Elizabeth Nugent’s After Repression makes a scholarly contribution on three levels. First, it offers a solid and interesting explanation for the outcomes of polarization and democratization in transition periods following the collapse of an authoritarian regime. Second, by exploring this explanation in the context of two recent cases, Tunisia and Egypt, it offers a coherent account of those complex experiences; these two cases are likely to loom large in subsequent scholarship on uprisings and regime change. Third, and likely most significantly, the book offers a novel account of how repressive tools are built and of the effects of using them, anchoring the former in history and the latter in social psychology. The first contribution requires some simplifying assumptions that greatly add in clarity and accessibility, but they may go too far for those interested in these particular cases. The second contribution is notable for its ability to bring a level of retrospective coherence to confused situations, although again it tends to favor clarity over verisimilitude. The third contribution is the subtlest and deepest and is likely to be most helpful and indeed influential over the long term.
Nugent’s general argument is that when authoritarian regimes use indiscriminate repression against opposition, they provide mechanisms and conditions for those opposition elements to find some common ground and that, after such regimes fall, such common ground makes polarization less likely and facilitates agreements that enable the construction of democratic systems. By contrast, when such regimes treat different opposition groups differently, they sow the seeds for polarization in any transitional situation and such polarization inhibits democratic outcomes.
This general argument is explored in the Tunisian and Egyptian cases. The argument is very clearly stated, and the cases are squarely situated within broader scholarly discussions about democratization and transition. This clarity sometimes leads to framing claims in terms that are quite strong—for example, downplaying the role of the military and suggesting a fairly high level of determinism—that are not likely to be fully persuasive for an audience deeply familiar with the two cases.
To be sure, Nugent generally favors modest terms for her causal argument, using words like “shape,” “affect,” and “condition” far more often than “create,” “define,” or “determine”—although the latter are used on occasion. Such careful word choice is to the author’s credit. The argument on path dependency for patterns of repression comes closest to a historical determinism; the other parts of the causal chain are framed a bit less ambitiously but are still persuasively argued. With a phrasing that is generally probabilistic rather than deterministic, the framework of the book is better at supplementing other explanations than at replacing or disproving them. Factors often cited for preventing democratization or aggravating polarization, such as the role of the military, are dealt with a bit too quickly; some other factors—electoral outcomes resulting in a split assembly in Tunisia but a strong Islamist majority in Egypt—are not discussed.
The second contribution of the book is on an empirical level. The pace of events in both countries was dizzying; the number of highly engaged actors and analysts (and actor-analysts) was large, and indeed, the stakes were high enough to leave much of the narrative terrain contentious. Assembling a coherent analysis of the political tumult in both countries—and doing so in a manner that is judicious, well informed, and liable to be legible to a disciplinary audience with a specific vocabulary (about regimes and transitions, most specifically)—is not an easy task.
This clarity will aid understanding for comparativists. However, those whose interests are more specific to the two empirical cases than the cross-national study of regime change may find that the framework does not always fit. The contrast in outcomes between Tunisia and Egypt did indeed appear stark from the perspective of the half-decade after the 2011 uprisings (when the research was conducted). It is less clear now—and may continue to be uncertain in the future—whether demarcating that period as a clear “transition” with an authoritarian outcome in Egypt and a democratic one in Tunisia will be the most useful lens for understanding regime change.
But the final and most profound contribution made by the book is its innovative approaches to two subjects that play supporting roles in the argument but nevertheless help us to think about some critical areas a bit differently than is usually done. First, Nugent precedes the full explication of her argument with an exploration of why regimes differ in their repressive strategies, and in doing so, her approach comes close to undermining the phrase “repressive strategies” itself. She argues that state formation—and, in these two cases, critical institutional developments in the period of foreign control—forges patterns that later regimes find themselves forced to use. In that sense, repression is more a function of the tools available than a phenomenon that follows from any strategic logic on the part of the regime. This is a welcome departure from the functionalism that has crept into so much of the scholarship on authoritarianism, though again the clarity of the presentation sometimes seems to make the argument a bit too stark and deterministic, as if choices made within a colonial period are made for all time.
Second, the book offers an account of the effects of repression that takes individual experiences very seriously. Torture, incarceration, and exile can have profound effects. The impact that interests Nugent the most is the way such repressive tools can enhance empathy among ideologically diverse victims who share common experiences (and even common prison cells). She establishes the plausibility of this account with a survey experiment but persuasively traces its relevance and significance through interviews with activists in the two cases.
In sum, close readers of After Repression will be rewarded by sophisticated insights that are underplayed when the general argument is laid out but are richly developed within several chapters. Those seeking to understand political trajectories in Egypt and Tunisia in the 2010s will find a clear, plausible, and sensible account. Those who wish to probe a bit deeper will get richer rewards for how to think about repression’s history and its effects.
