Political Repression

Jubilee Partners

Today I returned from having spent 3 days at Jubilee Partners. Jubilee Partners is a refugee resettlement organization located in Comer, Georgia. Comer is a very small town and is about two hours driving distance from Atlanta. On the property live a mixture of families: a few that live there full time and run the organization, and between 3 to 5 refugee families that live there for two and a half months before relocating to Atlanta. 

The refugees that come here before starting their lives in Atlanta have a significant advantage to the others. Here, they have very personalized one-on-one attention, and English classes 6 days a week, as well as other practical activities that help prepare them for life in America. I helped with a teaching class, child care, farming, and translating. Although my stay was short, it was immensely eye-opening. At the time I was there, there were three Burmese families and two Central African families. Spending time with them and the people who run the organization gave me a deeper, more personalized understanding of the struggle of refugees and everything I have read on the subject. Below is an interesting image I found that summarizes the migration of the Burmese to Comer, Georgia. 

Political Repression 

A refugee is someone who has crossed their countries borders in fear of persecution for their political or religious beliefs. My latest assignment was to define the difference between political repression and religious repression. Because I was unable to find anything specific to comparing the two, I decided to divide up the tasks and search for comprehensive definitions, as well as examples on both.

Political Intolerance and Political Repression During the McCarthy Red Scare
James L. Gibson

“Conceptually, I define repressive public policy as statutory restriction on oppositionist political activity (by which I mean activities through which citizens, individually or in groups, compete for political power [cf. Dahl 1971]) upon some, but not all, competitors for political power.3 For example, policy outlawing a political party would be considered repressive, just as would policy that requires the members of some political parties to register with the government while not placing similar requirements on members of other political parties”

Political repression : courts and the law
Linda Camp Keith

Keith describes problems such as: citizens not being able to criticize their governments openly, being arrested without rightful charge, and not having a truly independent judiciary. The book is very useful because it provides examples of contemporary political repression.

La légalité socialiste et les dilemmes de la répression politique

Corneliu Pintilescu

Pintiescu discusses German American political theorist Hannah Arendt’s definition of one of the fundamental elements of totalitarianism: when the judiciary branch dissolves and the law comes systematically violated. She uses the state of Romania in the early 50’s to demonstrate this by explaining the political repression that went on during that time.  The law forebode certain most political parties from forming unless they fit strict criteria.  It was changed to this way, to annihilate competition from the start.

Economic Sanctions and Political Repression: Assessing the Impact of Coercive Diplomacy on Political Freedoms

Dursun Peksen & A. Cooper Drury

It was deefined quite differently in this article:

“level of the government respect for democratic freedoms and human rights.”

Article describes how placing sanctions on a country makes that government more likely to politically repress their people. Peksen and Drury use the example of when the UN placed sanctions against Iraq to illustrate their point: “by diverting shrinking public resources to his supporters in the government and military (Reuther 1995). While Hussein’s regime used public goods to pay off supporters prior to the embargo, the sanctions were meant to weaken his hold on power. Instead, it increased his importance as a supplier of those resources and allowed the Iraqi regime to consolidate its repressive authority over the society.”

During my searches, I noticed a lot of articles came up on communist countries during the cold war used as examples of politically repressive states. I also noticed that the majority of articles, papers, or even books, dove right into the subject, without actually defining it first.