The concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the book by juxtaposing the workings of Accra’s old, established station with the designated function of a government-mandated and top-down administered public road transport terminal – the ‘new station’, as Accra’s urbanites have pithily dubbed it. It scales up the comparison to consider the significance of urban infrastructure as a ‘hard’ technical system and as a ‘soft’ system of sociality in relation to questions of governance, social order, and the significance of usage. Finally, it reflects on the broader implications of this study by pointing out empirical and theoretical continuities with the practices, places, and politics of urban hustle that go beyond this particular case of a West African bus station.

Chapter 3 explores the multiplicity of ordering dynamics that are integral to the workings of the station, and the complex and contingent constellations that emerge from this multiplicity. Expanding on the notions of Guyer’s ‘niche economy’ and Geertz’s ‘involution’, it discusses the institutional arrangements through which people create and accommodate themselves to the hustle as situation, a process that reproduces the complexities that form the social space and social order of the station. The ethnography presented in this chapter focuses on the changing occupational organisation of the station’s transport trades. These shifting arrangements, it is argued, are characterised by involuting growth within a niche economy logic, and they offer a window onto the constituents of hustle as a distinct mode of production and organisation that prevails in many spheres of African cities.

Death constitutes a deep life crisis to the living – depending on the departed, to families, communities, and societies. In this chapter, the author discusses the eminent strategies of overcoming this crisis, that is, funeral and burial practices, and the ritual sequences that connect the two. Both the Roman and the Chinese cases have received much scholarly attention. Armin Selbitschka’s chapter distinguishes itself through its comparative perspective and the theoretical charge with which it is enriched from performance theory and sociologies of place. In the study of each culture, careful consideration is given to the historical development across time. Embarking from conceptual debates on the disruption of the social order and the innate capacity of social performances to restore it, he discusses various practices revolving around the dead, including the preparation of the departed, funerary cortèges, and orations. The subsequent section extends the analysis to the inherent meaning of tombs – their place in the urban landscape, their commemorative force, and their embodiment of social hierarchies. In so doing, it reveals a curious spatial dynamics between the funeral’s beginning in the private sphere and its transition into the public arena. Due to the different configuration of public in Rome and in China, Selbitschka in conclusion makes visible the culture-specific traits in the performances that accompanied mourners on their way to the tomb and beyond, into a future where the social crisis of death was resolved, for the time being.

The discipline of sociology focuses on interactions and group processes from the perspective of emergent phenomena at the social level. Concepts like social embedding, norms, group-level motivation, or status hierarchies can only be defined and conceptualized in contexts in which individuals are involved in social interaction. Such concepts share the property of being social facts that cannot be changed by individual intention alone and that require some element of individual adjustment to the socially given condition. Sociologists study the embeddedness of individual motivations or preferences in the context of social phenomena as such and the impact of these phenomena on individual adaptation. However, these phenomena can only be observed in individual human behavior, and this tension between the substantive focus on the aggregate level and the analytical focus on the individual level is the challenge that sociological experiments confront.

This chapter lays out a novel theory of elite cohesion, coercive capacity, and authoritarian social order. Enabling and controlling coercive agents is a fundamental challenge confronting all dictators. Actors like secret police chiefs pose a grave threat to incumbent authoritarian elites because they hold the means of violence and could use them to overthrow their masters. Elites’ task of monitoring and controlling their coercive agents is a collective action problem. All members of an authoritarian ruling coalition are better off if they cooperate to control coercive agents. However, individual authoritarian elites have incentives to defect from cooperation. When authoritarian elites cannot cooperate to prevent insubordination by coercive agents, they reduce coercive capacity. Institutions promote authoritarian elite cohesion. They provide structures of shared expectations or focal points that allow authoritarian elites to pool their resources, cooperate, and control coercive agents. In Cold War communist Central and Eastern Europe, Stalinism was the institutional structure that promoted elite cohesion and led to the construction of large, capable coercive institutions across the region.

In this chapter, I analyze data on over 300 individual members of the communist regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. I explore how an abrupt post-Stalinist transition in the wake of the Soviet dictator’s death affected elite cohesion and the relationship between ruling coalitions and their coercive subordinates. Specifically, I test whether breakdowns in elite cohesion led to more punishment of coercive agency chiefs, and their more frequent removal from office. My test of this argument exploits both variation in elite cohesion across Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes, and variation in Soviet authority over different types of coercive agents. I analyze original data on members of communist ruling coalitions to estimate survival models of their tenures. I find that the tenures of Defense Ministers and secret police chiefs were similar under Stalinist coalitions, but secret police chiefs had significantly shorter tenures than Defense Ministers under post-Stalinist coalitions.

This chapter introduces the research design and comparative case studies in Part II of the book. In this part of the book, I present historical case studies of Poland and East Germany. This is the qualitative component of the integrated, multimethod difference-in-difference research design with which I test the theoretical propositions laid out in Chapter 2. The first case experienced a post-Stalinist transition, while the second did not. By carefully tracing developments in elite cohesion and coercive capacity across the two otherwise very similar cases, I demonstrate that post-Stalinist transitions caused reductions in coercive capacity. I do so by showing that trends in capacity were similar across the Polish and East German regimes before 1953; that post-Stalinist transitions occurred randomly and were not themselves a function of coercive capacity; and by tracing the causal mechanisms that linked transitions to declines in capacity.

In this chapter, I explain why the Stasi became the largest and most capable secret police force in Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. The shock of Stalin’s death did not cause a leadership transition and wholesale repudiation of Stalinism in the GDR. Instead, the ruling coalition persisted and purged their rivals after 1953. Walter Ulbricht and his fellow elites survived and persisted in their strong commitment to a harsh, Stalinist regime of repression. This persistence had profound consequences for the security apparatus, repression, and social order. The Stasi continued its growth in capacity to become an all-present repressive force. The story of elite cohesion and coercive capacity in East Germany is one of continuity and growth – unlike that of disruption, collapse, and stagnation in Poland. And as the commitment to surveillance and repression continued unabated in the GDR, the fortunes of regime opponents waned. With a few notable exceptions, dissidents and opponents were isolated and neutralized in East Germany.

In this part of the book, I move from a comparative historical analysis of Poland and East Germany in Part II to an analysis of quantitative data drawn from all the socialist dictatorships of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania. The purpose of the following two chapters is to test whether the argument developed in Chapter 2 can travel beyond the Polish and East German cases examined above to explain variation in the turnover of coercive elites and the size of coercive institutions across the region from 1945 to 1989.

In this conclusion, I draw broader lessons for the study of authoritarian regimes from the analyses of this book. I call for greater attention to coercive institutions by scholars of authoritarian politics, and for authoritarian regimes to be theorized as groups rather than unitary actors. I briefly discuss the applicability of my theoretical argument to the Chinese case. Under Mao Zedong, breakdown of elite cohesion during the Cultural Revolution was associated with a decline in the capacity of the Ministry of Public Security. This mirrors reductions in coercive capacity after post-Stalinist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe.

This introduction lays out the problem of enabling and controlling coercive agents under authoritarian regimes. It describes puzzling variation in the size and activities of coercive institutions across six regimes in Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. The theoretical approach of the book is briefly discussed, emphasizing elite cohesion over political threats. The research design, plan, and empirical findings of the book are discussed.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how the shock of Stalin’s death in 1953 caused a collapse in the cohesion of the Polish communist ruling coalition. This breakdown caused a persistent decline in the regime’s coercive capacity. The transition to a post-Stalinist ruling coalition in Warsaw removed the institutional basis for cooperation among PZPR elites. The highest echelons of the communist regime could no longer agree on an appropriate repressive policy or effectively monitor and control their coercive agents. The reformed and reduced post-Stalinist secret police simply did not employ enough agents and secret informants to effectively monitor and repress opponents. Opposition to the communist government among industrial workers and university students crystallized in the 1960s, persisted for decades, and became organized in durable social movements. By the late 1970s, the Polish regime faced a large, well-organized opposition movement in the trade union, Solidarity. The imposition of martial law and reconstruction of the security apparatus after the militarization of the regime in 1980 were too little, too late for the PZPR regime.

In this chapter, I test the effects of post-Stalinist transitions on two important measures of agency capacity: officers employed and individuals registered as secret informants by coercive agencies. I present an original cross-national dataset on officer and informant numbers for every coercive agency in communist Central and Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989. I show that countries that experienced post-Stalinist transitions had similarly sized coercive agencies to other states before 1953, but these agencies shrank thereafter while others continued to grow. I then estimate a series of difference-in-difference models to test the effect of post-Stalinist transitions on agency size. I find that agencies under post-Stalinist regimes had significantly smaller coercive agencies after Stalin’s death. This confirms the theoretical logic laid out in Chapter 2 in a broader setting than the comparative historical analyses of Poland and East Germany in Chapters 4 and 5. Although the number of cases and coverage of data here are limited, my results suggest that the logic of elite cohesion and coercive capacity laid out in Chapter 2 is applicable to a wide range of authoritarian regimes.

This chapter outlines the Laudian critique of puritan scripturalism, and the ways in which what the Laudians saw as the puritan insistence of the right of every Christian to a private judgement of what the scripture meant and a consequent duty, on the basis of that judgement, to hold the doings of their superiors in church and state to account. This, the Laudians claimed, undermined the authority of both the clergy and the church, not to mention order in church, state and society. At stake was not only a right to interpret scripture, but also claims to the testimony of the Holy Spirit. For the Laudians, such claims upset, indeed inverted, social and gender hierarchies, and utterly subverted the authority of the clergy. Again the result was a de facto, if not all too often, a de jure, separation.

This chapter explores the contrast between Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement as a natural experiment in comparative policing. I look at the different roles played by police within the larger historical dynamics of these two events. My goal is to distinguish the democratic qualities of Taiwanese policing from the more authoritarian qualities evident in Hong Kong. I develop a theoretical framework for analyzing this distinction by combining Peter Manning’s idea of police dramaturgy with Victor Turner’s theory of social dramas and Carl von Clausewitz’ approach to violent politics. This perspective, I argue, helps illuminate how the democratic qualities of police action in response to unsettling events can influence the longer historical/structural patterns linking what comes after to what went before.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.