Outsourcing Repression

Outsourcing Repression PDF Author: Lynette H. Ong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197628796
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A compelling examination of China's engagement of nonstate actors as a counterintuitive solution to coerce citizens while minimizing backlash against the state. How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression, Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Ong invites the reader to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies. Everyday state power is quotidian power acquired through society by penetrating nonstate territories and mobilizing the masses within. Ong uses China's urbanization scheme as a window of observation to explain how the arguments can be generalized to other country contexts.

Outsourcing Repression

Outsourcing Repression PDF Author: Lynette H. Ong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197628796
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
A compelling examination of China's engagement of nonstate actors as a counterintuitive solution to coerce citizens while minimizing backlash against the state. How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression, Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Ong invites the reader to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies. Everyday state power is quotidian power acquired through society by penetrating nonstate territories and mobilizing the masses within. Ong uses China's urbanization scheme as a window of observation to explain how the arguments can be generalized to other country contexts.

Outsourcing Repression

Outsourcing Repression PDF Author: Lynette H. Ong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197628761
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Bulldozers, violent thugs, and nonviolent brokers -- The theory : state power, repression, and implications for development -- Outsourcing violence : everyday repression via thugs-for-hire -- Case studies : thugs-for-hire, repression, and mobilization -- Networks of state infrastructural power : brokerage, state penetration, and mobilization -- Brokers in harmonious demolition : mass mobilizers, mediators, and huangniu -- Comparative context : South Korea and India.

The Sentinel State

The Sentinel State PDF Author: Minxin Pei
Publisher: Harvard University Press - T
ISBN: 067429646X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Countering recent hype around technology, a leading expert argues that the endurance of dictatorship in China owes less to facial recognition AI and GPS tracking than to the human resources of the Leninist surveillance state. For decades China watchers argued that economic liberalization and increasing prosperity would bring democracy to the world’s most populous country. Instead, the Communist Party’s grip on power has only strengthened. Why? The answer, Minxin Pei argues, lies in the effectiveness of the Chinese surveillance state. And the source of that effectiveness is not just advanced technology like facial recognition AI and mobile phone tracking. These are important, but what matters more is China’s vast, labor-intensive infrastructure of domestic spying. Central government data on Chinese surveillance is confidential, so Pei turned to local reports, police gazettes, leaked documents, and interviews with exiled dissidents to provide a detailed look at the evolution, organization, and tactics of the surveillance state. Following the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, the Chinese Communist Party invested immense resources in a coercive apparatus operated by a relatively small number of secret police officers capable of mobilizing millions of citizen informants to spy on those suspected of disloyalty. The CCP’s Leninist bureaucratic structure—whereby officials and party activists penetrate every sector of society and the economy, from universities and village committees to delivery companies, telecommunication firms, and Tibetan monasteries—ensures that Beijing’s eyes and ears are truly everywhere. While today’s system is far more robust than that of years past, it is modeled after mass surveillance implemented under Mao Zedong and Chinese emperors centuries ago. Rigorously empirical and rich in historical insight, The Sentinel State is a singular contribution to our knowledge about coercion in the Chinese state and, more generally, the survival strategies of authoritarian regimes.

Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen

Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen PDF Author: Hazem Kandil
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781681422
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
One of the most momentous events in the Arab uprisings that swept across the Middle East in 2011 was the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. As dramatic and sudden as this seemed, it was only one further episode in an ongoing power struggle between the three components of Egypt’s authoritarian regime: the military, the security services, and the government. A detailed study of the interactions within this invidious triangle over six decades of war, conspiracy, and sociopolitical transformation, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen is the first systematic analysis of recent Egyptian history. This paperback edition, updated to incorporate events in 2013, provides the background necessary to understanding how the military rebranded itself as the defender of democracy and ousted Mubarak’s successor, Muhammad Morsi. Impeccably researched and filled with intrigue, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen is an indispensable guide for anyone trying to fathom what this latest development means for Egypt’s future.

Corporate Conquests

Corporate Conquests PDF Author: Charles Patterson Giersch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503611641
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Muleteers -- Families -- The revolutionaries -- The excluded -- Mining -- The technocrat -- Corporations, the state, and ethnic difference.

After Repression

After Repression PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Nugent
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691203067
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In the wake of the Arab Spring, newly empowered factions in Tunisia and Egypt vowed to work together to establish democracy. In Tunisia, political elites passed a new constitution, held parliamentary elections, and demonstrated the strength of their democracy with a peaceful transfer of power. Yet in Egypt, unity crumbled due to polarization among elites. Presenting a new theory of polarization under authoritarianism, the book reveals how polarization and the legacies of repression led to these substantially divergent political outcomes. The book documents polarization among the opposition in Tunisia and Egypt prior to the Arab Spring, tracing how different kinds of repression influenced the bonds between opposition groups.

Rightful Resistance in Rural China

Rightful Resistance in Rural China PDF Author: Kevin J. O'Brien
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139450980
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 5

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Book Description
How can the poor and weak 'work' a political system to their advantage? Drawing mainly on interviews and surveys in rural China, Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li show that popular action often hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state. Otherwise powerless people use the rhetoric and commitments of the central government to try to fight misconduct by local officials, open up clogged channels of participation, and push back the frontiers of the permissible. This 'rightful resistance' has far-reaching implications for our understanding of contentious politics. As O'Brien and Li explore the origins, dynamics, and consequences of rightful resistance, they highlight similarities between collective action in places as varied as China, the former East Germany, and the United States, while suggesting how Chinese experiences speak to issues such as opportunities to protest, claims radicalization, tactical innovation, and the outcomes of contention.

Mobilizing Without the Masses

Mobilizing Without the Masses PDF Author: Diana Fu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108420540
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
How do weak activists organize under repression? This book theorizes a dynamic of contention called mobilizing without the masses.

Contesting Cyberspace in China

Contesting Cyberspace in China PDF Author: Rongbin Han
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545657
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The Internet was supposed to be an antidote to authoritarianism. It can enable citizens to express themselves freely and organize outside state control. Yet while online activity has helped challenge authoritarian rule in some cases, other regimes have endured: no movement comparable to the Arab Spring has arisen in China. In Contesting Cyberspace in China, Rongbin Han offers a powerful counterintuitive explanation for the survival of the world’s largest authoritarian regime in the digital age. Han reveals the complex internal dynamics of online expression in China, showing how the state, service providers, and netizens negotiate the limits of discourse. He finds that state censorship has conditioned online expression, yet has failed to bring it under control. However, Han also finds that freer expression may work to the advantage of the regime because its critics are not the only ones empowered: the Internet has proved less threatening than expected due to the multiplicity of beliefs, identities, and values online. State-sponsored and spontaneous pro-government commenters have turned out to be a major presence on the Chinese internet, denigrating dissenters and barraging oppositional voices. Han explores the recruitment, training, and behavior of hired commenters, the “fifty-cent army,” as well as group identity formation among nationalistic Internet posters who see themselves as patriots defending China against online saboteurs. Drawing on a rich set of data collected through interviews, participant observation, and long-term online ethnography, as well as official reports and state directives, Contesting Cyberspace in China interrogates our assumptions about authoritarian resilience and the democratizing power of the Internet.

The Petroleum Triangle

The Petroleum Triangle PDF Author: Steve A. Yetiv
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801463408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In The Petroleum Triangle, Steve A. Yetiv tells the interconnected story of oil, globalization, and terrorism. Yetiv asks how Al-Qaeda, a small band of terrorists, became such a real and perceived threat to American and global security, a threat viewed as profound enough to motivate the strongest power in world history to undertake extraordinary actions, including two very costly wars. Yetiv argues that Middle East oil and globalization have combined to augment the real and perceived threat of transnational terrorism. Globalization has allowed terrorists to do things that otherwise would be more difficult and costly: exploit technology, generate fear beyond their capabilities, target vulnerable economic and political nodes, and capitalize on socio-economic dislocation. Meanwhile, Middle East oil has fueled terrorism by helping to bolster oil-rich regimes that terrorists hate, to fund the terrorist infrastructure, and to generate anti-American and anti-Western sentiments about American support for oil-rich regimes and perceived Western designs on Middle East oil. Together, Middle East oil and globalization have combined in various ways to help create Al-Qaeda's real and perceived threat, and that of its affiliates and offshoots. The combined effect has shaped important contours of the Petroleum Triangle and of world affairs. A sweeping analysis of contemporary world politics and American foreign and military policy, The Petroleum Triangle convincingly argues that it is critical to understand the connections among oil, globalization, and terrorism if we seek to comprehend modern global politics. What happens within the Petroleum Triangle will help determine if the death of Osama bin Laden will ultimately cripple Al-Qaeda and its affiliates or be yet another milestone in an ongoing age of terrorism.