Communicating Authoritarian Practices – Justifications of Repression in the Maghreb, 2000-2010

One of the most well-established authoritarian practices is political repression. While many acts of repression occur in secret or are only visible to the targets of repression, at times autocratic officials still feel the need to communicate about them. Framing the targets of repression and their actions in a certain way gives autocratic elites a chance to deter potential or actual dissidents. But autocratic leaders also seek to justify their use of repression vis-à-vis some parts of their population as well as audiences abroad. Previous research has shown the ways in which authoritarian officials use justification narratives to avoid the backlash effect of repression during highly visible and critical situations of contentious politics. However, we know much less about how repression is communicated under everyday authoritarianism in the absence of extraordinary mobilization. This paper thus seeks to shed light on the communication of repression under “normal authoritarianism” in two North African states, Tunisia and Morocco. The focus on the 2000 years covers the era before the Arab uprisings, against the backdrop of the Global War on Terror. In the comparative context of the Maghreb region, Tunisia under Ben Ali was then characterized by a high degree of state repression against diverse groups across the political spectrum. Although in Morocco at the time the new king installed a truth commission dealing with human rights abuses of the decades before, dissenters and especially Western Sahara activists still faced repression. This paper is the first to systematically investigate how officials in autocracies communicate and justify different types of repressive acts directed against different targets. Incumbents’ communication strategies vary with respect to how they publicize, admit to, or conceal certain forms of repression. The conceptual framework draws on research on political violence, authoritarian legitimation, and political communication. Empirically, the paper draws on a novel original database, the “Justifications of Repressive Incidents in Morocco and Tunisia Dataset”, which contains ca. 450 repressive events between 2000–2010, based on reports by human rights organizations and news outlets that were coded together with their respective justifications. While due to their oftentimes covert nature it is impossible to arrive at a representative sample of repressive incidents, this systematic set nonetheless enables us to assess the extent of justifications as opposed to denial or silence and map different configurations of variables. Autocratic officials choose different types of justifications depending on their own roles, who the repressive agents were, and against whom they employed which forms of repression. The contribution highlights the judiciary’s role in justifying repression, since judicial repression is a common and well-sourced phenomenon in the two states under investigation. This novel approach adds an important piece to the puzzle of authoritarian survival in the MENA region and beyond.