State repression in the digital age.
Summary: The digital revolution has been celebrated by policy makers, human rights groups and scientists across the world as an empowering new way for ordinary citizens to collectively mobilize against repressive rulers. Amidst all these euphoric accounts, a crucial question remains unanswered: Why should power-hungry states, with de facto control over citizens' access to social media, impassively concede to defeat by these new tools? The simple answer is: They do not. Behind the scenes, governments across the world have been extremely active in developing and refining a whole arsenal of tools to surveil, manipulate, and censor the digital flow of information in the realm of their authority.
This book theoretically and empirically investigates the link between state-implemented Internet controls and state-sanctioned violent repression. It identifies two main forms of control, which are the restriction (or disruption) of the Internet on the one hand, and digital surveillance on the other hand. Governments face a trade-off: they can either restrict access to the Internet and with it diminish opposition groups’ capabilities, or they can permit the digital exchange of information and monitor it to their own advantage. The choice of Internet control affects the type and scale of state-sanctioned violence used against perceived domestic threats.
The book presents a wealth of empirical support at both the subnational and the cross-country level on how Internet control and state repression in the digital age go hand in hand. In an in-depth analysis of the ongoing Syrian conflict, the book presents evidence on the link between Internet accessibility and state violence in the to date most socially mediated conflict in history. It hereby draws on a newly compiled database of all documented killings committed by the Assad regime in the first four years of the conflict. Qualitative evidence is presented in four short case studies of China, Ethiopia, Bahrain, and Egypt which reveal how the variety of different means for digital control affect state-sanctioned violence in different contexts. Lastly, a global analysis of Internet shutdowns and state repression demonstrates the pervasiveness and magnitude of the issue. The empirical studies in the book present a range of methodological innovations regarding the analyses of large-scale data on human rights violations, including the use of supervised machine learning and statistical methods to correct for incomplete data on violence.
The book highlights the ambiguous role digital technologies play in contentious settings, providing low-cost coordination mechanisms for challengers, but equally informing governments' repressive strategies in to date unexplored ways. As such it offers crucial evidence for our understanding of how governments incorporate the selective access to communication technology into strategies of coercion. At a policy level, the incorporation of Internet controls into the toolkit of repressive governments has far-reaching ramifications for how the current discussion of cybersecurity laws needs to be included into the larger human rights discourse attempting to limit state abuse in the twenty-first century.
Summary: The digital revolution has been celebrated by policy makers, human rights groups and scientists across the world as an empowering new way for ordinary citizens to collectively mobilize against repressive rulers. Amidst all these euphoric accounts, a crucial question remains unanswered: Why should power-hungry states, with de facto control over citizens' access to social media, impassively concede to defeat by these new tools? The simple answer is: They do not. Behind the scenes, governments across the world have been extremely active in developing and refining a whole arsenal of tools to surveil, manipulate, and censor the digital flow of information in the realm of their authority.
This book theoretically and empirically investigates the link between state-implemented Internet controls and state-sanctioned violent repression. It identifies two main forms of control, which are the restriction (or disruption) of the Internet on the one hand, and digital surveillance on the other hand. Governments face a trade-off: they can either restrict access to the Internet and with it diminish opposition groups’ capabilities, or they can permit the digital exchange of information and monitor it to their own advantage. The choice of Internet control affects the type and scale of state-sanctioned violence used against perceived domestic threats.
The book presents a wealth of empirical support at both the subnational and the cross-country level on how Internet control and state repression in the digital age go hand in hand. In an in-depth analysis of the ongoing Syrian conflict, the book presents evidence on the link between Internet accessibility and state violence in the to date most socially mediated conflict in history. It hereby draws on a newly compiled database of all documented killings committed by the Assad regime in the first four years of the conflict. Qualitative evidence is presented in four short case studies of China, Ethiopia, Bahrain, and Egypt which reveal how the variety of different means for digital control affect state-sanctioned violence in different contexts. Lastly, a global analysis of Internet shutdowns and state repression demonstrates the pervasiveness and magnitude of the issue. The empirical studies in the book present a range of methodological innovations regarding the analyses of large-scale data on human rights violations, including the use of supervised machine learning and statistical methods to correct for incomplete data on violence.
The book highlights the ambiguous role digital technologies play in contentious settings, providing low-cost coordination mechanisms for challengers, but equally informing governments' repressive strategies in to date unexplored ways. As such it offers crucial evidence for our understanding of how governments incorporate the selective access to communication technology into strategies of coercion. At a policy level, the incorporation of Internet controls into the toolkit of repressive governments has far-reaching ramifications for how the current discussion of cybersecurity laws needs to be included into the larger human rights discourse attempting to limit state abuse in the twenty-first century.
