This chapter explores what border-crossing tells us about the linkage between citizenship and rights-claiming by examining the experiences of North Koreans who resettle in South Korea, focusing on the security screening process that occurs immediately after they arrive on South Korean soil. Although North Koreans are often described as having “automatic citizenship” in the South under both constitutional and communitarian conceptions of citizenship, that claim is only partially accurate. I show that North Koreans must exhibit considerable agency to claim citizen-standing, and their rights are heavily circumscribed and contingent on state recognition of their identity throughout the screening process. The chapter elucidates how marginalized citizens claim rights at a site of maximal state power (Korea’s deep and securitized border) and illuminates how the gap between legal recognition of rights and their instantiation in state practice can render the claims process extended and arduous even for individuals whose citizen-standing is already theoretically established.

The design of Taiwan's coercive institutions had a profound effect on the patterns of violence that the island experienced during martial law. In particular, the reforms made to the coercive apparatus in the early 1950s, described in Chapter 3, help explain why Taiwan experienced a drop in state violence in the years that followed. Before that, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the exclusivity of the KMT's coercive institutions isolated coercive agents from Taiwan's society. Social exclusivity had two major effects: first, the security forces had a more difficult time identifying and dealing with popular threats without resort to public, indiscriminate violence, and second, exclusivity created out-group resentment between the Mainlander and native Taiwanese populations that incentivized worse violence. Fragmentation of the coercive apparatus also fostered violence – against civilians as well as between rival security organizations – by hampering the flow of intelligence on popular policing and by providing incentives for inter-agency competition. As a result, state violence was relatively high during the period from 1945 to 1955.

Following the reforms that were documented in Chapter 3, however, the coercive apparatus became unitary and socially inclusive. This new organizational design provided fewer social and material incentives for coercive agents to engage in violence. Because social inclusivity provided better access to information on Taiwan's society, and because reductions in fragmentation improved internal coordination, the coercive apparatus’ intelligence capacity also improved. These changes enabled coercive agents to rely on surveillance and pre-emptive, discriminate repression rather than public, reactive, and indiscriminate violence. As a result, state violence declined around the time that these reforms were completed, in 1955, and remained low for the rest of the martial law period.

The first section of this chapter describes the drop in state violence that occurred in Taiwan in the mid-1950s, with an emphasis on several key aspects of that violence that are either omitted from or inaccurately depicted by existing studies. The second section illustrates how exclusivity and fragmentation worked through the intelligence and incentives pathways to contribute to higher levels of violence in the late 1940s and early 1950s, while the third section analyzes how inclusivity and a unitary coercive structure altered incentives and intelligence capabilities in ways that decreased violence after 1955.

A Spanish colony since the mid-1500s, the Philippine Islands became an American colony after a period of warfare at the turn of the twentieth century, and achieved Commonwealth status and limited domestic autonomy in 1935. The archipelago saw brutal fighting after its occupation by Japan in 1941; granted independence in 1946, it was then governed by a series of democratically elected presidents. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the government sought to suppress a rebellion by the Communist Hukbalahap insurgency. The sixth president, Ferdinand Marcos, was elected in 1965 and re-elected in 1969. Unable to run for a third term, Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, and remained in office until deposed by a combination of military coup-defection and mass uprising – the so-called People's Power revolution – in 1986.

This chapter examines the origins of Marcos’ internal security apparatus, particularly the coercive institutions that operated from the declaration of martial law in September 1972 to his fall from power in 1986. Like Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, Marcos had the opportunity to reorganize the Philippines’ coercive apparatus and did so. However, Marcos chose the opposite kind of coercive institutional design to that of Chiang: one that was fragmented and socially exclusive. This chapter examines why. It shows that fragmentation and exclusivity were not dictated either by external American influence or by the social factors and institutions that Marcos inherited. If either American assistance or preferences were decisive, the Philippines should have emphasized unitary internal security forces, especially police, to handle the popular threat of communist subversion. If institutional inheritance were determinative, then the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) should have remained socially inclusive, and Marcos would not have been able to pursue unitary internal security institutions as a democratically elected leader but then create fragmented ones as he moved toward dictatorial rule.

For a complete explanation of why Marcos chose to pursue fragmentation and exclusivity in the coercive apparatus after 1972, then, we must look to his own perceptions of threat. This chapter shows that Marcos created this apparatus primarily to deal with the threat of a coup by the military and security forces, which he feared would pave the way for one of the other elite families in the Philippines to replace him as President.

Coercive institutions exist to safeguard an autocratic ruler in power. Their construction is among the most fundamental tasks he can undertake, and their performance determines his longevity in office and the manner of his exit. These institutions also matter deeply for the millions of ordinary citizens that the autocrat governs, because they affect the levels of violence experienced by those people.

This chapter outlines the logic behind the creation and operation of autocratic coercive institutions. The first half of the chapter begins by reviewing the threats that an autocrat must address to stay in power. It then identifies how different threats lead to the creation of distinct types of coercive institutions, proposing that autocrats face a “coercive dilemma” because managing the risk of a coup and managing the threat of popular unrest call for different optimal levels of fragmentation and social exclusivity: coup-proofing calls for fragmented and exclusive coercive institutions, while managing popular unrest is best accomplished using a unitary and inclusive internal security apparatus. Ultimately, autocrats negotiate this organizational tradeoff by crafting their coercive institutions to address the dominant perceived threat at the time they come to power.

The second half of the chapter turns from using coercive institutional design as the dependent variable to making it an independent variable that explains variations in state violence. I isolate two primary mechanisms by which coercive institutions affect levels of state violence, which I term the intelligence pathway and the incentives pathway. Fragmentation and exclusivity both provide incentives, either social or material, that predispose coercive agents toward higher levels of and less discriminate violence. Both characteristics also hamper the collection, analysis, and transmission of intelligence that might enable more targeted, pre-emptive, and non-violent repression, thereby raising the probability of higher levels of and less discriminate violence. Through these pathways, the coercive apparatus has an independent effect on levels of state violence that cannot be accounted for by other factors.

The fact that authoritarian coercive institutions have varying intelligence capabilities also suggests a set of fairly restrictive conditions under which we should see institutional change, and suggests the likely direction of such change when it occurs. The chapter therefore outlines a set of predictions for when and how coercive institutional change should happen, and contrasts this theory of change with explanations grounded in path dependence and rational design.

This book has developed the first rigorous, comparative, and empirically documented theory of the origins and operation of authoritarian coercive institutions. Coercion is central to theories of the state and to our intuitive understanding of dictatorship, yet political scientists have largely overlooked the variation that exists across the institutions that manage domestic surveillance, repression, and violence. The strategies of repression and patterns of violence that these regimes employ also differ in ways not fully explainable by existing theories. Simply put, authoritarian coercive institutions are not all alike, and neither is the violence that they produce. Today, when political developments in non-democratic regimes shape the fate of billions of individuals and shift the contours of global politics, it is important to understand why. This concluding chapter briefly reviews the main findings of the book, draws out the implications of the work for scholarship and policy, and identifies questions raised by the findings that suggest directions for future research.

MAIN FINDINGS

The first half of this book examined the origins of coercive institutions, and explored the reasons for variations in their structure and social composition. It posited that autocrats face a “coercive dilemma”: a fundamental tradeoff between optimizing their internal security apparatus to deal with a popular threat, or coup-proofing it to defend against elite rivals. Coup-proofing against elite threats typically creates an internally fragmented security force, drawn from narrow and exclusive segments of society. Managing popular unrest, on the other hand, calls for a unitary, non-fragmented apparatus with broadly embedded, socially inclusive intelligence networks. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 demonstrated that autocrats construct coercive institutions based on whichever threat they perceive to be dominant at the time they come to power. Institutional inheritance and external influence are not immaterial, but they are rarely, if ever, decisive when it comes to coercive institutional design – not surprising since the fate of the autocrat himself rests on the performance of these institutions.

The second half of the book examined the effect of variations in coercive institutional structure and social composition on patterns of state violence. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 demonstrated that different coercive organizational characteristics give rise to predictable variations in state violence.

Materials for this book were drawn from the following libraries, archives, and collections:

United States

Harvard University Libraries (Harvard Yenching Library, Fung Library, University Archives)

National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD)

National Security Archives, George Washington University (Washington, DC)

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Boston, MA)

Harry S. Truman Presidential Library (Independence, MO)

Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University (Stanford, CA)

Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ)

Taiwan

Academia Sinica (various libraries and collections)

Institute of Modern History Archives, Academia Sinica

National Central Library

National Taiwan University Library

Academia Historica Archives

Kuomintang Party History Archives

National Archives Administration

Compensation Foundation

Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation

China

National Library

Foreign Ministry Archives

South Korea

Seoul National University Library

National Assembly Library

Kim Dae Jung Presidential Library and Archives, Yonsei University

Woon Am Institute/Rhee Syngman Library, Yonsei University

Korea Democracy Foundation Library and Archives

Philippines

University of the Philippines (various libraries and University Archives)

Lopez Museum and Library

National Library of the Philippines

Intelligence Services of the Armed Forces of the Philippines

Commission on Human Rights

Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, Museum of Courage and Resistance

SELDA Archives, University of the Philippines

The differences in the coercive apparatus under Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan, described in Chapter 5, shaped the patterns of state violence that Korean society experienced during their different periods of rule. The structure and social composition of the coercive apparatus in these two cases help us understand both the within-country temporal trends in levels of state violence, which were the main focus of the chapters on state violence in Taiwan and the Philippines (Chapters 6 and 7), and how the Korean cases compare cross-nationally, to the cases in the previous two chapters. Moreover, coercive institutional design can also shed light on sub-national variations in the execution of state violence, including cross-unit variations in state violence executed by different parts of the coercive apparatus and regional variations in the distribution of protest repression.

To a much greater degree than either Taiwan or the Philippines, the presence of an external threat in South Korea limited the degree of coup-proofing present in the coercive apparatus, particularly the externally focused military. By cross-national comparative standards, therefore, state violence in South Korea was relatively low. The non-military parts of the internal security apparatus, however, had important differences under Park, compared to Chun, that help to explain why violence in the two regimes took on a somewhat different character. Park's more fragmented and regionally exclusive regime engaged in intra-apparatus violence as organizations attempted to counterbalance and investigate each other, resulting in the arrest and sentencing of a number of internal security personnel. It also engaged in disproportionately high repressive violence against protests in Chŏlla, compared to the rest of the country, culminating in the Kwangju incident of May 1980. Chun Doo Hwan, on the other hand, had a unitary internal security apparatus but one that was divided in terms of exclusivity: somewhat more inclusive of Chŏlla at the top levels but entirely inclusive and representative in terms of its ground-level policing of protest. The difference in the social composition of Chun's riot police units helps explain several findings that are otherwise surprising and counterintuitive to scholars of Korea's authoritarian history: that in fact Chun seems to have been less violent on average in his non-protest repression than Park, that his repression of popular protest was usually less violent and less regionally biased, and that, despite these considerations, his use of repression ended up being far more reviled.