，用以影響被監視對象的行為與態度。從檔案內容可推知，情報來源將影響情報內容的正確性，因此對情治機關而言，情報來源越接近被監視對象越理想，不過越深入被監視對象的生活進行情蒐，驗證與運用情報時線民越有可能曝光，對情治機關而言將得不償失。在情報運用上，從檔案中可歸納出醜化、分化、恐嚇、疏導與轉化等五種策略，皆用於試探、遊說或打擊被監視對象。本文將以《青谷專案》中的各類情報指出，無論是監視或控制，被監視對象的人際關係皆為情治機關運用的關鍵工具：人際關係不只可轉換成情治機關的情報網絡，也可成為顛覆被監控者生活與交際的政治工具，用以影響與控制被監視者的行為與態度。

The paper presents in a simple model the possible choices and constraints facing democratic governments when confronting an anti-democratic party that is able to seriously endanger the survival of the democratic regime. Miscalculations of the players about the occurrence of future states of the world, and the relaxation of some of the basic assumptions of the game provide possible explanations as to how a "legal" (that is, not based on an armed insurrection) regime breakdown can come about. The last part of the paper focuses on the logic of prevention of democratic challenges by means of short-term suboptimal choices by the government and gives some historical examples of the modeled situation.

Over the past two decades, the concept of militant democracy-the use of legal restrictions on political expression and participation to curb extremist actors in democratic regimes-has again captured the attention of comparative constitutional lawyers and political scientists. In comparative constitutional law, the old neutral model of liberal democracy, according to which all political views are entitled to the same rights of expression and association, has given way to a general consensus that restrictions on basic rights designed to preserve democracy are legitimate. At the same time, legal scholars attribute the considerable cross-national variation in the formal design and use of such restrictions to the particular historical background of each country. In political science, a large body of work now examines specific militant restrictions on extremist actors. Although this scholarship consists mainly of descriptive analyses , it has begun to advance causal hypotheses explaining variation in important militant democracy policies. Taken together, these developments point to the fact that militant restrictions constitute an important facet of modern democracy and that at the same time, notwithstanding recent advances, our understanding of the phenomenon is still marked by significant gaps, making the legal and empirical analysis of militant democracy an important emerging research program both in comparative constitutional law and political science. This article reconstructs the debate on the concept since its origins in the 1930s and suggests directions for further research in both fields. 207 Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2013.9:207-226.

In analyzing extremist challenges to democracy, the literature in comparative politics has paid more attention to the ideology, the social extraction, and the political strategies of the challengers than to the institutions and policies put into place by democratic governments to defend against its internal enemies. This tendency is visible, for example, in the literature on European extreme right-wing parties and movements, as well as in analyses of post-9/11 terrorism and its supporters. Only recently have comparativists started analyzing the ways in which democratic actors respond to such challenges. The piece builds on these recent developments and offers some general reflections on how a research program on the comparative analysis of "militant democracy" could be developed.
Published in European Studies Forum, Autumn 2008, 38 (2), 58-65

Why are some challenges to the territorial unity of democratic states more tractable than others? The literature has focused on numerous explanatory factors, including the  impact of institutional reforms and government policies implemented in response to subnational mobilization and the ethnic identity of subnational groups. Building on
the insights of a large literature on the political consequences of religious mobilization, this article analyzes a new dataset on the trajectory of 181 subnational political organizations active in India between 1952 and 2002. The article shows that demands for autonomy or secession put forward by religious organizations are likely to prove much more resilient over time than identical demands advanced by nonreligious organizations. The analysis has important implications for the study of secessionism and ethnic politics in general.

This policy brief brings Middle Eastern Studies to the Western Balkans in her examination of the use of counterterrorism measures against Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Muslim community. By connecting wartime narratives from the participation of the mujahideen in the Bosnian War to the labelling of national security threats and separatist movements in BiH, Mathieson emphasises the current intimidation and persecution faced by Muslim Bosniaks and highlights the necessity of an international definition of terrorism.

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

https://www.academia.edu/35399662/CFP_F_CK_May_68_Fight_Now_Exploring_the_Uses_of_the_Radical_Past_from_1968_to_Today?email_work_card=title

Since  2015  a  new  human  rights  movement  struggles  against  violence  against women, “Ni una menos”. From the perspective of cultural studies, there is a strong link between these  women  struggling  for cultural  transformation  and  the  long  lasting  battle  against oblivion  carried  out  by  Argentina’s  Human  Rights  Movement  and  especially,  by  the  Mother and  Grandmother  of  Plaza  the  Mayo.  Against  the  background  of  state  terrorism  and  its literature  written  by  women,  this  contribution  reflects  on  methodology  studying  Argentina women’s literature on state repression and also on the role of women as agents of social transformation.