Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Secret Police and State Violence under Authoritarianism

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Why do authoritarian regimes use intense and indiscriminate violence against their citizens at some times and some places, but not others? Despite a wave of recent interest in authoritarian politics, social scientists lack an understanding of what drives variation in the scope and intensity of violent repression. Although we tend to think of authoritarian regimes as uniformly repressive and dependent on coercion to maintain power, the actual level and kind of force employed to do so varies widely. What explains this variation? The project attempts to answer the question posed above by analyzing patterns of state violence in pre-democratization Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines, with reference to a larger set of cases of autocracy. Drawing on new statistics and original archival and interview evidence, the project chronicles the origins and evolution of the internal security apparatus in these three countries since 1945. It focuses on the organizational dynamics of coercive institutions and their effect on patterns of state violence, testing the hypothesis that how violence is organized has important implications for how it is employed. Preliminary research suggests that the theory explains variation in the scope and intensity of state violence over time and across these three countries in Asia; the current project will collect and analyze data to test whether the theory also explains additional variation observed at the sub-national and cross-national levels. The project's intellectual merit lies in its contributions to the study of authoritarianism and violent repression. A fuller understanding of the role played by coercive institutions in repression and state violence will inform contemporary scholarly and policy debates on authoritarian stability and democratization, human rights, and internal conflict. The project's broader impacts are associated with its potential importance not only to the scholarly community but also to policy-makers and practitioners promoting democratization.