Paths to State Repression: Human Rights Violations and Contentious Politics

In the last ten years, there has been a resurgence of interest in repression and violence within states. Paths to State Repression improves our understanding of why states use political repression, highlighting its relationship to dissent and mass protest. The authors draw upon a wide variety of political-economic contexts, methodological approaches, and geographic locales, including Cuba, Nicaragua, Peru, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Israel, Eastern Europe, and Africa. This book is invaluable to all who wish to better understand why central authorities violate and restrict human rights and how states can break their cycles of conflict.

Christian Davenport is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan as well as a Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies and Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Primary research interests include human rights violations, genocide/politicide, torture, political surveillance, civil war and social movements, measurement, racism and popular culture. He is the author of five books; three solo-authored: How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa (2014, Cambridge University Press), Media Bias, Perspective and State Repression: The Black Panther Party (2010, Cambridge University Press) - winner of Best Book in Racial Politics and Social Movements by the American Political Science Association, and State Repression and the Promise of Democratic Peace (2007, Cambridge University Press).  Prof. Davenport is the author of numerous articles appearing in the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Comparative Political Studies, and the Monthly Review (among others). He is the recipient of numerous grants (e.g., 8 from the National Science Foundation) and awards (e.g., the Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar Award and a Residential Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences - Stanford University). Others books are underway: Stopping State Repression (with Ben Appel); In Search of a Number: Rethinking Rwanda, 1994 (with Allan Stam) and If You Kill a Revolutionary, Do You Kill the Revolution (with Chris Sullivan).  He is also engaged in various data collection efforts, developing crowd-sourcing data collection programs and co-organizing workshops/conferences/webportals facilitating the development of conflict/peace studies. For more information, please refer to the following webpage: christiandavenport.com.