State Repression and War-Making: Raising an Army of Dissidents

• In Event: The Interaction of Repression and Resistance in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Over the course of the past few centuries, authoritarian states have raised and trained strong armies that have waged deadly conflicts. Despite the ubiquity of such regimes in contemporary times, there is very little research on the role of state repression in shaping individuals’ decisions to support the state in its war-making effort. I develop a novel theory of combat motivation that formulates the conditions under which different levels of repression can incite or depress combat motivation. The most common explanation in the literature for how citizens decide on a trade-off between supporting or fighting the state has rested on the logic of coercion, whereby compliance of the citizens can be achieved through only selective violence, which gives citizens an opportunity to avoid it by behaving in a desired manner. I present a model in which this mechanism plays out in the opposite direction, such that indiscriminate repression motivates individuals to support the regime in its war-making efforts to signal loyalty. The model illustrates how, in anticipation of international conflict, an authoritarian has an incentive to target population indiscriminately based on group-level characteristics. The intensity of such repression, however, is qualified by a trade-off between the imminence of external threat and the possibility of a domestic uprising.

Author

• Roya Talibova, University of Michigan