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Information about Political Repression

Political repression is the oppression or persecution of an individual or group for political reasons, particularly for the purpose of restricting or preventing their ability to take part in the political life of society. Political repression may be represented by discriminatory policies, surveillance abuse, police brutality, imprisonment, involuntary settlement, stripping of citizen's rights, and violent action such as the murder, summary executions, torture, forced disappearance and other extrajudicial punishment of political activists, dissidents, or general population.

Where political repression is sanctioned and organised by the state, it may constitute state terrorism or genocide. Systemic and violent political repression is a typical feature of dictatorships, totalitarian states and similar regimes. In such regimes, acts of political repression may be carried out by secret police forces, army, paramilitary groups or death squads.

If political repression is not carried out with the approval of the state, a section of government may still be responsible. An example is the FBI COINTELPRO operations in the United States between 1956 and 1971.

In some states, such as the former Soviet Union, "repression" can be an official term and official legal policy of repression with respect to internal political opponents of the state.

See also

Further reading

Articles Books
  • Davenport, Christian (2007). State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Davenport, Christian, Johnston, Hank and Mueller, Carol (2004). Repression and Mobilization Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Donner, Frank J. (1980). The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-40298-7
  • Donner, Frank J. (1990). Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-05951-4
  • Goldstein, Robert Justin. (1978). Political Repression in Modern America, From 1870 to Present. Boston, G. K. Hall, Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. ISBN 0-8467-0301-7
  • Jensen, Joan M. Army Surveillance in America, 1775 - 1980. New Haven. Yale University Press. 1991. ISBN 0-300-04668-5. Book review retrieved April 3, 2006.
  • Talbert, Jr. Roy. Negative Intelligence: The Army and the American Left, 1917 - 1941. Jackson. University Press of Mississippi, 1991. ISBN 0-87805-495-2. Book review retrieved April 3, 2006.
  • Irvin, Cynthia L. "Militant Nationlism between movement and party in Ireland and the Basque Country
Oppression is the negative outcome experienced by people targeted by the cruel exercise of power in a society or social group. It is particularly closely associated with nationalism and derived social systems, wherein identity is built by antagonism to the other.
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Persecution is the systematic mistreatment of an individual/group by another group. The most common forms are religious persecution, ethnic persecution, and political persecution, though there is naturally some overlap between these terms. The act of killing an offender of the law.
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Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, politics is observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious
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society is a grouping of individuals which is characterized by common interests and may have distinctive culture and institutions. Members of a society may be from different ethnic groups.
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Discrimination

Major forms
Racism
Sexism
Homophobia
Ageism
Antisemitism
Islamophobia
Ableism

Manifestations
Slavery · Racial profiling
Hate speech · Hate crime
Genocide · Ethnocide · Holocaust
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Surveillance abuse is the use of surveillance methods or technology to monitor the activity of an individual or group of individuals in a way which violates the social norms or laws of a society.
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Police brutality is a term used to describe the excessive use of physical force, assault, verbal attacks, and threats by police officers and other law enforcement officers. The term may also be used to apply to such behavior when used by prison officers.
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prison, penitentiary, or correctional facility is a place in which individuals are physically confined or interned and usually deprived of a range of personal freedoms.
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Forced/Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union took several forms. Though the most notorious was the Gulag labor camp system of penal labor, resettling of entire categories of population was another method of political repression.
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A lishenets (Russian: лишенец), from Russian word лишение, "deprivation", properly translated in this context as a disenfranchised
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A summary execution is a type of extrajudicial punishment in which an accused or reported suspect of criminal activity is killed, often at the time and place of their being discovered.
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Torture, according to international law, is "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third
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forced disappearance occurs when an organization forces a person to vanish from public view, either by murder or by simple sequestration. The victim is first kidnapped, then illegally detained in concentration camps, often tortured, and finally executed and the corpse hidden.
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Extrajudicial punishment is punishment without the permission of a court or legal authority. Agents of a state apparatus often carry out this type of punishment if they come to the conclusion that a person is an imminent threat to security.
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Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action to bring about social or political change. This action is in support of, or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument.
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For the Pearl Jam song, see .


A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively opposes an established opinion, policy, or structure.
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State terrorism is a controversial term, with no agreed on definition, used when arguing that there may be a similarity between terrorism and certain acts done by states.

The concept of state terrorism and indeed of terrorism
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Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group. While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, the legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
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dictatorship is an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by a dictator. It has three possible meanings:
  • Roman dictator was a political office of the Roman Republic. Roman dictators were allocated absolute power during times of emergency.

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Totalitarianism is a term employed by some scientists, especially those in the field of comparative politics, to describe modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior.
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Secret police (sometimes political police) are a police organization which operates in secrecy to maintain national security against internal threats to the state. Secret police forces are typically associated with totalitarian regimes.
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Paramilitary designates forces whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military force, but which are not regarded as having the same status.[1] The term uses the Greek/Latin prefix para- ("beside"), also seen in words such as
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Federal Bureau of Investigation

Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity|

Director: Robert S. Mueller III
Deputy Director: John S. Pistole
Department: Justice
Divisions:
  • FBI Academy
  • FBI Laboratory
  • Criminal Justice Information Services

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COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States.
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Motto
"In God We Trust"   (since 1956)
"E Pluribus Unum"   ("From Many, One"; Latin, traditional)
Anthem
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Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (abbreviated USSR, Russian: (help info ) ; tr.
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Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on February 25, 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. It was revised several times. In particular, its Article 58-1 was updated by the listed sub-articles and put in force on June 8, 1934.
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Amnesty International (commonly known as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization which defines its mission as "to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity,
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