Repression as a Double‐edged Sword: Resilient Monarchs, Repression and Revolution in the Arab World

Abstract

The Arab world shows a puzzling variation of political violence. The region's monarchies often remain quiet, while other autocracies witness major upheaval. Institutional explanations of this variation suggest that monarchical rule solves the ruler's credible commitment problems and prevents elite splits. This article argues that institutional explanations neglect the role of repression: increasing the scope of repression raises the costs of rebellion and deters rebels. However, the deterrence effect disappears if repression is used indiscriminately. If remaining peaceful offers no benefits, repression creates new rebels instead of deterring them. A time‐series‐cross‐section analysis of repression and political violence in the Middle East and North Africa corroborates our argument and shows the u‐curve relation between repression and violence. Once we control for repression, monarchies have no special effect anymore. Thus, our article addresses the discussion about monarchical exceptionalism, and offers an explanation why repression deters as well as incites political violence.

Shooting for the Tsars: Heterogeneous Political Volatility and Institutional Change in Russia

“…31 In the aggregate, democracies tend to have the most to lose from bouts of sociopolitical instability, which may also be a factor in determining how individuals, non-state actors, or collective action may influence the regime. 32 Autocracies and monarchies, on the other hand, are famously more stable and less affected by political instability in discrete bursts, 33 mainly due to either an ability to co-opt the rebellious 34 or via the mechanisms of repression which raise the cost of deliberate political instability, either at the individual 35 or collective level. 36 In theory, this leads to fewer incidences of political violence than in democracies, 37 but a corollary of this work makes such an outcome dependent upon the strength of the regime: intuitively, if political violence, terrorism, or large-scale unrest should occur in a weaker institutional environment, such political instability can be plausibly expected to have at least the probability of a modicum of success in changing the political order.…”

The Legitimacy of Alien Rulers

“…It is costly because it often requires constant monitoring to detect deviance, as well as the maintenance of enforcers and enforcement institutions. And coercion may produce instability in the form of civil unrest and disorder (e.g., Bischof and Fink ) – as seen in Egyptian discontent with Mubarak's rule and violence in other parts of the Middle East. Due to the costs associated with coercion, political stability is thought to rest in part on some normative basis.…”

An Empirical Assessment of Social Unrest Dynamics and State Response in Eurasian Countries

“…response are highly autoregressive). Bischoff and Fink (2013) give a further step in this analysis, demonstrating that repression can explain the variation of political violence in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region since repression is related to political violence in a U-shaped fashion (i.e. increasing repression decreases political violence, but after a turning point, repression generates it).…”

“…As mentioned above we define four -state‖ variables, three related to social unrest in the sense of dissatisfaction in the perception of perceived and imposed social and political reality (Aven and Renn, 2010) and one related to state or state response (in the sense of Carey, 2002). Please see (2002) and Bischoff and Fink (2013). In general, the extracted variables are not attempting to describe a discrete set of conflict events (Santifort et al 2013), but rather at offering a general level of unrest intensity and a measure of interaction between the two acting agents: the state and the population.…”

“…Like in Carey (2002), Bueno de Mesquita (2005a and2005b) and Bischoff and Fink (2013), we distinguish between two unitary actors: the population and the State. Also we distinguish between two events: unrest and state action.…”