State Repression and Human Rights II (Virtual Session)

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

This panel brings together a group of scholars working at the frontier of repression scholarship to look into the underlying motivations of state repression and the consequences of various forms of repression. By studying state repression in historical as well as contemporary contexts, the four research projects provide new theoretical insights and empirical evidence into the scholarship of repression and conflict processes.

The first project studies the role of information and trust in explaining the motivation of ethnic-based repression under foreign threats, using the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to empirically test this theory. The second project investigates the suppressive effect of surveillance technology on protest in autocracies using original street maps and social media data from China. The third research examines the role of religious leaders in democratic transitions by focusing on their persuasive influence in human rights trials. The authors address this puzzle in the context of Argentina, where Catholic leaders engaged in the prosecution of human rights violations during the country’s Dirty War. The fourth project applies text analysis methods to explore the substitution between civilian courts and military tribunals in Francoist Spain and assesses how courts can serve as repressive instruments in authoritarian regimes.

Together, the four research projects enrich the theoretical and empirical knowledge of the causes and consequences of state repression by introducing novel conceptual frameworks, data collection, measurement strategies, and empirical evidence to analyze and predict the threats of human rights violations.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Ethnicity, Border, and State Repression - Chen-Yu Lee, University of Essex; Chuyu Liu, University of Amsterdam; Howard Liu, University of South Carolina

• How Smart Are Smart Cameras? Surveillance and Protest Dynamics in China - Xu Xu, Princeton University; Han Zhang, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Religious Leaders and Transitions to Democracy - Pearce Edwards, Carnegie Mellon University

Chair

• Courtenay R. Conrad University of California, Merced

Discussants

• Travis B. Curtice Drexel University

• Marika Miner University of California, Davis