The Effects of Selective and Indiscriminate Repression on the 2013 Gezi Park Nonviolent Resistance Campaign

We investigate the differential effects of selective and indiscriminate repression on the rate of protest actions during the nonviolent resistance campaign in Gezi Park, Turkey, in 2013. After deriving theoretical expectations about how and why these forms of repression will influence protest actions, we test them with protest event data that were collected from a major local newspaper and subsequently validated through a comparison with two other independent Twitter datasets. Utilizing a Poisson autoregressive estimation model, we find that selective repression, as measured by the number of arrested activists who were detained while they were not demonstrating, decreased the rate of protest actions. Meanwhile, indiscriminate repression, as measured by the frequency of the government’s use of lethal and nonlethal violence against protesters during demonstrations, increased the rate of protest actions. Our findings support prior research on the influence of indiscriminate repression on backfire outcomes. They also provide evidence for the impact of selective repression on movement demobilization through the removal of opposition activists. Finally, the targeted arrest strategy of selective repression that was employed in the Gezi campaign has implications for the feasibility of the strategic incapacitation model of protest policing

The Demobilization of Protest Campaigns

All protest campaigns move through cycles of escalation and de-escalation and ultimately demobilize. Some campaigns demobilize quickly as protesters reach their goals. The 2011 Egyptian uprising, when protesters left the streets after they brought down the Mubarak regime, for example, is a case of rapid demobilization. Others, like the 2011 uprising in Bahrain, demobilize over a longer time span before protests come to a complete halt. In Bahrain, the government first cracked down on the opposition by bringing in foreign troops and then continued to repress protesters until the protesters ended the campaign in 2012. Regardless of the length of time it takes for protesters to leave the streets and stop the protests, demobilization is a complex process. Numerous factors, such as severe repression, government concessions, countermobilization of opposition groups, leadership changes, or even unexpected events, can all bring about demobilization. These factors and strategies may occur simultaneously or sequentially, but usually one or a combination of them lead to the demobilization of a protest campaign. Moreover, demobilization is a dynamic process, as it continues to evolve out of the endogenous interactions among governments, challengers, bystanders, and, in some cases, as in Bahrain, external third-party actors.Even though every protest campaign eventually demobilizes one way or another, the demobilization phase has generally attracted less scholarly attention than the onset and escalation of violent and nonviolent forms of collective action. For a long time, most scholars addressed demobilization indirectly within the context of the repression-dissent nexus as they explored why repression backfires and escalates dissent in some cases, while it succeeds in demobilizing the opposition in others. Nonetheless, factors besides state repression contribute to the demobilization of dissent. In other words, a state’s accommodative tactics, as well as individual, organizational, or even regional and systemic factors that interact with the state’s actions, have the potential to shape when and how political dissent demobilizes. More recently, scholars have begun to examine why and how protest campaigns demobilize by stepping out of the repression-dissent nexus and focusing on a variety of other factors related to organizational structures, regime types, individual-level constraints, and contingent events that affect the trajectory of campaigns. At the same time, recent studies on state repression have also begun to focus more heavily on the different causal mechanisms that explain how a state’s repressive tactics can lead to demobilization. While this new line of research has made significant contributions to our understanding of the demobilization of protests, we are still left with important questions about the demobilization process that have yet to be answered

Razed, repressed and bought off: The demobilization of the Ogoni protest campaign in the Niger Delta

This study examines the demobilization of the Ogoni protest campaign in the oil producing Niger Delta region of Nigeria in the mid-1990s. The contentious politics literature suggest that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of the polarization between radical and moderate protesters. In this study, we offer a different causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns can demobilize before such indiscriminate repression. Moreover, states can prevent the subsequent radicalization of a protest campaign followed by harsh repression by coopting the radicals and the remaining moderate elites while continuing to use repression to prevent collective action. Our conclusion assesses how relations between extractive industry firms and their local host communities have or have not changed in the twenty years since the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995

“Populism” versus “Popular”: A Response to Ziarek’s “Populism—A Crux or Crisis of Politics?”

This article discusses two main issues Ziarek highlights regarding populist social movements. The first one is the exclusionary stance populist movements take when contending for power in a democratic society. The second one is the repressive response to contenders when populist movements are in power. The underlying characteristic in both issues is that populists movements assume an anti-pluralist stance against other contending alternatives. Therefore, the distinction between “popular” and “populist” is an important one

The Gezi Park Protests and the Escalation and De-escalation of Political Contention

This study argues that escalation and de-escalation processes lie at the heart of protest campaigns. These processes are largely determined by the interactions between protesters and governments, as well as the timing and types of strategies and tactics employed. The study examines the dynamics between the Turkish government and the protesters during the 2013 Gezi Protest Campaign. This campaign escalated quickly by generating massive support from different segments of the Turkish society in its earlier days, and then de-escalated and eventually demobilized without securing major concessions. By using original data collected from a Turkish newspaper, Cumhuriyet, the study illustrates how the trajectory of the Gezi campaign changed in response to the interactive dynamics between the government and the dissidents

The Dynamics of the Demobilization of the Protest Campaign in Assam

This study highlights the role that critical events play in the demobilization of protest campaigns. Social movement scholars suggest that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of polarization within the campaign or the cooptation of the campaign leaders. I offer critical events as an alternative causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns in ethnically divided societies are particularly combustible as they have the potential to trigger unintended or unorchestrated communal violence. When such violence occurs, elite strategies change, mass support declines and the campaign demobilizes. An empirical investigation of the dynamics of the demobilization phase of the anti-foreigner protest campaign in Assam, India between 1979 and 1985 confirms this argument. A single group analysis is conducted to compare the dynamics of the campaign before and after the communal violence by using time series event data collected from The Indian Express, a national newspaper. The study has wider implications for the literature on collective action as it illuminates the dynamic and complex nature of protest campaigns

Military Counterterrorism Measures, Civil–Military Relations, and Democracy: The Cases of Turkey and the United States

This study examines how military counter-terrorism (CT) measures affect the quality of democracy by altering civil-military relations (CMR) and focuses on civil-military relations as the main causal mechanism. We argue that the use of a military approach in counter-terrorism jeopardizes democracy at the societal level by increasing the belief that only the military is equipped to deal with the threat at hand. Therefore, erosions of civil liberties are tolerated in exchange for security. Second, we argue that military CT measures change the balance between the military and executive powers in procedural and liberal democracies. While the military’s executive power increases in procedural democracies, the civilian ruler’s control of the military power increases in liberal ones. Case studies of the U.S. and Turkey show that a military counter-terrorism approach affects CMR in these countries, which generate a similar tradeoff between security and the quality of democracy, albeit via different causal mechanisms. While that tradeoff is less severe in the U.S., Turkey is more vulnerable to erosion of democracy

Partisanship Versus Democracy: Voting in Turkey’s Competitive Authoritarian Elections

Do voters care about anti-democratic behavior by their leaders? While political pundits and academics often hope that they do, there has been little research that tests the effects that specific anti-democratic actions have on voters during elections. This is because there are few clear instances where violations of democratic norms are so visible to the average voter that one would expect it to have an effect, above and beyond traditional predictors of the vote. However, the recent elections in Turkey offer a unique opportunity to test the effect that nullifying an entire election (an unequivocal violation of democratic norms) has on voters. We do exactly that with a survey of voters following the election re-do. We find that even in such an extraordinary circumstance, voters rely on standard voting drivers like partisanship, rather than concern for the functioning of democracy itself. Ultimately, our findings have important implications for voting in competitive authoritarian regimes, as they fail to show that anti-democratic behavior is punished

Terrorism, Counterterrorism and “The Rule of Law”: State Repression and “Shoot-to-Kill” in Northern Ireland

Authors have argued that counterterrorism must be consistent with “the rule of law.” Often associated with this approach is the assumption that plural political structures limit the state’s response to terrorism and that state agents will be held accountable if their response is excessive. Scholars who focus on social movements reject this assumption.. We examine the state’s response to anti-state violence in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1994. In 1982, Sinn Féin did much better than expected in an election to the Northern Ireland Assembly. Following the election, it is alleged that state agents followed a “shoot-to-kill” policy and shot dead Irish republican paramilitaries instead of arresting them. We find evidence suggesting such a policy and consider the implications