‘The Full Weight of the State’: The Logic of Random State-Sanctioned Violence
| Date | 01 November 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343306069189 |
| Author | Francisco Herreros |
| Published date | 01 November 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Introduction
The existing literature on state-sanctioned
violence has largely focused on its forms and
causes. Most studies stress the crucial impact
that the nature of political regimes has on the
mode and magnitude of state repression.
One oft-repeated conclusion, and one on
which there exists almost complete consen-
sus, is that democracies repress much less
than authoritarian regimes (Poe & Tate,
1994: 860; Davenport, 1995: 690; Gartner
& Regan, 1996: 274; Tilly, 2003). Although
this hypothesis regarding the effect of politi-
cal regimes on state violence has been ques-
tioned on the basis of its limited ability to
account, for example, for different modes of
violence in countries with the same political
regime (Ron, 2003: 4), the widespread use of
repression by dictatorships is a commonplace
in the literature on political violence.
Authors have defined authoritarian regimes’
objectives in using repression as being to
instil fear into those it needs to control
(Denemark & Lehman, 1984), to attain
compliant behaviour from citizens or to
maximize power, with the constraint of the
citizens’ loyalty (Wintrobe, 1998: 58–59).
As well as highlighting the influence that
regime type has on state repression, the
literature often also identifies a number of
other variables that help explain the scale of
© 2006 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 43, no. 6, 2006, pp. 671–689
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343306069189
‘The Full Weight of the State’: The Logic of
Random State-Sanctioned Violence*
FRANCISCO HERREROS
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
The literature on political violence has advanced some hypotheses concerning the forms and the causes
of state-sanctioned violence and terror: why some governments make more widespread use of violence
than others. However, one aspect of this question that has scarcely been considered concerns the con-
ditions under which state violence achieves its goal, that is, to secure citizens’ submission to the state.
This article offers an analysis of the conditions of success of a certain form of state violence: random
repression by the state. It shows that random repression usually does not prevent a shift in popular
support from the regime to the opposition. But under certain circumstances, if the state resorts to
random violence but at the same time mimics, to a certain extent, the behaviour of a non-arbitrary
repressor, this form of political violence by the state can achieve success. This explanation is illustrated
with various cases of random state-sanctioned violence, including occupied Europe during World War
II, El Salvador in the 1980s, present-day Israel and, especially, the terror in the Soviet Union during
the Stalinist period. The Soviet regime combined random violence, through the imposition of quotas
of arrests on each region, with signals about the legality of the arrests both before and during the terror
process. These signals included the 1936 Soviet Constitution and the extraction of confessions of imag-
inary crimes. This strategy was largely successful.
* I would like to thank the editors and two anonymous
reviewers for their useful comments. Henar Criado, David
Laitin, Benjamin Valentino and James Ron also gave very
useful advice. Correspondence: herreros@ceacs.march.es.
state-sanctioned violence. These include the
presence of authoritarian ideologies that
justify the use of violence (López, 1984:
63–64; Rummel, 2004), various aspects of
political culture (Della Porta, 1995: 57;
Wisler & Kriesi, 1998), a record of state
repression in the past (Gurr, 1986), the
involvement of the state in a civil war (Poe
& Tate, 1994; Krain, 1997: 336), the level of
social and economic inequality (Henderson,
1991: 124), international monitoring of
human rights (Ron, 1997; Gartner & Regan,
1996) and the weakness of the state
(Brubaker & Laitin, 1998).
There exist, therefore, a wide array of
hypotheses about why some governments
make more widespread use of violence than
others. We can also identify an incipient
literature on the different forms of state
violence, most notably Ron’s (2003) study of
state-sponsored violence in present-day
Serbia and Israel. Nevertheless, one aspect of
this question that has scarcely been con-
sidered concerns the conditions under which
state violence achieves its goal, that is, in
which it does indeed secure citizens’ submis-
sion to the state.
In this article, I analyse the conditions of
success of a certain form of state violence:
arbitrary or random repression by the state.
The literature already includes a few studies
that suggest a number of different hypothe-
ses to explain why states resort to random
violence towards citizens. Stanley (1996:
131) considers that, in El Salvador, the
security forces resorted to random violence
because they had a limited capacity to target
the guerrillas through infiltration and intel-
ligence gathering. Kalyvas (2004) provides
numerous examples of arbitrary violence
and reasons for incumbents sometimes
using this type of violence. In this article,
however, the explanation for the resort to
random violence by the state is a question of
secondary importance. My primary focus
here is not the reason why the state resorts
to random violence, but rather, when such
action occurs, under what conditions does it
succeed in deterring opposition to the
regime. My analysis is illustrated by the case
of the so-called Great Terror in the Soviet
Union in 1937–38, when over 1,565,000
people were arrested, of whom about
700,000 were executed (Jansen & Petrov,
2002: 104). Some of the victims were high-
ranking members of the Communist Party,
but the majority were rank-and-file
members and ordinary citizens. All these
people were forced to confess to imaginary
crimes against the state, and most of the
victims were randomly selected. The Great
Terror has habitually been interpreted, to a
certain extent, as the product of the
irrational mind of a paranoid dictator
(Tucker, 1990: 162; Knight, 1993: 6;
Deutscher, 1984: 326). In contrast, I will
treat the terror as a phenomenon in which
both the Soviet leadership and citizens are
assumed to have behaved rationally. My aim
here is not really to explain the causes of the
Great Terror, nor even to explain the
duration and scale of the repression. As
stated above, the main objective of this
article is to identify the conditions under
which random political violence may
achieve its goals. While I will say something
about why the Soviet state resorted to arbi-
trary terror, I will mainly discuss why this
succeeded in eliminating potential opposi-
tion to the regime. I have selected this case
because it is an example of arbitrary violence
that succeeds in eliminating opposition to
the regime, and, therefore, it is a good illus-
tration of the general model of successful
state-sanctioned arbitrary violence that I
present.
In order to develop the hypothesis of the
article, I will combine the narratives of some
examples of random state-sanctioned
violence, especially the Great Terror, with
two game-theoretic models, in line with the
‘analytic narratives’ approach advocated by
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 43 / number 6 / november 2006
672
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