The history of Guatemala is, sadly, one of Latin America’s richest in coups d’état and bloody civil wars. This chapter analyzes the processes that combined to result in Efraín Ríos Montt’s bloodless coup against Romeo Lucas García in 1982. In the 1970s, the military fought rural guerrillas while expropriating peasants of their land to benefit new landowners from the officer corps. In the cities, the military assassinated numerous leaders of political, union, and student movements. As the Comité de Unidad Campesina attempted to unite indigenous peasants and poor ladinos, the military responded with repression. In this context, the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo became less important than the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres and the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas. The military unleashed a counteroffensive in 1981, supported by Israel, as the US government, under Jimmy Carter, had less tolerance for human rights violations. Under the pretext that peasants were arming themselves to fight the guerrillas, Ríos Montt led a group of junior officers in the overthrow of Lucas García, who had lost legitimacy in the eyes of soldiers. The coup initiated a new strategy against the guerillas and promoted Evangelical Protestantism to marginalize progressive elements in the Catholic Church.

How did an English state torn apart by sectarian conflict, civil war and a revolution in the late seventeenth century become the most powerful in the world by 1819?

My fieldwork uncovers the differing dynamics of the homeowner self-governance movement in three cities: In Shanghai, 94 percent of condominium communities have established homeowners’ associations (HoAs), compared with 41 percent in Shenzhen and only 12 percent in Beijing. In this chapter, I present a framework with two variables, the risk to social stability and state capacity, to explain the different styles of authoritarianism in the three cities, and examine the role of the local state in the development of HoAs.

This chapter analyzes the right in Venezuela under Chavismo. It argues that the main divide of Venezuelan politics is now between democracy and autocracy rather than the ideological left and right. As authoritarianism and repression have increased and Venezuela’s socioeconomic decline has worsened, right-wing movements and factions have prioritized competitiveness through a centrist approach over an emphasis on ideological purity.

States interact with their national communities abroad in very different ways. In some cases, they actively support and protect them. In other cases, they co-opt and exploit their national communities abroad in that they reach out to them in order to tap into, thus benefitting domestically, from their economic and financial potentials or to garner political support. In still other cases, they repress or coerce their communities abroad, thus conceiving the latter not as an asset but as a possible challenge or threat that needs to be controlled. Against this background, the chapter first explores the general motivations and objectives as to why states interact with their national communities abroad, in the form of “support,” “co-optation,” and “repression.” Then, it discusses key practices that states employ in this interaction, along three substantive dimensions, namely: diplomacy and consular, economy and social, and security. Next, possible drivers that condition whether, how, and for what reason states interact with their communities abroad are presented. This is followed by a discussion on how the countries covered in this volume were selected. The concluding section presents the plan of the book and briefly summarizes the individual chapters.

This chapter discusses the larger implications of Sanhe gods’ experiences. It analyzes the various forms of their resistance, from non-compliance to direct confrontation, and the state’s mechanisms of control, from gentrification to coercion. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ precarious future, as flexible employment becomes more widespread and the prospects for settling down in cities reduce even when the great gods have intentions to stay. It presents migrant workers’ experiences not only of factory hopping but also, and increasingly, of city hopping, as both livelihood strategies and coping strategies formed in response to state policies and repression.

Chapter 7 concludes the Jordanian case study by analyzing the theory’s expectations for how strategic interactions around delegation and blame influence repression, protest, and accountability in authoritarian political systems. Original protest data indicates that the monarchy permits hundreds of protests each year and that security forces repress only a tiny fraction of these events. Instead, repression is highly targeted at those individuals who cross the regime’s redlines by publicly blaming and criticizing the king. The chapter explains how this approach to repression complicates anti-royal coordination, even among those opposition figures who personally blame the monarchy for Jordan’s ills. The chapter also illustrates how the monarchy provides limited accountability by removing prime ministers and cabinet ministers when the public becomes visibly dissatisfied with the government’s performance.

Chapter 3 provides evidence from cross-national statistical analysis as well as two case studies that are consistent with the major implications of the theory. First, it draws on internet search data, survey data, and short case studies of Russia and Morocco to demonstrate that power-sharing arrangements affect how the public attributes blame under autocracy. The case studies also suggest that autocrats delegate strategically in response to shifting threats to their rule. Second, the chapter uses cross-national data from Varieties of Democracy to test my expectations about how strategic interactions around delegation and blame influence broader governance outcomes in autocracy. The analysis indicates that autocrats who share power more are less vulnerable to popular discontent, which is consistent with their ability to shift blame more effectively. The analysis also shows that autocrats who share power more are less likely to use repression and more likely to provide a measure of accountability by sacking ministers when the public becomes dissatisfied. These findings indicate that the book’s arguments provide insights into a range of modern authoritarian regimes around the world.

I consider how Gulf Arabs evaluate their government’s behavior relative to the circulation of wealth. On the basis of roughly 350 interviews in the four countries with scholars, economists, dissidents, bankers, members of government, representatives of public and private foundations and NGOs and official and independent ‘ulama, I summarize their views, quoting from their responses to a set of questions and sharing the evidence they provide. I note the extent to which my interlocutors criticize their rulers in ethical terms, especially insofar as their commitment to social justice, equity and inclusion is concerned. In short, they confirm that there is no genuine concern for equity in the distribution of resources, and no indication that religious norms are integrated into this domain of governance. Rather, fairly narrow political and material interests prevail. Then, I briefly describe episodes of resistance to Gulf rulers from religious forces in society. The aim is twofold: to demonstrate how they too instrumentalize Islam for political capital and how rulers respond to the challenge they face from the religious field.

Chapter 3 explores how the host state (France) and the home state (Tunisia) influenced the possibilities, nature and forms of pro- and anti-regime activism. It shows how the trans-state space of mobilisation should be understood in the light of the diverse and dynamic opportunities and constraints it offered. It first examines the ways in which the Tunisian system of control – the politics of encadrement – worked from afar, and shows how this system was characterised by a dialectic of assistance and surveillance. Through social and cultural encadrement, as well as surveillance, propaganda and a pervasive sense of threat, the Tunisian party-state succeeded in constraining Tunisian anti-regime mobilisation while simultaneously facing difficulties in encouraging support and pro-regime action in France. The chapter also looks at the ways in which the French authorities managed the different groups, from a diplomatic approach towards Ben Ali’s party-state to a securitised approach towards Islamists and a tendency towards indifference to the leftist movements.

The first chapter explores the new presence of the military in the city after the start of the war. It analyzes the militarization of civil society and the blend of increased prestige and tensions in civil–military relations characteristic of wartime. During the mobilization days, reactions in Prague resembled scenes in other European cities: streets buzzing with anxious agitation as crowds thronged army barracks and train stations. Increasingly ubiquitous gray uniforms delineated new visible wartime hierarchies. Contacts between soldiers and civilians sometimes led to violent clashes, especially prevalent around cafés and pubs. These locales were also hubs for spreading information in a context of increased censorship and military repression. General suspicion by the military authorities transformed Prague residents’ experience of the rule of law. The different facets of military mobilization and emergency measures in urban space are examined to contribute to the discussion on the nature of the Habsburg military wartime government.

It is exactly because literary language relies on the stylistic possibilities afforded by indirection that queer literary studies established such strong connections between indirection and the representation of queer content. It’s not only that queer content had to be reframed to be socially acceptable and publishable, though that certainly was an element. Rather, indirection itself tended to be a hallmark of both the literariness and the queerness of literary writing. This chapter examines some key examples of textual repression, latency, and queer sublimation in a range of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Prime-Stevenson, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Lillian Hellman, and James Purdy. Alongside those readings it animates an investigation of textual content by tracing key theorists of these literary strategies, most significantly Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The chapter demonstrates how these quite particular questions, related to historical shifts in the representation of queer content, quickly settle into more general discipline-specific areas of enquiry.

This chapter provides an overview of the innovative protesting techniques of the Kazakh Spring and the Oyan, Qazaqstan movement. The interplay between the repressive law-enforcement agencies and the creative protesting techniques and narratives protestors had to find is at the heart of this chapter. I argue that the evolution of the protestors’ movements led to slow but consistent adaptation on the part of the police and secret police, and all those involved in the physical and emotional harassment of the protestors. Through interviews, I focus on how the body of the protestor and the public square become the two prime spaces for aggressive coercion and resistance. This pushes protestors to stage bodiless performances with anonymous posters and anonymous online activism, on the one hand. And on the other hand, it pushes law-enforcement officers to find aggravated techniques of torture. They came up with the kettling strategy, whereby protestors are trapped for hours in the heat or severe cold without access to basic amenities, water, food, or shelter. Other techniques of torture included kidnapping, intimidation, and even sexual violence.