Free from State Violence or Free to Comply?
A Revised Typology of Coercion and Repression in Liberal Democracies
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Abstract
This article addresses the problem of unclear usage of “coercion” and “repression” in literature concerning protest and repression in democratic and nondemocratic states. It questions the bases and conclusions of domestic democratic peace theory and discusses its consequences. The article proposes expanding definitions of coercion and repression in terms of timing, agency, and perceptiveness. Using vocabulary of poststructuralist discourse theory and the “logics” approach to analyzing social phenomena, it introduces the notion of hegemonic coercion and repression and describes their functioning. It argues that contemporary liberal democracies are not free from coercion and repression, but that the hegemony embodied in the state is able to sustain itself by means of hegemonic coercion with little use of direct violence. Consequently, the absence of state violence is not a criterion of a mature democracy, but can also be a characteristic of a totalitarian regime where ideological deviations are strictly and preemptively controlled.
Contributor Notes
Barbora Capinska is a PhD student at Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Her primary interest are protests and repressions in liberal democracies and their representation in the media. More generally, she likes to study the ideological dimension of social and political practices and grand, national debates. She is devoted to poststructuralist discourse theory and finds its application also in civic activism and journalism.