The Death and Life of State Repression by Christian Davenport and Benjamin J. Appel is an ambitious book based on a simple premise: if we want to effectively prevent the large-scale abuse of citizens at the hands of their governments, we need to better understand how repression starts, escalates, ends, and recurs. However, as the title rightly suggests, this requires nothing less than a full account of the life cycle of violence and a shift in the way we understand large-scale state repression (LSSR). To this end, the authors argue that we need to consider all phases of state violence and how they relate to each other. In their words, we need to study repressive spells, one of the book’s key innovations.
The book’s juggernaut theory of repressive spells sees the initial decision to repress citizens as the result of a simple yet cold-blooded cost-benefit calculation by governments (pgs. 31–39). Although this angle matches existing explanations, its innovation lies in the argument that over time the decision to repress can “become institutionalized into diverse policies and the activities associated with them,” making repression likely to escalate and more difficult to end (pgs. 33–35, 154). At the core of this path-dependent process are repressive cohorts: individuals and institutions that have a preference for and derive benefits from maintaining policies of LSSR (pgs. 31–32). In this spiral of violence, only “movements towards democracy” have the ability to slow and ultimately break the process of state violence (p. 37).
Davenport and Appel place democracy at the core of ending spells of repression. Yet, as the book’s empirical findings demonstrate, only those attributes of democratic regimes that effectively disturb “cohorts of political authorities and security agents who cohere around policies of state repression/human rights violations” (p. 150) may have an impact on the repression cycle. Other factors, such as civil resistance and INGO involvement, are unlikely to have an effect on their own but may, however, influence repression indirectly through democratization.
Overall, the book follows an intuitive structure. The authors do an excellent job of taking readers on an intellectual journey. The sections on “what have we learned” remind readers of the most important findings, and the book dedicates a final chapter to a reflection on its main contributions (table 8.1, p. 151), persistent challenges, and future research avenues. Some points, however, deserve further discussion.
The juggernaut theory of repressive spells is intuitive and convincing (chap. 2). Putting repressive cohorts center stage, the authors see violent state behavior as the outcome of a top-down decision-to-implementation process that flows from political authorities to leaders of coercive institutions and, then, to the state’s repressive agents (p. 32). This agent-centric focus is a valuable contribution and reflects recent advances in research on state repression. However, the link between agents and the structural determinants of repressive phases is at times difficult to follow and could have been fleshed out more.
Moreover, although it is valuable to think about movements to democracy as bottom-up disruptors to the functioning of the (top-down) juggernaut, more insights into how these mechanisms work would have been desirable. Such a focus might be a fruitful future extension of the theory. Related to this point, the authors dedicate chapter 7 to cases that, based on the empirical results, illustrate specific sequences of the repressive life cycle and democratization. Yet, except for Chile, the cases depict more aggregated repression dynamics, rather than the agent-level dynamics proposed by the theoretical framework. Critical readers may therefore wonder whether the book provides enough evidence on the proposed decision-to-implementation process.
The theory also speaks to and shares great synergies with contemporary research on autocratic regimes. An example is the 2018 book by Barbara Geddes, Erika Frantz, and Joseph Wright, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse, which also addresses the central role of cohorts, dubbed seizure groups, in shaping and sustaining autocratic regimes. Although Davenport and Appel’s juggernaut theory goes beyond the domain of nondemocracies, incorporating insights from this line of research would have allowed the book to engage in a broader dialogue with the vibrant research program on autocracies and with the work of comparative regime scholars.
The empirical analysis of the book is based on 244 LSSR spells from 1976 to 2006. The authors explain that “during the period, there was popular interest in the subject, and around 2001 … it was possible that a different type of relationship exists between democracy and state repression/human rights violations” (p. 17). In the concluding chapter, the authors return to this point, inviting future works to scrutinize “whether the results are temporally bound or if they extend up to the present” (p. 156). This, however, does not explain why the book’s analysis does not reach beyond 2006, particularly in light of the availability of relevant data. The book’s temporal coverage is even more surprising given that the post-2006 years have been marked by increases in the surveillance and coercive capacity of states and by the erosion of various democracies around the world—both factors relevant to the book’s theory and the proposed existence of repressive cohorts.
The book’s analysis of the influence of democratization on the onset, termination, and recurrent repressive phases is an important feature. It provides readers with an assessment of policies that many believe to have a direct effect on LSSRs but that actually take effect through democratization. The extended analysis of the determinants of democratization draws on two key explanatory variables: past transitions to democracy and democratic regional diffusion (pgs. 80–81, 151–52). The presentation of the main substantive effects, however, seems incomplete, which may surprise some readers. In chapter 5, the figure that presents the results for the determinants of democratization in LSSR spells (p. 106) does not include the two important explanatory factors. In chapter 6 on recurring spells, readers are presented with only a selection of visualized substantive effects, although all the variables are discussed in the text. Finally, it appears that the book presents the same figure twice for different outcomes of interests: determinants of the recurrence of LSSR spells (p. 112) and of electoral democratization after LSSR spells (p. 117). If results are the same for both outcomes, it would be relevant to further discuss them.
There is a lot to like about The Death and Life of State Repression. Davenport and Appel provide compelling insights into how domestic and international factors shape the life cycle of state repression. The book challenges readers to think beyond preset standards by providing a novel theoretical framework to study state violence across different phases. The Death and Life of State Repression deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in why states violate the rights of their citizens and under what conditions they stop doing so.
