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I had interacted with professor Imari Obadele for quite some time at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS). He is an elder scholar whom I knew had been politically active in the past but I was not aware of his specific affiliations or activities. At the time we first met, Obadele was only known to me as a political scientist at Prairie View. I had just begun my first job at the University of Houston a few years before. As there were not many elder black political scientists that I knew at the time, especially one interested in social movements and revolution, we immediately hit it off. It was not until a year or so after we first met and after I had published some research on the Black Panther Party (Davenport 1998a; Dahlerus and Davenport 1999; Davenport and Eads 2001), that we really started to interact.

As part of a special journal forum entitled "Swiss Political Sciences Review." In this article the author argue the relative neglect of state repression by Tilly was both a strength and weakness. By not being bound by the relevant subfield, Tilly provided an extremely rich understanding of government coercion but it was always addressed while addressing another topic and thus several issues were not attended to. Shedding light on so many topics, one can clearly forgive Tilly for the omission. Indeed, in the author case, the author is thankful for it left us something to write about. Within this short essay, the author outlines what Tilly thoughts about state repression and the importance of regime type with regard to this government policy. The author will also highlight what he tended to downplay as well as what he ignored completed. Finally the author discuss what other scholars have done with their insights as well as where this work needs to go in the future. Kenneth Ngo

Existing literature on state repression generally ignores the diversity that exists within autocracies. At present, different political systems are collapsed together, leaving unique approaches to political order unexamined. This limitation is important for policymakers, activists, and everyday citizens around the world seeking new ways to reduce government coercion. Within this study, the author explores an alternative path to decreasing repression — a `tyrannical peace'. Examining 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, he finds that single-party regimes are generally less repressive than other autocracies. Results also show that military governments decrease civil liberties restriction and the end of the Cold War has varied influences on repression, depending upon the form considered and whether this variable is interacted with another. There are thus alternative routes to peace, but these routes are not equally robust. The implications of this analysis are threefold. First, those interested in understanding why states restrict civil liberties and violate human rights must disaggregate their conceptions of system type and repression. Second, policymakers must adjust their approach to reducing state repression according to the type of authoritarian government they are confronted with. Third, advocates for human rights must accept that, in lieu of full democratization, alternatives exist.

State repression includes harassment, surveillance/spying, bans, arrests, torture, and mass killing by government agents and/or affiliates within their territorial jurisdiction. Over the past 40 years, the systematic study of state repression has grown considerably. The development of this work, however, has been uneven. Though unified in their focus on the problem of order (i.e., trying to ascertain how political authorities wield coercive power amid potential and actual domestic challengers), different scholars tend to emphasize distinct aspects of the topic. Consequently, a great deal of progress has been made in specific areas but others have lagged behind. In this review, I attempt to identify the dominant traditions in the repression literature, the core empirical findings, and some persisting puzzles. Adapted from the source document.