Title: Coercive Institutions and State Violence Under Authoritarianism
Description: Why do we observe such widely differing patterns of repression and state violence under authoritarian rule? Despite a wave of recent interest in authoritarian politics, the origins, design and behavior of the coercive institutions that embody the state's monopoly on violence remain relatively unexamined. This project draws on new statistical and geographic data, elite interviews, and archival evidence from the U.S. and Asia to chronicle the origins and operation of the internal security apparatus in three Cold War anti-communist authoritarian regimes - Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea - and compares them to similar processes in Communist authoritarian regimes in North Korea and China.