Configuring Political Repression: Anti-Civil Rights Enforcement in Mississippi

Abstract

Dominant approaches to political repression, which rely on linear analytic models and focus on discrete state agencies or repressive forms, obscure the complex organization and impacts of enforcement networks. Building on recent investigations of collective action fields and arenas of political contention, we develop a relational approach to political repression emphasizing joint actions to suppress challenges to the political status quo. We use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine enforcement networks that mobilized against challenges to segregation in early-1960s Mississippi, identifying four distinct enforcement configurations which maintained segregation across the state's eighty-two counties. We then analyze the processes that undergird these configurations of enforcement using archival data associated with representative counties. Our approach demonstrates the emergent logic of enforcement— i.e., how particular enforcement activities developed jointly, rather than only in parallel, with those initiated by other authorities.

Exculpating Injustice: Coroner Constructions of White Innocence in the Postbellum South

“…Although these officials were able to enact a performance that removed their implication in the murder, the coroner ultimately determined the cause of death and identified responsible parties. In practice, the de facto function of coroner inquisitions was both to reinforce other officials’ efforts to absolve individual perpetrators, and to submit evidence that squared with, and thus legitimated, other, often fictive, accounts of the act advanced by other actors within the overall “enforcement network” (Cunningham et al 2019; Dray 2002; Saunt and Berry 2014).…”

“…Supplementing the attention typically paid to police, court, and legislative actors in racist violence and repression, we highlight how coroners’ exculpatory efforts have helped sustain a broader ideology of white innocence and institutional legitimacy. A component of a broader enforcement network, whereby racial violence maintains prevailing systems of power and stratification (Bailey and Tolnay 2015; Brundage 1993; Cunningham et al 2019; Ifill 2003), coroners enacted what we refer to as administrative performances , through which white publics could be exculpated in the face of criminal acts that often functioned themselves to maintain racial dominance.…”

The Role of Civil Society in Political Repression: The UK Prevent Counter-Terrorism Programme

“…In response, the government made alliances with actors already active in this area, including the neoconservative movement – a key opponent of the anti-war movement. The formation of these alliances resulted in an ‘enforcement network’ comprised of both ‘state and private actors seeking to maintain the status quo’ who share ‘direct connections’, ‘mutual awareness’ and ‘shared understandings’ (Cunningham et al, 2019: 320). The implementation of Prevent relied on an enforcement network of the following actors:…”

“…In this article, I examine both types of social movement activity. I show how neoconservative think tanks and counter-extremism civil society organisations alongside governmental counter-terrorism actors form an ‘enforcement network’ (Cunningham et al, 2019) enabling the Prevent counter-terrorism programme as a distinct form of political repression. Moving beyond a ‘challenger versus authority’ conception of social movement activity, my analysis shows three ways in which political mobilisation is located within and around the state.…”

“…I argue that existing sociological accounts of repression have a tendency to focus on state-based coercion; this is too narrow to account for the empirical reality of movement suppression. Drawing on and extending social movement literature on the role of non-state actors as repressive agents (Cunningham et al, 2019; Earl, 2003; Ong, 2018), I suggest that state-supported movement organisations (SSMO) serve as para-statal agencies with quasi-independence from the state.…”