Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Protest, repression and transition in Southeast Asia
- 3 Authoritarian attack and dictatorial rise
- 4 Protest in socialist Burma
- 5 New Order repression and the Indonesian opposition
- 6 The Philippine new society and state repression
- 7 Repression and protest in comparative perspective
- 8 People power and insurgency in the Philippine transition
- 9 Protest and the underground in Burma
- 10 Indonesia's democracy protests
- 11 Democracy protest and state repression
- List of references
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Protest, repression and transition in Southeast Asia
- 3 Authoritarian attack and dictatorial rise
- 4 Protest in socialist Burma
- 5 New Order repression and the Indonesian opposition
- 6 The Philippine new society and state repression
- 7 Repression and protest in comparative perspective
- 8 People power and insurgency in the Philippine transition
- 9 Protest and the underground in Burma
- 10 Indonesia's democracy protests
- 11 Democracy protest and state repression
- List of references
- Index
Summary
There are times and places about which nothing seems more significant than the sheer energy and violence that states direct against basic freedoms. The snippets of information that filter from these dictatorial seasons – tales of furtive hiding and tragic discovery: hard times and uneasy sleep – describe lives utterly structured by state repression. Authoritarians bent on taking power, consolidating their rule or seizing resources frequently silence opponents with bludgeons, bullets and shallow graves, and those who find themselves in the path of the state juggernaut probably have trouble even imagining protest or resistance without also calculating the severity or likelihood of state repression. Such considerations surely influence whether individuals take action or maintain a frustrated silence, and will over time broadly shape protest and resistance. They also influence what modes of democracy struggle will emerge or succeed in a given setting. Democracy movements arise against established patterns of contention: their timing, base, and outcome reflect state-movement interactions begun at the dictatorship's outset and reproduced (with adjustments) thereafter, in interactions between repression and contention. Institutions and repertoires of contention that survive, or are ignored by, state repression inform important aspects of anti-dictatorship movements, and influence the role that protest plays in transitions to democracy.
Analysts, however, have seldom attempted to understand modes of protest in authoritarian settings – or indeed elsewhere – via its relationship to styles of state repression. More often, we have been concerned with quantitative associations between the degree of repression and the extent of protest.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Resisting DictatorshipRepression and Protest in Southeast Asia, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004