Autocracies and the Control of Societal Organizations

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Marie-Eve Reny

AbstractAuthoritarian regimes seek to prevent formal and informal organizations in society from engaging in mobilized dissent. What strategies do they use to do so, and what explains their choices? I posit that state actors in autocracies use four mechanisms to control societal organizations: repression, coercion, cooptation and containment. How they control these organizations depends on whether they think they might undermine political stability. Two factors inform that assessment. First is whether state actors think societal organizations’ interests are reconcilable with regime resilience. Second is whether groups are in national or international networks that are either cohesive or incohesive. While the irreconcilability of interests influences state actors’ perceptions of groups as subversive, network cohesion shapes organizations’ capacity for large-scale mobilization.

Author(s):  
Marie-Eve Reny

The value of a concept lies in large part in its ability to travel and explain dynamics across settings. Authoritarian regimes other than China have contained informal religious organizations. This chapter explains why, and to some extent how, the Mukhabarat has contained jihadi Salafists in post-Zarqawi Jordan, starting in 2006. Similarly, it accounts for why and how President Sadat contained the Muslim Brotherhood in 1970s Egypt, following the earlier regime’s attempt to eradicate the organization. As in China, state actors in these two cases contained informal religious groups, as their interests did not conflict with authoritarian regime resilience and the networks they were part of were incohesive.


Author(s):  
Marie-Eve Reny

This chapter empirically accounts for why local public security bureaus contain Protestant house churches in Chinese cities. Public security bureaus have incentives to contain house churches rather than using an alternative, and possibly more forceful, strategy. Not only do Protestant church leaders have political and religious beliefs that are reconcilable with regime resilience, but they are also survival-seekers inclined to cooperate with local state actors to ensure their congregations’ safety. Public security bureaus also contain Protestant house churches, as they are part of incohesive networks, both domestically and internationally, and lack the capacity to organize large-scale mobilization as a result.


1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 77-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Silva

Chile is Often portrayed as an exceptional case among recent transitions from authoritarian rule for a number of reasons. It was the last of the "bureaucratic authoritarian" regimes to democratize; the transition followed the timetable and conditions set by the military more closely than in Argentina and Uruguay; the prognosis for economic and political stability seems optimistic relative to the rest of the region. An important reason for Chilean exceptionality was the fact that, unlike in other cases, Chile's business and landowning elites supported the military government to the end. Why did they do so?


Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams

This chapter provides a fuller treatment of the pure manifold theory with an expanded discussion of competing doctrines. It is argued that competing doctrines fail to account for the extensive and/or transitory aspect(s) of time, or they do so at great theoretical cost. The pure manifold theory accounts for the extensive aspect of time because it admits a four-dimensional manifold and it accounts for the transitory aspect of time because it hypothesizes that the increase of entropy is the thing that is ‘felt’ in veridical cases of felt passage. A four-dimensionalist theory of time travel is outlined, along with a sketch of large-scale cosmological traits of the universe.


Author(s):  
Na Li ◽  
Baofeng Jiao ◽  
Lingkun Ran ◽  
Zongting Gao ◽  
Shouting Gao

AbstractWe investigated the influence of upstream terrain on the formation of a cold frontal snowband in Northeast China. We conducted numerical sensitivity experiments that gradually removed the upstream terrain and compared the results with a control experiment. Our results indicate a clear negative effect of upstream terrain on the formation of snowbands, especially over large-scale terrain. By thoroughly examining the ingredients necessary for snowfall (instability, lifting and moisture), we found that the release of mid-level conditional instability, followed by the release of low-level or near surface instabilities (inertial instability, conditional instability or conditional symmetrical instability), contributed to formation of the snowband in both experiments. The lifting required for the release of these instabilities was mainly a result of frontogenetic forcing and upper gravity waves. However, the snowband in the control experiment developed later and was weaker than that in the experiment without upstream terrain. Two factors contributed to this negative topographic effect: (1) the mountain gravity waves over the upstream terrain, which perturbed the frontogenetic circulation by rapidly changing the vertical motion and therefore did not favor the release of instabilities in the absence of persistent ascending motion; and (2) the decrease in the supply of moisture as a result of blocking of the upstream terrain, which changed both the moisture and instability structures leeward of the mountains. A conceptual model is presented that shows the effects of the instabilities and lifting on the development of cold frontal snowbands in downstream mountains.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Shubha Kamala Prasad ◽  
Filip Savatic

Why do some immigrant diasporas in the United States (U.S.) establish foreign policy interest groups while others do not? While scholars have demonstrated that diasporic interest groups often successfully influence U.S. foreign policy, we take a step back to ask why only certain diasporas attempt to do so in the first place. We argue that two factors increase the likelihood of diaspora mobilization: a community’s experience with democratic governance and conflict in its country of origin. We posit that these conditions make it more likely that political entrepreneurs emerge to serve as catalysts for top-down mobilization. To test our hypotheses, we collect and analyze novel data on diasporic interest groups as well as the characteristics of their respective countries of origin. In turn, we conduct the first in-depth case studies of the historical and contemporary Indian-American lobbies, using original archival and interview evidence.


2013 ◽  
Vol 299 ◽  
pp. 130-134
Author(s):  
Li Wei ◽  
Da Zhi Deng

In recent years,china input in the construction of the network management is constantly increasing;information technology has improved continuously,but,making a variety of network security incidents occur frequently,due to the vulnerability of the computer network system inherent,a direct impact on national security and social and political stability. Because of the popularity of computers and large-scale development of the Internet, network security has been increasing as the theme. Reasonable safeguards against violations of resources; regular Internet user behavior and so on has been the public's expectations of future Internet. This paper described a stable method of getting telnet user’s account in development of network management based on telnet protocol.


2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7) ◽  
pp. 676-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibtissame Abaidi ◽  
Eric Vernette

PurposeThe internet has made it possible to diffuse totally digitized products on a very large scale. The newspaper business is one of the sectors that has been most affected by this technological revolution. Given such products’ uneven commercial success, an analysis of the literature suggests that these mixed results could be explained by the digitized nature of the product combined with a price judged too high. Both these elements reduce the perceived global value of the digital support compared with the print version on paper. To test this proposition, the authors have constructed an experimental design, manipulating the format (digital newspaper vs. print newspaper) and the price (high vs low). The results show that newspaper digitization significantly reduces perceived global value for the consumer compared with the print format. The authors also show that the perceived intangibility of the product exerts a more complex effect on perceived global value: this effect depends on both the nature of the intangibility (mental vs physical) and the cost and benefit analysis.Design/methodology/approachAn experimental study was conducted with two factors: digitalization (print vs digital format) and price (low vs high). The authors carried out a mixed-factor variance analysis and follow Preacher and Hayes procedure to test the hypothesis. A sample of 387 undergraduate students was interviewed in laboratory.FindingsThe results show that newspaper digitization significantly reduces (i.e. destroys) perceived global value for the consumer (i.e. it destroys value), compared to the print format. The reuslts also show that the perceived intangibility of the product exerts a more complex effect on perceived global value: this effect depends at the same time on the nature of the intangibility (mental vs physical) and the account taken of costs and benefits.Originality/valueOne major result is the fact that digitizing newspaper strongly destroys its perceived global value for the consumer, compared to the physical alternative. To explain this phenomenon, the product’s perceived intangibility had been considered, as well as how this is related to the perceived costs and benefits. It appears that it has an overall direct negative effect on perceived value; therefore, the more a newspaper format is perceived as physically intangible, the more its perceived global value decreases. Results shows that this loss of value can be counteracted in two different ways, through the indirect effects of costs and benefits.


2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Slinko ◽  
Stanislav Bilyuga ◽  
Julia Zinkina ◽  
Andrey Korotayev

In this article, we re-analyze the hypothesis that the relationship between the type of political regime and its political instability forms an inverted U shape. Following this logic, consistent democracies and autocracies are more stable regimes, whereas intermediate regimes (anocracies) display the lowest levels of political stability. We re-test this hypothesis using a data set that has not been previously used for this purpose, finding sufficient evidence to support the hypothesis pertaining to the aforementioned U-shaped relationship. Our analysis is specifically focused on the symmetry of this U shape, whereby our findings suggest that the U-shaped relationship between regime types and sociopolitical destabilization is typically characterized by an asymmetry, with consistently authoritarian regimes being generally less stable than consolidated democracies. We also find that the character of this asymmetry can change with time. In particular, our re-analysis suggests that U-shaped relationship experienced significant changes after the end of the Cold War. Before the end of the Cold War (1946-1991), the asymmetry of inverted U-shaped relationship was much less pronounced—though during this period consistent authoritarian regimes were already less stable than consolidated democracies, this very difference was only marginally significant. In the period that follows the end of the Cold War (1992-2014), this asymmetry underwent a substantial change: Consolidated democracies became significantly more stable, whereas consolidated autocracies became significantly more unstable. As a result, the asymmetry of the U-shaped relationship has become much more pronounced. The article discusses a number of factors that could account for this change.


2005 ◽  
Vol 129 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Li ◽  
Li Chen

We have developed a decomposition-based rapid redesign methodology for large and complex computational redesign problems. While the overall methodology consists of two general steps: diagnosis and repair, in this paper we focus on the repair step in which decomposition patterns are utilized for redesign planning. Resulting from design diagnosis, a typical decomposition pattern solution to a given redesign problem indicates the portions of the design model necessary for recomputation as well as the interaction part within the model accountable for design change propagation. Following this, in this paper we suggest repair actions with an approach derived from an input pattern solution, to generate a redesign road map allowing for taking a shortcut in the redesign solution process. To do so, a two-stage redesign planning approach from recomputation strategy selection to redesign road map generation is proposed. An example problem concerning the redesign of a relief valve is used for illustration and validation.


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