Declining state capacity expands tolerated contention through repressive neglect

Evidence

Relatedly, as states have increased their scope and range, their growth in institutional determination and (formal) authority over the lives of their inhabitants — both citizens and noncitizens, those in and out of the state alike - de facto control, efficiency, and effect have diminished (Comaroff calls this “the Minogue Paradox,” 1998:336). There is, one could say, a point of diminishing returns, a marginal effectivity of rule. The more repressive, the more likely resistant. And the more cemented, the more internally cracked. This is especially so regarding racial repression and rule. States, as Weber famously insisted, are those institutions effecting a monopoly over the legitimate means of physical force. Thus the greater state insistence on effecting and exercising such monopoly, the more visible. The greater the violence states promote in everyday life, the more they have to resort to threatened or explicit violence as the mode of rule. And the more violence becomes a norm, the readier those within and without the state are loosened, if not licensed, to resort to forms of personalized and anonymous violence. This is especially exacerbated by racial terms, for race, while making institutionally visible the perpetrators, picks out the objects of violence in emphatically identifiable ways. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1726 (#expands, via linked claim)

CA theory would be best supported by finding a strongly curvilinear relation between conflict and coercion. If one or another side greatly outweighs the other’s capacity for coercion, rebellions should not start or regimes ought quickly to collapse, at low cost. The most intense conflicts ought to occur where coercive capacities are closely matched. Granted difficulties in the available data, the most recent study (by Gurr et al.) shows only slight curvilinearity. In addition, some other results that are very odd from the standpoint of CA theory turn up: In general, a positive relationship seems to exist between governmental coercion and conflict. This includes the finding that the cumulative application of sanctions increases conflict, even at the extreme of sanctions, and that the use of sanctions has no discernible time-lagged effect on conflict. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4330 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The regime itself sorts performances into prescribed, tolerated, and forbidden, dispensing threats and penalties to claimants who move onto forbidden ground. The changing interaction of these three elements—everyday social organization, cumulative experience with contention, and regime intervention—produces incremental alterations in contentious performances. At any given moment, however, that interaction promotes clustering of claim-making in a limited number of recognizable performances, a repertoire. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 272 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State expansion paradoxically reduces effective control and increases reliance on violence — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1726; Regimes sort contention into prescribed, tolerated, and forbidden performances — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 272; Governmental coercion increases rather than suppresses political conflict — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4330 (+1 more)

Related

• Governmental coercion increases rather than suppresses political conflict (similarity 0.80)
• Expanding state authority paradoxically erodes its de facto control and efficiency (similarity 0.80)
• State expansion paradoxically reduces effective control and increases reliance on violence (similarity 0.80)
• High-capacity regimes’ monopoly on coercion means their own agents dominate the violence that occurs (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• State expansion paradoxically reduces effective control and increases reliance on violence #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1726
• Governmental coercion increases rather than suppresses political conflict #corroborates (0.82) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4330
• Regimes sort contention into prescribed, tolerated, and forbidden performances #expands (0.80) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 272
• A regime’s past path in capacity-democracy space shapes its contention practices. #expands (0.75) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 145