Suchergebnisse

Introduction : juvenile justice and 21st century calls for reform -- Characterizing contemporary delinquency -- Characterizing contemporary juvenile justice -- Development, decision-making, and identity -- Expanding the evidence base for developmental juvenile justice -- Developmentally-suitable treatment and sanctions -- Implementation science and juvenile justice reform.

This study examines attempts by authorities to undermine overt collective challenges, such as protests, riots, or armed attacks, by targeting activities that precede and/or support such behavior. After providing a theory of how repression and resistance develop, the study analyzes unique data drawn from the confidential records of the Guatemalan National Police to assess the use of repression during the years between 1975 and 1985. Empirical tests demonstrate that (1) government forces anticipate challenger development by identifying the mobilization activities nascent challengers rely on to initiate and sustain overt collective challenges and (2) the use of repression designed to undermine such efforts is specifically targeted against radical (i.e., highly transformative) claims making. Implications are drawn for how we understand and study political order and conflict.

How does repression influence overt, collective challenges directed against political authority? To date, answers to this question have been inconclusive. This article argues that recent works inadequately address the topic because the focus has been on repression's impact on local civilians, with less consideration of dissident organizations. The author develops an organizational theory of challenger development and specifies predictions for how repression's effects on dissent are contingent upon the types of organizational behaviors targeted for coercion. The analysis employs original, microlevel data collected from previously confidential Guatemalan National Police records to assess the effects of repression during the years 1975 to 1985. Results show that the effects of repression are more complex than previously imagined. When repression targets the clandestine activities necessary to develop and sustain dissident organizations, such as holding meetings, training participants, and campaigning for funds, dissent declines significantly. But when repression is directed at ongoing, overt, collective challenges, it motivates a backlash that escalates dissent. Implications are drawn for how political order and conflict are understood and studied. (World Politics / SWP)

It is commonly believed that torture is an effective tool for combating an insurgent threat. Yet while torture is practiced in nearly all counterinsurgency campaigns, the evidence documenting torture's effects remains severely limited. This study provides the first micro-level statistical analysis of torture's relation to subsequent killings committed by insurgent and counterinsurgent forces. The theoretical arguments contend that torture is ineffective for reducing killings perpetrated by insurgents both because it fails to reduce insurgent capacities for violence and because it can increase the incentives for insurgents to commit future killings. The theory also links torture to other forms of state violence. Specifically, engaging in torture is expected to be associated with increased killings perpetrated by counterinsurgents. Monthly municipal-level data on political violence are used to analyze torture committed by counterinsurgents during the Guatemalan civil war (1977–94). Using a matched-sample, difference-in-difference identification strategy and data compiled from 22 different press and NGO sources as well as thousands of interviews, the study estimates how torture is related to short-term changes in killings perpetrated by both insurgents and counterinsurgents. Killings by counterinsurgents are shown to increase significantly following torture. However, torture appears to have no robust correlation with subsequent killings by insurgents. Based on this evidence the study concludes that torture is ineffective for reducing insurgent perpetrated killings.

This dissertation is divided into three papers that approach the topic of ethnic inequality in China in different ways. The first paper has two main goals: first, at the empirical level, it examines trends in household income inequality between ethnic groups in China from 1989-2009. Second, at the theoretical level, this study examines the importance of ethnicity relative to other socio-economic indicators and control variables in accounting for household income inequality over time. Using data from eight waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey, this study finds growing ethnic differences at the aggregate level between Han and non-Han Chinese. The growing difference between ethnic groups at the aggregate level is the result of two main trends: 1) increasing returns to higher education levels, certain occupational categories, and geographic regions in China; and 2) a larger proportion of Han in the categories that have experienced the greatest increases in economic returns. However, once controlling for additional variables, the analysis finds a declining significance of ethnicity as a predictor of income at the household level over time. The second paper draws upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with a group of Uyghur Chinese Muslim entrepreneurs to examine the relevance of the concept of structural violence for understanding ethnic domination and inequality in Chinese society. Critics of structural violence have argued the concept lacks analytical precision, does not offer a clear account of change over time, and downplays the role of agency on the part of challengers. This article offers a new analytical approach to understanding structural violence. First, utilizing insights from the "multi-institutional politics" approach, this article documents changing conditions of structural violence, strategies of resistance to police pressures, and changing Uyghur identity over time. Second, the results of my fieldwork outline two mechanisms that explain how structural violence changes over time. Third, this research challenges conventional wisdom on the relationship between structural violence and agency by demonstrating how Uyghur entrepreneurs exercised greater agency under increasingly harsh climates of structural violence. The third paper examines educational stratification in China. Previous studies of educational stratification in China have highlighted regional differences in educational attainment between residents in urban and rural areas, the historical gender gap in educational attainment, and the increasing importance of education in shaping occupational outcomes in an era of marketization. First, this paper examines the relative importance of social origins and political background in shaping educational attainment in different historical periods of educational expansion and decline; second, it reexamines the applicability of the Maximally Maintained Inequality (MMI) hypothesis to the case of China; and third, it examines differences in educational outcomes between the Han majority and non-Han ethnic minorities. The results indicate a growing importance of parental origins, relative to political background, in educational attainment; limited support for the MMI hypothesis; and a Han advantage in making certain educational transitions.

Although policymakers, NGOs, and academics have all expressed interest in accounting for mass killing, it is still unclear why states perpetrate massacres against their citizens. The present article identifies how strategic incentives can motivate states to commit massacres in particular settings. The article contends that massacres are committed to pursue two strategic goals: threat removal and projecting state control over territory. This theory is tested using local-level data from Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification. The results have significant implications for how we understand as well as attempt to reduce mass killing.

Among security institutions, police occupy a unique position. In addition to specializing in the repression of dissent, police monitor society and enforce order. Yet within research studying state repression, how police institutions are used and deployed to control domestic threats remain under-explored, particularly as it relates to the dual functionality just described. In this study, we develop and test an explanation of police repression accounting for the bifurcation of Mann's two modalities of state power: infrastructural power and despotic power. Infrastructural power allocates police resources to surveil dissidents and preemptively limit dissent's emergence or escalation. Police deploy despotic power through repressive responses to political threats. Empirically, we employ unique data to investigate police repression and the modalities of power in Guatemala. To analyze how shifting the balance between infrastructural and despotic power affects police repression, we isolate damage occurring from an earthquake that exogenously reshaped the landscape of infrastructural power. Results affirm the role of infrastructural power in regulating the despotic power of the state. Where local infrastructure was most affected by the earthquake, the security apparatus lost the capacity to surveil nascent movements and predict their activity, thereby providing opportunity for dissidents to mobilize and forcing police to (over-)react rather than shutdown resistance preemptively. However, the intensity of state violence recedes as the state recovers from the infrastructural damage and regains its control of local district.

An emerging consensus holds that achieving successful counter-movement outcomes requires combining overt repression (e.g. raids, arrests, and targeted assassination) with covert repression (e.g. monitoring, agents provocateurs, and wiretapping). Research in this article disputes the presumed complementarity between overt and covert repressive tactics. When overt repression signals new information about the state's covert intelligence collection program, challengers respond in ways that frustrate efforts to accumulate new intelligence. These propositions are investigated using original, weekly panel data on a black nationalist insurgent organization, the Republic of New Africa (RNA), and US Red Squad counter-movement activities directed against this group (between 1968 and 1971). Using archived materials generated by various policing agencies and their rivals in the RNA, the analyses provide new understanding of dynamics rarely observed or analyzed systematically. Findings reveal that the two methods of political repression can work at cross purposes. Overt repression motivates challenger adaption towards less readily observable tactics and organizational forms; covert repression subsequently fails to identify challengers' actions or identities. These findings hold even while controlling for challenger mobilization and government investment in covert repression. In addition to advancing our understanding of what happens to behavioral challengers when governments repress, the results help to shed light on some of the factors that make defeating domestic challengers so difficult. Each 'step forward' taken by counter-movement forces potentially makes the next one more difficult.

As they pursue information and deploy violence during conflict, combatants compose, catalog, and preserve a wide variety of records, such as memos, investigative reports, and communiqués. In an increasing number of post-conflict scenarios, these records are being archived and released publicly, quickly becoming a critical new source of data for studies of peace and conflict. The objective of this special issue is to advance a new research agenda focused on the systematic analysis of conflict archives. The contributors each spent significant time collecting original data from often-dusty archives and, in many cases, developed new methodologies for sampling, cataloging, and analyzing historical documents. Their findings reveal how violence simultaneously shapes and is shaped by factors that remain largely unobservable using more conventional sources of conflict data, including clandestine mobilization, bureaucratic accountability, and political identities. By considering these studies in relation to one another, this introduction aims to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of field research strategies and analytical techniques for studying original data from conflict archives. We conclude that while archival data are subject to their own biases that must be considered, this research agenda addresses significant limitations associated with traditional data sources and, in turn, pushes scholars to rethink many of the mechanisms underlying the causes and dynamics of peace and conflict.

How does repression influence backlash (i.e., challenges against political authorities that follow acts of government coercion)? This study argues that to adequately study backlash, it is necessary to analytically open up a social movement and examine why specific individuals in the same movement organization increase their participation following repression while other members drop out. The study uses original panel data on organizational behavior and individual participation in a black-nationalist insurgency group called the Republic of New Africa. Results show that the effects of repression are more complex than previously imagined. At the organizational level, repression leads to backlash challenges. At the individual level, however, repression has mixed effects. Challengers who personally experience repression become more likely to participate in post-repression challenging activities. At the same time, those within the organization who did not directly experience repression withdraw.