Political analysis of protest and repression, state repression

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

For the second time in five years, citizens of Hong Kong mobilized in protest against proposed legislation that threatened to erode the Special Administrative Region's relative degree of autonomy from the People's Republic of China. The ensuing Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement subsequently became the largest social movement in Hong Kong's history. While the movement had peaceful beginnings, clashes between police and protesters turned increasingly violent over time. Under what conditions do primarily nonviolent movements escalate to violence? Given the widespread diffusion of social movements around the world, insights into potential explanations to this question are important for both policymakers and citizens alike. Regarding this question of violent escalation, the social movements literature suggests that movements make strategic decisions to escalate, are driven toward this outcome by state repression, or alternatively engage in nonviolent escalation. This paper argues that a combination of state repression and a determination of the inefficacy of nonviolence by movement actors influences the likelihood of violent escalation. In a qualitative case study of the Anti-ELAB Movement, this paper finds support for the hypothesis that a combination of state repression and the perceived ineffectiveness of nonviolent protest drives violent escalation. Biography Connor Weathers is currently a senior at Suffolk University in Boston, MA studying Government with a concentration in International Relations. His main research interests are focused on international conflict and American foreign policy. In addition to coursework, he has served for the past seven months as a Data & Analytics intern with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, assisting the federal government's COVID-19 response. He has also interned as a research assistant with a Professor of International Relations at Suffolk. Following the completion of his undergraduate degree in December 2022, Connor plans to pursue graduate study in the field of International Relations.

In the history of Germany, Italy, the former USSR and the “people's republics of the socialist camp,” a number of countries in America and Asia, we can conclude that among the intelligentsia of countries where totalitarian regimes existed, there was always resistance. But, this resistance had different forms.
One of the methods of resistance was a kind of "Aesopian language." Usually, Soviet writers, poets and cinematographers used this technique. Showing in their works in a negative way, the “bourgeois past”, the notions of “political pluralism”, free elections, freedom of speech, assembly, an adversarial judicial system, and protection of rights were brought to the public.
Working on Bulgarian archeology research works within the framework of the Horizon 2020 project of the European Commission, one article of eminent Bulgarian archaeologist, cultural scientist, historian Nikola Mavrodinov called our attention. The article was published in the Soviet scientific journal “Soviet Archeology”, XXIV issue, for 1955. The article “Excavation and research in Bulgaria in recent years” was in Russian and had the character of a report on the state of archeology in Bulgaria after the establishment of the communist system.
From the first pages it is clear that the author follows the established schemes and draws a “terrible” picture of the Bulgarian archeology of the capitalist period.
Of the 33 pages of the article, 14 are mentioned in different volumes and approaches by excavations carried out in Bulgaria until September 9, 1944, i.e. until establishing a communist regime.
References to studies of the “backward bourgeois” period of Bulgaria in the article are no less than literature after the “establishment of socialism”.
As can be seen from the examples given in N. Mavrodinov’s article in “bourgeois” Bulgaria, archaeological and cultural studies corresponded to the requirements of their time and were in no way inferior to research in the USSR from the same period. Thus, we see that in N. Mavrodinov’s article there is a tangible contrast of the description of “underdeveloped archeology of bourgeois Bulgaria”, which he outlined at the beginning of his article, with the given facts, proving quite the opposite.
In our opinion, the article by N. Mavrodinov is a vivid example of the “Aesopian language” of a scientist whose country was occupied and the regime established by the metropolis demanded that a scientist to downplay all achievements before the occupation. It is by using this “Aesopian language” that the scientist at least shows that not everything was negative in the past, or one should not see the past at all in the negative.