Prisoner releases in postcolonial Uganda: Power, politics, and the public

This article examines prisoner releases in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the inauguration of Yoweri Museveni in 1986. During these decades, Uganda's government enacted over 30 large scale releases of prisoners and detainees, affecting approximately 20,000 individuals. These acts of clemency were highly politicized and frequently occurred during times of political transition or tension. While framed by Uganda's leaders and the official media as gestures of goodwill and symbols of progress, these releases ultimately reinforced executive power and the centrality of incarceration in state repression.

Challenges to African incumbents will grow

Significance The continent’s trajectory is not a uniformly bleak one, however, as it also features the only two countries to move towards democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic: Malawi and Zambia. Furthermore, large majorities of people in many countries surveyed by Afrobarometer prefer democracy over other forms of government. Impacts Countries that are more democratic will, on average, experience more inclusive economic recoveries. Economic hardships generated in part by COVID-19 will make it harder for incumbents in Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe to retain power. Authoritarian governments will continue to see high levels of political and civic protest. Authoritarian countries such as Angola and Zimbabwe will resort to more state repression to maintain the status quo.

Varieties of post-civil war violence

Quantitative research on the “durability” of peace following civil wars typically captures the breakdown or survival of “peace” in a binary manner, equating it with the presence or absence of civil war recurrence. In the datasets that underpin such studies, years that do not experience full-scale civil war are implicitly coded as “peaceful.” Yet, post-civil war environments may remain free from war recurrence, while nevertheless experiencing endemic violent crime, state repression, low-intensity political violence, and systematic violence against marginalized groups, all of which are incongruent with the concept of peace. Approaches to assessing post-civil war outcomes which focus exclusively on civil war recurrence risk overestimating the “durability” of peace, implicitly designating as “peaceful” a range of environments which may be anything but. In this article, we discuss the heterogeneity of violent post-civil war outcomes and develop a typology of “varieties of post-civil war violence.” Our typology contributes to the study of post-civil war peace durability, by serving as the basis for an alternative, categorical conceptualization of “peace years” in conflict datasets.

Unintended Lessons of Revolution

In the 1920s, Mexico established rural normales—boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanalís Padilla traces the history of the rural normales, showing how they became sites of radical politics. As Padilla demonstrates, the popular longings that drove the Mexican Revolution permeated these schools. By the 1930s, ideas about land reform, education for the poor, community leadership, and socialism shaped their institutional logic. Over the coming decades, the tensions between state consolidation and revolutionary justice produced a telling contradiction: the very schools meant to constitute a loyal citizenry became hubs of radicalization against a government that increasingly abandoned its commitment to social justice. Crafting a story of struggle and state repression, Padilla illuminates education's radical possibilities and the nature of political consciousness for youths whose changing identity—from campesinos, to students, to teachers—speaks to Mexico’s twentieth-century transformations.

THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF STATE REPRESSION ON POLITICAL BEHAVIOR AND ATTITUDES: EVIDENCE FROM TAIWAN

This article examines how violence against citizens affects their political attitudes and behavior in the long run, and how those effects vary over time. We construct and analyze a novel dataset on the victims of Taiwan's February 28 Incident, in 1947, with survey data spanning 1990 to 2017. Our empirical analysis shows that cohorts having directly or indirectly experienced the Incident are less likely to support the Kuomintang Party (KMT), the former authoritarian ruling party responsible for the Incident. They tend to disagree with the key conventional policy stand of the KMT (unification with mainland China), are more likely to self-identify as Taiwanese, and are less likely to vote for KMT presidential candidates. Taiwan's residents who were born in towns with larger number of casualties during the Incident are more likely to reject unification. Finally, the effects are found to vary over the period following democratization.

The Others of the Ravine

In the society and culture of the Canary Islands, ravines (barrancos in Spanish) are spaces that contain a wealth of meanings and perceptions attached to a collective imagination. These natural scars that mark and characterize the island's geography represent scenes of dissidence, as will be shown through the spatial and geographic stories of various transsexuals and transvestites who lived in Tenerife between 1970 and 1990; the specific character of their testimonials is situated in a specific context: El Cabo, a barrio in Tenerife, as well as the Santos Ravine (Barranco de Santos in Spanish). The state repression, marginalization, and violence against sexually dissident people during this age will be the main context of analysis. In a brief journey through history, these aspects will be placed in relation to key events from the Francoist dictatorship on the islands, a travel journal of the nineteenth century, and passages from the conquest of the Canary Islands in which the ravines, among them the Santos Ravine itself, take on a relevant importance. Finally, this study will mention the existence of a chapel consecrated to the Virgin of Candelaria in this environment as possibly the most significant crystallization of the otherness of the ravine. This study thereby contemplates reviewing these spaces on the basis of their formation as media in which specific Canary Island subjectivities can be located.

Unproductive Workers and State Repression

Social Reproduction Theory, as advanced by scholars such as Bhattacharya (2017) and Ferguson (2019), is at its core a theory of the revolutionary capacity of “unproductive” workers such as teachers, nurses, and social workers who are disproportionately women and disproportionately employed by the state. However, Social Reproduction Theory overlooks the contradictory and antagonistic role of the state in the lives of people, as the reproduction of labor power in capitalism proceeds via antagonism and state repression. The task of teachers, nurses, and social workers is the production of not just any life but that of a docile, exploitable worker. JEL classification: B51, B54, P1, I3

Political Socialization in New Democracies: Legacies of Repression and Pre-Democratic Partisanship

Family socialization is a key mechanism for the transmission of political attitudes and behaviors. Work in developed democracies highlights the role of family socialization in the stability of partisanship across generations. But what of family socialization in new democracies? In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding how experiences with state repression and the process of family socialization influence new democracies after transition from authoritarian rule. In doing so, we combine findings from established literature on processes of family socialization with political psychological work on how repression crystallizes political identities. We examine how individual-level experiences of state repression shape political participation and partisanship in Tunisia, an important and rare contemporary case of successful (and still ongoing) democratic transition. Drawing on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2017, we find evidence that Tunisian citizens whose family and community members who were arrested are more likely to vote in subsequent democratic elections and to vote against the old regime. While individuals who were arrested under the previous authoritarian regime are less likely to turn out to vote, in line with research on the demobilizing effects of repression, those that do vote are strong partisans and are more likely to vote for the former opposition and anti-old regime parties. This paper lays out a broader project on how the different socialization processes in authoritarian regimes affect political attitudes and behaviors after democratization.