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1. When Does Lethal Repression Fail? Unarmed Militancy and Backfire in Bolivia, 1982–2021

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X24000208  

   Bjork-James, Carwil (February 2024, Journal of Latin American Studies)

   Abstract Repressive state violence, intended to tamp down collective mobilisation, sometimes inspires greater participation by protesters. When popular and/or elite reactions cause the repressing party to concede, civil resistance scholars define the failure of state repression as ‘backfire’. Some have proposed that movements’ nonviolent discipline is essential to backfire. This article demonstrates that movements that practise ‘unarmed militancy’ – forceful, combative tactics less damaging than armed violence – can also succeed through backfire, achieving policy concessions and even presidential resignations, and presents a qualitative comparative analysis of the outcomes of 48 protest events with multiple deaths in Bolivia between 1982 and 2019, and a case-based analysis of how either movements or repressors prevailed. Movements that confronted deadly repression succeeded in 57–8 per cent of cases. Whether or not protesters engaged in lethal defensive violence did not affect their likelihood of success. However, state repression of guerrillas and paramilitary groups, and during polarised partisan conflicts, was consistently successful. Current understandings of backfire need to be reconsidered in light of successful unarmed militant protest in Bolivia and numerous other locations worldwide. 

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2. Hierarchies of Violence, Victimhood, and Remedy in the Pursuit of Women’s Rights After War

   https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf051  

   Berry, Marie; Lake, Milli; Raja, Sinduja; Zarook, Soraya (June 2025, Global Studies Quarterly)

   Abstract Recent postwar recovery efforts have paved the way for reforms that advance women's participation in politics, inclusion in the economy, and access to justice. In this article, we show how a singular emphasis on gender reforms after war that are inattentive to other societal cleavages can leave various forms of marginalization in the shadows. Subnational interviews on the reverberations of gender reforms in five postwar countries expose three hierarchies that structure access to rights for war-affected communities. We reveal which violence is privileged, whose violence is privileged, and which responses are privileged from the perspectives of differently situated war-affected women, showing how patterns of access to new rights can reinforce exclusionary dynamics. Importantly, because international and domestic actors tend to privilege top-down, state-based responses to wartime violence (what we term hierarchies of remedy), hierarchies of violence and victimhood frequently also reflect state actors’ priorities. Speaking to debates on legal and policy reform, we acknowledge that attention to women's rights after war offers an urgently needed corrective to earlier gender inequalities. Yet, a singular focus on gender reforms that ignores other conflict-related cleavages, particularly those that are amplified by the distribution of political power within the state apparatus, can risk obstructing access for marginalized women, sometimes reproducing grievances that contributed to violence in the first place. For policymakers, we suggest that striving for more equal access to new rights after war will help foster a more inclusive—and therefore more stable and durable—peace. 

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3. Uncovering Economic Complicity: Explaining State-led Human Rights Abuses in the Corporate Context

   Olsen, T. D. (January 2023, Journal of business ethics)

   Today’s scholarship and policymaking on business and human rights (BHR) urges businesses to better understand their human rights responsibilities and remedy them, when and if abuses do occur. Despite the public discourse about businesses and human rights, the state—as the main duty bearer in international human rights law—plays a fundamental role as the protector and enforcer of human rights obligations. This is a problem because the existing literature overlooks state involvement as perpetrators of abuse in the corporate context. We develop the term economic complicity to shed light on the state’s role in directly or indirectly abusing human rights within a corporation’s sphere of influence, such as police violence toward protests or granting environmental licenses without adhering to legally required community consultations. We ask: What contributes to the state’s engagement in economic complicity in corporate human rights abuses? We assess hypotheses emergent from the democratic change and development studies literatures with a unique database that includes economic complicity data from Latin America, the Corporations and Human Rights Database (CHRD). This research has important theoretical implications for the business ethics and BHR literatures, as understanding economic complicity highlights the need for businesses actors to avoid shirking their moral responsibilities to not only ‘do no harm’ but also to protect human rights when they are threatened by the state. 

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4. The diversity of repression: Measuring state repressive repertoires with events data

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343320983424  

   Bagozzi, Benjamin_E; Berliner, Daniel; Welch, Ryan_M (April 2021, Journal of Peace Research)

   Tactical repertoires of mobilization and repression play an essential role in understanding dynamics of political violence, yet existing quantitative approaches focus primarily on intensities or counts of repressive actions. We focus instead on the diversity of repression, and demonstrate a novel method of measuring repertoires of state repression using event data. We show that more repressive states are likely to employ more diverse repertoires of repression, rather than specializing narrowly in particularly coercive tactics. We demonstrate that, globally, repertoires of state repression are growing less diverse over time. Finally, in the Online appendix, we model repertoires of repression across countries and over time, finding evidence of broader repertoires during protest and civil war, but narrower under democratic regimes and international human rights treaties. 

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5. Data Tactics in Worker Advocacy Research

   Spektor, F; Khovanskaya, V; Forlizzi, J; Fox, SE (October 2025, Computer supported cooperative work CSCW)

   Lewkowicz, M; Schmidt, K (Ed.)

   This paper draws on Michel de Certeau’s notion of "tactics" to explore the use of data in labor organizing research in CSCW [? ]. Taking a historical view, we first analyze a set of cases from 20th century US labor history that offer three distinct lenses on the risks of data-based advocacy campaigns: wagers, compromises, and concessions. Across our cases, we frame reformers’ use of data tactics as a rhetorical move, taken to advance incremental worker gains under conditions of precarity [90, 105, 154]. However, by continuing to rely on certain data-based arguments in the short term, we argue that labor reformers may have limited the frame of debate for broader arguments necessary to improve conditions in the long-term. These tensions follow us into data-based advocacy research in the present, such as the emerging "digital workerism" movement [70]. To ensure the continuation of responsible advocacy research in CSCW, we offer insights from social justice movements to suggest how members of the HCI and CSCW communities can work more intentionally alongside (or without) data methods to support worker-led direct action. 

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