This project explains Polish non-violence and Algerian violence under martial law following peaceful protests against comparable material deprivation and authoritarian political exclusion. From narratives of state formation, institutional performance, and social movement evolution in postwar Poland and postcolonial Algeria a conditional model derives violent and non-violent opposition strategies from divergent practical citizenship regimes in formally similar autocratic systems. It argues that distinct regimes of citizen-subjectivity under authoritarian governance foster divergent practices of resistance and evaluations of states before and during emergency conditions that reduce activists to biological life, tempting violence. Where citizenship regimes differentiate social resources (means of protest) from state resources (means or sovereignty), affording regime opponents actual or immanent systemic subjectivity, social agitation remains non-violent despite objectively comprehensive political and social dispossession; in contrast, by subordinating social to state resources, undifferentiated citizenship regimes under martial law wholly eliminate systemic subjectivity, provoking violence. Neither the formal political regime-type nor the immediate experience of social suffering or political abjection distinguishes violent from non-violent responses to despotism; rather, violent versus non-violent protest strategies express discrepant evaluations of regime coercion, reflecting the elimination versus endurance of the citizenship regime that formed the iterated systemic subjectivity of regime opponents. Poland's worker-based citizenship regime endured fiscal crisis and martial law because it provided differentiated social resources: regime opponents had means independent of state solvency to compel policy concessions by withdrawing labor power from industries pivotal to ruling-elite incumbency. But Algeria's client-based citizenship - based on undifferentiated resources - tied activists' systemic means of compulsion to state largesse. Differentiated citizenship regimes endure state crises because citizens retain the social resources, however suspended, of systemic-subjectivity that ground their evaluations of state actions, minimizing incentives to violent pressure on ruling classes. Undifferentiated citizenship regimes perish under state bankruptcy or force, eradicating social resources and channeling the recuperation of subjectivity to anti-systemic acts. In short, Polish workers could strike and threaten the state under martial law; Algerian clients were effectively expelled from political status. In forming opposition strategies, citizens judge state policies or legitimacy, but also their status as systemic subjects. Evaluations of systemic subjectivity reflect experiences in using social resources, not merely immediate material or political conditions. The research design does not test a general theoretical model linking citizenship-subjectivity regimes to experiential evaluations of objective dehumanization, but its conceptual and causal variable analyses may complement other studies of state institutions and social agitations by promoting subject formation over abstract human universals as the key mechanism in reliable social explanation.

O autoritarismo, complexo fenômeno social largamente estudado pela Ciência Política e pela Psicologia Social, é aqui pesquisado em suas articulações com o sistema penal. Na medida em que o autoritarismo deriva do poder e em que o sistema penal deriva do direito, são estudados os conceitos de poder e de direito, em suas peculiaridades e inter-relações. Em seguida, examinam-se a história da construção do conceito de autoridade e os contextos políticos e psicológico-sociais em que o termo autoritarismo tem sido empregado, para, em seguida, analisar, abstrata e conceitualmente, suas inter-relações com o sistema penal. Observa-se que o autoritarismo é característica estrutural de todo e qualquer sistema penal, manifestando-se nas mais variadas agências desse sistema, e em todos os planos: na criminalização primária (ou seja, na edição de leis penais), na criminalização secundária (i.e., na aplicação concreta de poder punitivo a autores concretos), no poder positivo configurador da vida social, no discurso-jurídico penal (nas teorias dos juristas) e nos sistemas penais paralelo e subterrâneo. Como hipóteses de trabalho, são examinados o sistema penal alemão nazista e o sistema penal brasileiro contemporâneo, buscando verificar, ainda, se e em que medida há coincidências em propostas político-criminais e em práticas concretas de poder punitivo. / Authoritarianism, a complex social phenomenon that is widely studied by Political Science and by Social Psychology, is researched in this thesis in its articulations with the criminal system. As authoritarianism is derived from power, and the criminal system is derived from the law, the concepts of power and law are studied in their peculiarities and interrelationships. Further on, there is the analysis of the history of construction of the authority concept, and the political and social-psychological contexts in which the term authoritarianism has been employed, and, thereafter, the analysis of its interrelationships with the criminal system, in an abstract and conceptual manner. It is noted that authoritarianism is a structural characteristic of any and all criminal system, being shown in the most varied agencies of this system, and in all its plans: in primary criminalization (i.e., enactment of criminal laws), in secondary criminalization (i.e., concrete application of punitive power to concrete authors), in the positive power that shapes social life, in the criminal legal speech (in the jurists' theories), and in the parallel and subterranean criminal systems. As work cases, the Nazi German criminal system and the contemporary Brazilian criminal system are examined, also trying to find out whether and to what extent there are any coincidences in political-criminal proposals and concrete practices of punitive power.

Dieser Text ist ein Klassiker der vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft. In den 1960er Jahren erarbeitete Juan Linz am Beispiel des Franco-Regimes das Konzept eines dritten Regimetyps neben Demokratie und Totalitarismus. Es sollte der wirkungsmächtige Anstoß zum Nachdenken über autoritäre Regime werden: Ein Nachdenken, das angesichts aktueller weltpolitischer Entwicklungen fortgesetzt werden muss - und wozu diese erste deutschsprachige Übersetzung des Klassikers einen Beitrag leistet.

Autoritarismus global: Entgegen vieler Erwartungen der Politikwissenschaft und des gehobenen Feuilletons aus den frühen 1990er Jahren scheint sich der autoritäre Regimetyp durchzusetzen. Antworten, die politische Regime auf alte und neue Herausforderungen geben, sind immer weniger demokratischer und immer mehr autoritärer Natur. Wir analysieren diesen WeltTrend: von Lateinamerika und Ostasien über Russland und den Nahen Osten bis in die Mitte Europas.

Election boycotts are a common occurrence in unconsolidated democracies, particularly in the developing world, with prominent examples from recent years occurring in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia. Despite the frequent occurrence of boycotts, there are few studies available in the scholarly literature concerning the effectiveness of electoral boycotts, particularly as a strategy of opposition parties seeking to bring about the end of electoral authoritarian governments. This paper is based in the democratization literature, with a particular focus on the behavior and vulnerabilities of hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes. Using an original dataset with global coverage including hybrid regimes from 1981 to 2006, this paper uses event-history analysis to determine the efficacy of boycotts in national elections among other risk factors thought to undermine electoral authoritarian regimes as well as the possibilities for subsequent democratization occurring following both contested and boycotted electoral processes.

This dissertation is a qualitative examination of how the anti-dam movements, with so many disadvantages, are able to pursue their goals in a hybrid democratic political system in Thailand. This dissertation tries to prove that the extra-bureaucratic influence, which emerges from the anti-dam movements are gaining their foothold in the dam politics of Thailand and become a major cause in increase in pluralism in the fragmented authoritarian regime of Thailand. There are two major arguments in the dissertation: Firstly, FA framework, which has already been proved applicable to China by Lieberthal and Oksenberg in 1988 and by Metha in 2008 is also applicable to Thailand. Second argument is that the success of anti-dam movement should not be judged simply by the ability to cancel the project. If we only consider the ability to cancel the project, we may either overestimate or underestimate the ability of anti-dam movement. However, it does not mean that the ability to cancel the dam project does not count at all or should be excluded completely because it still proves the short-term success, which means that the project is cancelled as that moment. In sum, the ¡§success¡¨ of the anti-dam movement mentioned in this dissertation is the ability to transform the state¡¦s decision-making process for the dam project into the direction of more pluralism and less of authoritarianism so that individuals and groups both inside and outside the traditional arenas of policymaking have increasing role in the policy process. Thus the ability to cancel the dam project is an additional indicator not the main one. This view is illustrated through the four case studies: Bhumibol Dam, Nam Choan Dam, Pak Mun Dam, and Kaeng Sua Ten Dam.

Why do we observe such widely differing patterns of repression and state violence under authoritarian rule? Despite a wave of recent interest in authoritarian politics, the origins, design and behavior of the coercive institutions that embody the state's monopoly on violence remain relatively unexamined. This project draws on new statistical and geographic data, elite interviews, and archival evidence from the U.S. and Asia to chronicle the origins and operation of the internal security apparatus in three Cold War anti-communist authoritarian regimes – Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea – and compares them to similar processes in Communist authoritarian regimes in North Korea and China. Its findings challenge dominant narratives about contentious politics and state-society conflict in Asia; offer an unprecedented view inside 'secret police' use of surveillance, coercion, and violence; and provide a new understanding of the institutional and social foundations of authoritarian power.I argue that autocrats face a fundamental tradeoff between designing their internal security apparatus to deal with a popular threat, or coup-proofing it to defend against elite rivals. Coup-proofing requires an internally fragmented security force drawn from narrow segments of society; managing popular unrest requires a unitary apparatus with broadly embedded, socially inclusive intelligence networks. Autocrats construct coercive institutions based on the dominant perceived threat when they come to power, but these organizational tradeoffs, exacerbated by institutional stickiness, blunt their ability to adapt as new threats arise. Organizational characteristics thus give rise to predictable patterns of state violence. A more fragmented, exclusive security apparatus – associated with a high initial threat from fellow elites – is likely to be more violent, both because it has stronger incentives to engage in violence and because it lacks the intelligence capacity to engage in discriminate, pre-emptive repression. In contrast to existing threat-based explanations of repression, I demonstrate that autocrats who are deeply concerned about popular threats use less violence rather than more, and do so because they mobilize organizations expressly designed for that purpose. In these organizations, intelligence becomes a substitute for violence, and citizens relinquish their privacy, but less often their lives. / Government

No description available.

This thesis examines if and how Twitter can be used to organize protests by activists. Theoretically, it addresses several debates about Internet technology in approaches to Social Movement Theory, Network Theory, and Digital Politics Theory and synthesizes them to create an analytical framework to address Internet technologies effects, or lack thereof, on civil society. Through a case study examining protests in Kuwait empirical results indicate that Twitter does not have a significant impact on collective action efforts as it is not used to connect activists or create a forum for dialogue. Instead it is used to promote slogans and provide on-the-ground-reports of events, which do not have significant effects on organizing collective action. The reason for its relative insignificance is largely due to political, social and economic obstacles that polarize and fragment online collective action efforts.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.