The dynamics of autocratic coercion after the Cold War

This article examines coercive capacity and its impact on autocratic regime stability in the context of post-Soviet Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine. In the post-Cold War era, different types of coercive acts require different types of state power. First, high intensity and risky measures – such as firing on large crowds or stealing elections – necessitate high degrees of cohesion or compliance within the state apparatus. Second, effective low intensity measures – including the surveillance and infiltration of opposition, and various forms of less visible police harassment – require extensive state scope or a well-trained state apparatus that penetrates large parts of society.Coercive state capacity, rooted in cohesion and scope, has often been more important than opposition strength in determining whether autocrats fall or remain in power. Thus, the regime in Armenia that was backed by a highly cohesive state with extensive scope was able to maintain power in the face of highly mobilized opposition challenges. By contrast, regimes in Georgia where the state lacked cohesion and scope fell in the face of even weakly mobilized opposition. Relatively high scope but only moderate cohesion in Belarus and Ukraine has made autocratic regimes in these countries generally more effective at low intensity coercion to prevent the emergence of opposition than at high intensity coercion necessary to face down serious opposition challenges.     

Developing a peace course in police studies: how a culture of peace can enhance police legitimacy in a democratic society

This paper reflects my experiences developing a course within the Criminal Justice Technology Associates of Science degree program at Valencia College that fuses topics unique to peace and police studies. The key challenge in developing this course was in confronting the paradox of the police as instruments of both peace and conflict. In dealing with this paradox, students examine the role of the police in a democratic society and the authority of the police to use coercive force. Key topics covered in this course include defining peace, the police role in peace movements, the history, structure and strategies affecting the police, causes of violence, conflict analysis and conflict intervention, and ethical foundations for peace. In addition, this course examines occupational, organizational, institutional factors that contribute to the development of a unique police subculture that values crime fighting as its core responsibility and the impact of that orientation on police attitudes and behaviors toward the public. Throughout the course, students are challenged to envision a new paradigm for policing that emphasizes a culture of peace rather than a culture of conflict.     

Soviet Partisan Violence against Soviet Civilians: Targeting Their Own

Applying the ‘victory at all costs’ principle adopted during World War II, partisans—the long arm of the Soviet regime in the occupied territories—pressured civilians to resist the enemy. The thinking behind most of their coercive policies seemed rational within the framework of this concept; however, the passions produced by merciless fighting, communist dogma, Stalinist culture with its habitual witch-hunts, and the belief in collective guilt frequently escalated coercion far beyond rational limits. Partisans increased the polarisation of civilian society between supporters and enemies of the Soviet state, killing thousands of bystanders in the process.     

Soviet Legacies,New Public Management and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship in the Georgian Protection Police. Agencifying the Police?

The article studies agencification and commercialisation within the Georgian police, specifically the Protection Police Department as the successor organisation of the old extra-departmental guards. Despite ostensibly having been scheduled for privatisation from 2004, this unit was instead expanded and strengthened. Given the centrality of police reform in establishing the Saakashvili government's reformist credentials, this represents a critical case testing the limits of top-down neoliberal reform within the very institution that was seen as its centrepiece. It also shows how neo-managerialist forms of organisation—in particular the public law agency—are used to camouflage what remains, essentially, Soviet-style organisation.     

Crime,Irregular Warfare,and Institutional Failure in Latin America: Guatemala as a Case Study

This article examines the current crisis in Guatemala as a case study in the phenomenon of “criminal insurgency” in Latin America. Since the close of Guatemala's civil war in 1996, crime—especially violent crime—has increased dramatically, to the point that drug traffickers, organized crime syndicates, and youth gangs are effectively waging a form of irregular warfare against the state. The police, the judiciary, and entire local and departmental governments are rife with criminal infiltrators; murder statistics have surpassed civil-war levels in recent years; criminal operatives assassinate government officials and troublesome members of the political class; and chunks of territory are now effectively under the control of criminal groups. All this has led to growing civic disillusion and eroded the authority and legitimacy of the government. Rampant crime is causing a crisis of the democratic state.     

GPU Repressions of Zionists: Ukraine in the 1920s

This essay explores repressions against Zionist political parties in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, and considers the formation of an efficient synergetic structure of Soviet secret organs in Moscow and Ukraine. The narrative identifies participants from central and regional secret departments who engaged in systematic mass operations against Zionists, and reveals that despite Moscow's initial vacillation between tolerance and persecution of Zionist parties, the Soviet secret police exhibited a continual escalation of repressions against Zionists. The policies of the secret police in Ukraine illuminate their personal adaptation to the coercive Soviet system of centralisation and ideological exclusion.     

“Orbiting the Core”: Politics and the Meaning of Dialect in Chinese Linguistics, 1927–1957

In 1956, the Chinese Communist state launched its official language policy, which included the promulgation of a standard spoken language, called Putonghua. Their justification for this policy and their methods for implementation were guided by intellectual and ideological frameworks that formed during decades preceding the policy's rollout. In particular, Communist language reform was predicated on the conceptualization of Putonghua as a holistic language meant to serve the national body—and of local dialects, called fangyan in Chinese, as dependent on Putonghua for their very definition. This article interrogates the history of this framework. Focusing on dialect surveys from the 1930s, Chinese interpretations of Marxist linguistic theory in the early years of the Communist state, and methods of Putonghua promulgation in the late 1950s, this article reconstructs the epistemological regimes that gave meaning to the concept of independence and autonomy as they related to language in modern China.     

Globalization,State Autonomy and the Fight against Cross-Border Crime: Greater China's Cooperation with the World

Although globalization has stimulated the rise in cross-border crime, it does not really undermine the autonomy of the mainland Chinese state, the Taiwan state, and the city-states of Hong Kong and Macao. Instead, through cooperation with law-enforcement agencies in other countries, the law-enforcement agencies of these four places, notably the police and customs, have ensured the persistence of state autonomy vis-à-vis cross-border criminal groups and individuals. In the case of Greater China (mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao), interstate cooperation involving the police and customs can maintain state autonomy vis-à-vis criminal groups and individuals. The mechanisms of such interstate and intergovernmental cooperation embrace the sharing of criminal intelligence, the occurrence of anti-crime joint operations, the holding of seminars and conferences, and the administrative arrangements of extraditions. In a nutshell, intergovernmental cooperation in the combat against cross-border crime can maintain state autonomy in the midst of globalization, as the case of Greater China shows.     

Institutional isomorphism,negativity bias and performance information use by politicians: A survey experiment

New Public Management popularized performance measurement in public organizations. Underlying performance measurement's popularity is the assumption that it injects performance information (PI) into decision-making, thus rationalizing the ensuing decisions. Despite its popularity, performance measurement is criticized. In part, this criticism results from the limited knowledge of the conditions under which PI is purposefully used by politicians. We conducted a survey experiment based on real PI with 1,240 politicians. We hypothesized that PI has a positive impact on performance information use (PIU) when PI is benchmarked with coercive, mimetic or normative pressures. Moreover, due to negativity bias we expected this positive impact to be stronger when PI signals low performance. We found that normative pressures had a positive impact on actual PIU while coercive pressures positively affected intended PIU. Negativity bias is only relevant when linked to coercive pressures and intended PIU for analysing the organization's finances.     

“Victim Refuses to Cooperate”: A Focal Concerns Analysis of Victim Cooperation in Sexual Assault Cases

Research suggests that victim cooperation is a strong predictor of arrest and prosecution in sexual assault cases. Relatively little research has focused on identifying the factors that shape the decision to cooperate and the research that does exist is largely atheoretical. We address these gaps by examining victim cooperation using a revised version of the focal concerns perspective. We use data on cases reported to law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles to estimate models using factors situated within three victim focal concerns—crime seriousness, costs of cooperation, and likelihood of conviction—for three stages of the case process. We supplement these results with qualitative data from police reports regarding the reasons why victims refused to cooperate. The findings of this study provide initial support for the theoretical development of victim cooperation using the focal concerns perspective and provide potential guidance to criminal justice practitioners on how to increase victim cooperation.     

The (Neglected) Statist Bias and the Developmental State: the case of Singapore and Vietnam

Abstract

This paper highlights three key weaknesses with the developmental state as a theory of the state. First, that the theory imagines the state in Weberian terms and then seeks to judge all states—even ones which are not Weberian—according to Weberian yardsticks which are not universal. Second, that the theory underestimates the extent to which it is itself bound up with dominant global power structures associated with the Cold War and the post-cold war period. Third, that in its concern to identify the correct ‘institutional mix’ for development to occur, developmental state theorists ends up believing that the (best) states really do stand apart from society, forgetting that this is an illusion which is fundamental to how states rule. Not to be alert to the state's ‘ideological effects’ is not really to study the state at all; this is ultimately a criticism which has to be levelled at the theory of the developmental state. To suggest—as many scholars do—that the theory's weaknesses can be solved by breaking the state down into its constituent parts, focusing more on society, or trying to locate the ‘blurred’ boundary between state and society more effectively, completely misses the point, since it does little, if anything, to uncover how states really rule. The issues are explored via a comparison of the state in Singapore and Vietnam.     

The evolution of policing in post-soviet Russia: Paternalism versus service in police. Officers' understanding of their role

This paper examines two interrelated issues: the role of police as an institution of Russian society and their role during the past 25 years. This research is based on a series of in-depth interviews conducted by the author in 2014–2016 with former and current police officers in three Russian cities. The paper traces changes in the perceived institutional roles of the Russian police by comparing police officers' views during three periods: early through mid-1990s, late-1990s through mid-2000s, and mid-2000s through 2010s. The study reports that, during the early period, Russian police were disfranchised from the state and this abandonment was a source of institutional identity crisis for law enforcement officers who remained on the job. This process was coupled with high levels of job dissatisfaction and the overall feeling of “abandonment” of police by the state.At the same time, it was during this post-Soviet period, when ideas of policing as a service to the society were introduced and sometimes entertained among the professional circles of police officers and other government officials. Furthermore, this period was marked by continuous, though often sporadic, institutional reforms and anti-corruption measures.In the second period, the Russian police were slowly engaging back into the state-building process, which caused increased job satisfaction and better retention rates. At the same time, the second period signified a decline of the “police as service” ideology and the comeback of paternalistic views on policing. During this time, the government's efforts to reform police and anti-corruption measures became systemic and better organized. Also, in the second period, members of the civil society became more active in demanding public accountability and transparency from the Russian police.Finally, the modern period of police development presents a case in which the institutional identity of the Russian police has been clearly connected to the state's capacity. This process is coupled with increased paternalistic views among police officers and a failure of “police as a service” doctrine. In such an environment, the efforts by a maturing civil society to demand public transparency and accountability of the police are often met with hostility and anger. The paper concludes that further development of the Russian police depends on the role that they will play within the modern Russian state.     

Tax Evasion and the Role of the State Actor(s) in Bangladesh

Little attention has been paid to tax evasion in developing countries due to a lack of data. This article addresses this lacuna by investigating the tax evasion practices and finds significant increases in tax evasion in Bangladesh. The study makes a major contribution to the literature in tax evasion, and indicates that the norms of state actor(s) (i.e. the National Board of Revenue–the sole tax authority in Bangladesh) lie in the interests of politicians and the continuation of corruption. The legitimacy of the state actors in this case means that they act as facilitators for increasing tax evasion practices. Therefore, the current system has endured remarkably robustly to date, and coercive isomorphism is indeed needed in the institutionalization process.     

Intersectoral Police Collaboration: An Exploratory View from the States

Modern policing in the United States is best conceived as a joint undertaking between public and private sectors. Over the last several decades there has been a gradual movement away from monopolistic state provision of police services toward a greater reliance on the private sector for protection and security. While the current activities of public and private police are well chronicled in the research literature, little is actually known about the coordination of policing activities across sectors. The purpose of this article is to describe the range of public-private police partnerships that have developed recently in the United States.     

Transnational police building: critical lessons from Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands

In this paper we begin by defining and examining the concept of police building. Its historical precedents and contemporary forms are briefly reviewed, showing a variety of motives and agendas for this kind of institution building. We argue that police building has been a relatively neglected dimension of nation- and state-building exercises, despite its importance to functions of pacification and restoration of law and order. The emerging literature on international police reform and capacity building tends to adopt a narrow institutionalist and universalistic approach that does not take sufficient account of the politics of police building. This politics is multilayered and varies from the formal to the informal. Using two case studies focusing on events in 2006 in Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands, the reasons for the fragility of many current police-building projects are considered. In both cases, we argue, police capacity builders paid insufficient attention to the political architecture and milieu of public safety.     

Public service motivation and continuous organizational change: Taking charge behaviour at police services

Building change capabilities into public organizations is a challenge for strategic management. This study focuses on the micro‐level of extra‐role behaviours that contribute to continuous improvements in working procedures at the front‐end of organizations (i.e., taking charge behaviour; TCB). More particularly, we examine public service motivation (PSM) as a key variable mediating between perceived practices and TCB of street‐level bureaucrats. The analyses are based on survey data from a state police force in Germany (N = 1,165). Results confirm the role of PSM as full mediator, but this mediation is limited to the relationship between leadership behaviours and TCB, while perceived organizational characteristics—except for red tape—have direct positive impact on TCB.     

Surveying American State Police Agencies About Lone Wolves,Far-Right Criminality,and Far-Right and Islamic Jihadist Criminal Collaboration

This study presents state police agencies’ perceptions about three significant terrorism issues on which there is little empirical research. All three issues have significant implications for understanding the role of state police agencies in responding to terrorism threats. First, the authors investigated whether the respondents believed that supporters of specified extremist movements tended to commit crimes as lone wolves, with others, or both alone and with others. Second, they were asked to provide data to gauge how often far-right extremists committed 13 crime types that varied in magnitude and motivation. Third, they were asked if they had knowledge about whether far-right extremists and Islamic jihadists had cooperated to commit crimes. These data were collected by surveying the 50 state police agencies in the United States. The results indicate that state police officials are concerned with both group and lone-wolf activities. Importantly, there was variation in the potential for lone-wolf crimes when comparing different types of extremist movements. The results indicate that far-right extremists are involved in a range of terrorist, preparatory, and routine criminal activities, but this involvement varies by region. Two state police agencies also indicated that they knew of Islamic and far-right collaboration. The study identified two other instances of direct collaboration and a number of other interesting cases through open source searches. The article concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the findings and outlines directions for future research.     

Expatriate Games: Interorganizational Coordination and International Counterterrorism

In America, Britain and Australia the threat of terrorism has been used to justify radical new legislation that gives police and intelligence agencies unprecedented powers to detain and question people believed to have information connected to terrorism. In this paper I explore the nature of the threat of non-state terrorism—threat to national security and the well-being of citizens. I argue that terrorism does not pose a threat sufficient to justify the kinds of counterterrorism legislation currently being enacted. Furthermore many of the current counterterrorism practices pose a greater threat to individual physical security and well-being than non-state terrorism. We should fear counterterrorism more than we fear terrorism.     

Explaining Strategic Violence after Wars

This article aims to explain why strategic violence against targeted groups emerges after some civil wars but not others. It argues that when one side has captured the coercive apparatus of the state, and the potentially hostile losing side is less vulnerable to predation, the leaders of the victorious group can reward their domestic constituents and conduct in-group policing to prevent opportunistic violence. But when an armed group fails to achieve state capture and the losing side remains in a vulnerable position relative to its former enemies, neither side can credibly guarantee their domestic allies a share of the resources of the state or conduct effective in-group policing of potential extremists. Using Kosovo and East Timor as case studies, this article shows that in these cases, strategic violence is less a function of a concerted attempt to spoil a settlement than of the internal bargaining of new splinter groups.     

Looking Back to the Future: Threats to the Success of Restorative Justice in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an entrenchment of restorative justice principles and practices in the youth and adult criminal justice systems of the United Kingdom. This research presents a comparative analysis of the findings of two empirical studies—one of a police restorative cautioning scheme conducted 15 years ago, and the second a contemporary study of youth offender panels. In this research, we argue that restorative justice practices in the United Kingdom are repeating history, rather than learning from it. Specifically, we argue that if restorative justice programs continue to proliferate with the same shortcomings—most notably, inadequate victim involvement, failure to provide a genuine role for the community, and targeting only relatively low-level crime—the future for restorative justice in the United Kingdom is likely to be bleak.