Disappearances are used by states, insurgents, militias, criminal groups, and transnational security services, yet international studies lack a shared framework for systematically comparing them across contexts. Despite their relevance to repression, civil conflict, criminal governance, and migration, they remain theoretically fragmented and empirically under-measured, examined across partially overlapping literatures employing distinct definitions and case-bound approaches. This article introduces the first global, systematically coded database of disappearances (1999–2023) and a purpose-based typology identifying nine strategic logics underpinning the practice, ranging from state repression and counterinsurgency to criminal extraction, trafficking, and identity-based targeting. The typology reveals shared rationales across political and criminal domains, while the dataset traces how disappearance practices diffuse, evolve, and adapt over time. By reconceptualizing disappearances as an adaptive form of coercion operating under conditions of heightened external scrutiny, the article contributes to international studies debates on repression, sovereignty, and the governance of violence.

How did the climate movement, so strong and dynamic after 2018 face such a sharp backlash even in eco-minded democratic environments? To answer this question, this article analyses political strategies and the media discourse regarding climate activism in Austria. Drawing on theoretical notions of changing civic spaces and civil society capture, we illustrate how delegitimization lays the groundwork for multiple forms of repression. Ultimately, activists and civil society scale back their activities, while public support diminishes. Methodologically, we take a mixed-methods approach and combine interviews with civil society representatives with a quantitative analysis of newspaper articles. Our contribution is twofold: first, we validate and expand upon the civil society capture model through empirical investigation; second, we enrich the social movements literature by analyzing the conditions and effects of repression.

This article introduces CriTaRep v1, a geo-coded event dataset documenting state repression against Crimean Tatars (2000–2024). Drawing on locally sourced materials in Crimean Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian languages, CriTaRep records n = 709 repression events affecting more than 2,200 individual victims. We inductively identify 22 repression types across three categories: deprivation of liberty, legal and administrative repression, and physical repression. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea marked the onset of a large-scale and systematic repression campaign against the Crimean Tatar population. We document a concentration of arbitrary searches on Thursdays, physical repression targeting elites, and intensified repression during periods of dissent. Empirical analyses show that repression spikes in response to protest activity. Russian authorities respond rapidly and increasingly harshly to dissent, pursuing a dual strategy of protest suppression and long-term deterrence. CriTaRep fills critical gaps in existing datasets and provides new opportunities to study patterns and mechanisms of demographically targeted repression in Russian-occupied territories and beyond.

What repressive strategies do dictators use to maintain regime stability as anti-government movements rise under conditions of economic growth? We investigate the changing function of authoritarian repression and the ways in which dictators accommodated rising opposition during Taiwan’s period of authoritarian rule. Using time-series data spanning 39 years (1949–1988), this article analyses the relationship between economic development, opposition movements, and shifts in repression strategies under the Kuomintang (KMT) rule. Drawing on historical documents and statistical analysis, we argue that economic development influences patterns of repression. With economic growth, autocrats tend to adopt selective repression rather than indiscriminate violence (e.g., mass killings), as the latter risks inciting greater social unrest and endangering regime stability. Using an additive dynamic linear model (ADLM), our findings suggest that economic development, when coupled with rising social movements, compels dictators to rely on less severe yet more targeted forms of coercion. While this adaptation may temporarily bolster regime control amid economic growth and social unrest, it may ultimately undermine the foundation of long-term authoritarian resilience. This work bridges the gap between repression literature and modernisation theory by demonstrating that authoritarian decision-making in repressive policies plays a crucial role in shaping the fate of both dictatorships and opposition movements.

What are the long-term legacies of authoritarian repression on civil society? While much research has focused on high-intensity repression, we examine the more pervasive, low-intensity repression characteristic of many authoritarian regimes. We argue that repression’s effects vary by generation, reducing civic engagement among those who came of age during the authoritarian period but not among younger generations who either only lived their childhood under the regime or were children and grew up under democracy. Using data from around 140,000 individual surveys conducted between 1989 and 2017, we find that cohorts who reached adulthood during the Franco regime consistently exhibit lower civic engagement than those who came of age in democratic Spain. We show evidence consistent with the main results from complementary analyses using local-level data on repression. These findings contribute to the literature on authoritarian legacies, emphasizing the generational and contextual variability of their effects on civil society.

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.

In this introductory essay to the special issue on civil society in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, we review core themes in the growing literature on shrinking or closing space for civil society. We discuss the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) as agents of democratization and note the emergence of dual, at times apparently conflicting policy postures within authoritarian regimes (restriction and repression for some CSOs vs. financial support and opportunities for collaboration for others). We posit that different conceptual perspectives applied to civil society can help account for the duality of authoritarian postures and examine repercussions for three key subgroups of CSOs: claims-making (or advocacy) NGOs, nonprofit service providers and regime-loyal NGOs supporting often populist and nationalist discourses.

Orthodox terrorism studies tend to focus on the activities of illiberal non-state actors against the liberal democratic states in the North. It thus excludes state terrorism, which is one of a number of repressive tools that great powers from the North have used extensively in the global South in the service of foreign policy objectives. I establish the reasons for the absence of state terrorism from orthodox accounts of terrorism and argue that critical–normative approaches could help to overcome this major weakness.

LGBTQ+ organizations have a crucial dual role. They advocate and lobby for equality, while simultaneously providing vital services for LGBTQ+ communities. Different literatures provide perspectives on the hybridity of these organizations’ activities, highlighting the relation between political context and organizational capabilities. Yet, each body of literature emphasizes different elements. Building on key insights from nonprofit, social movement, and interest group literatures, this study investigates the contextual and organizational factors shaping the political and community-oriented activities of 294 LGBTQ+ organizations across 17 European Union countries. Using a unique dataset, it reveals that organizations faced with governmental repression reduce their political activities and increase their community-oriented activities. Organizational factors such reliance on membership fees and amount of funding sources have only a limited influence on organizations’ activities. These findings offer a more comprehensive understanding of how political and organizational contexts shape the work of LGBTQ+ organizations and emphasize the need for LGBTQ+ organizations to balance advocacy with community engagement, particularly in diverse and repressive environments.

Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labour campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) led to as many as 45 million deaths in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history. Drawing on a corpus of over 300 interviews with famine survivors, I apply a mixed-methods approach to examine the impact of mass state repression on how such survivors speak about a repressive regime that remains in power. Exploiting variation in county-level mortality rates, I find that interviewees exposed to more intense state violence do not publicly voice more explicitly negative attitudes towards the state, but they do possess more latent negative sentiments. Furthermore, I use the establishment and subsequent dissolution of communal canteens – a key repressive institution through which the state functioned as the sole food distributor during a time of extreme scarcity – as an analytical lever to show that although some survivors may be unwilling to express grievances directly against an enduring regime that perpetrated mass violence, they readily express negativity towards a long-dead institution.

Quantitative research has established a strong association between ethnopolitical exclusion and civil war onset, but direct investigation of the proposed causal pathway has been limited. This article applies large-N qualitative analysis (LNQA) to 15 post–Cold War cases to trace how exclusion may generate grievances, mobilization, and conflict escalation. In nine cases, grievance-based mobilization preceded civil war, and escalation followed governments’ reliance on indiscriminate repression or on inconsistent mixes of rejection and accommodation. In six cases, however, conflict itself produced exclusion, revealing recursive dynamics rather than a one-way sequence. These findings refine grievance theory by showing that escalation is shaped by patterns of state response and that exclusion may also emerge as a result of violence. More broadly, the study demonstrates how systematic qualitative analysis across multiple cases can trace mechanisms, address concerns about endogeneity and measurement validity, and still support cautious generalization.