Despite its increasingly repressive institutions, Liberia enjoyed rapid economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. This was due in large part to the expansion of exports produced by foreign companies granted generous concessions by the Liberian government. The first major concession was in 1926 to the Firestone Rubber Company. Rubber exports were the main source of economic growth in the 1930s. This was followed after 1945 with numerous concessions in mining, forestry, and agriculture. This chapter compares Liberia’s economic history during this period with that of Mexico under the presidency of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911), which also grew rapidly through the attraction of foreign capital. While research on institutions and economic development has often stressed the importance of limited government, periods of economic growth haven often occurred under authoritarian governments through various means to create substitutes for limited government. Histories of Porfirio Diaz’s government have argued that a system of elite coordination and rent-seeking made contracts with foreign companies credible even in the absence of representative institutions. Ultimately, however, this system fractured with the beginning of the Mexican civil war. This chapter argues that a similar system operated in Liberia, and that the inability of the elite to integrate new members resulted in the overthrow of the Americo-Liberian regime in 1980 and, ultimately, the beginning Liberia’s devastating civil wars.

Chapter 6 first examines contention over the scope of local political representation. Covering the six rounds of city council elections from the first in 1999 to the sixth in 2021, the chapter shows how candidates and parties have been prevented from participating in city council elections through formal and informal processes of disqualification. It also shows how central government supervision and national administrative law constrains the range of local legislation the city councils can pass. I also show that the intergovernmental system is highly regulated and that central government-appointed representatives have broad power over elected officials at the province, district, city, and village level. This chapter concludes by pointing to the mixed legacy of the local electoral and political system created in 1999. On the one hand, central government bureaucracy and national-level laws blocked municipal governments from passing local legislation on most issues or raise the revenue necessary for fulfilling their legal mandates. For example, the first Tehran City Council failed to pass a Tehran Municipal Charter enshrining greater democratic rights for local civil society and autonomy vis-á-vis central government. On the other hand, elected local government became institutionalized as a coherent but subordinate component of the Islamic state. Within these narrow limits, thousands of creative and dedicated municipal councilors and employees did their best to represent their local constituencies and manage their cities.

Since the 1970s, the campaigns of animal protection advocates have been met with increasingly draconian government response, reflected in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s post-9/11 classification of animal rights activists as the “number one domestic terrorism threat.” Animal advocates—who have never harmed a human being—have been targeted by expanded federal and state anti-terrorism legislation, disproportionate prison sentences, sweeping new surveillance powers, and experimental prison units, among other attacks. This article explores how, and why, the civil rights and civil liberties community have largely ignored—and in some cases even embraced— the carceral logic of criminalizing animal rights activists as “terrorists.”

How do authoritarian governments control society? How, in turn, can citizens control the state? The conventional wisdom is that a strong civil society increases citizen control over their governments, even in autocracies. The central argument of this book, by contrast, is that in autocratic states, civil society groups can give officials leverage over citizens and strengthen the state’s coercive capacity. This chapter explains how autocrats from China to Hungary to Venezuela to Russia have used civil society groups to strengthen authoritarian control. These institutions allow autocrats to reduce protest and implement coercive policies by giving authoritarian leaders moral authority and by helping them monitor society. Autocrats use three key tactics of “informal control”: they cultivate civil society groups, co-opt their leaders, and create parallel institutions of infiltration.

This chapter lays out a theory of political control. How does the Chinese state control protest and implement policies such as sweeping urbanization schemes that displace millions or family planning quotas that restrict the reproductive choices of half the population? Scholars of authoritarian regimes like China have often focused on coercive institutions that strengthen state capacity. In this book, by contrast, I focus on everyday, informal methods of coercion. “Informal institutions of control” created by civil society groups encourage obedience by calling on the obligations, allegiances, and bonds that non-state groups create. Drawing on evidence from qualitative case studies, the chapter illustrates the three mechanisms through which informal control occurs: cultivating civil society groups, co-opting local notables, and infiltrating society. Informal control fosters compliance with the state but it can backfire in the long run by creating grievances and linking activists to each other. Finally, I explain how the state strategically deploys each of these strategies.

Cultivating civil society – encouraging the establishment of non-state groups like churches, temples, or civic associations – can strengthen the state’s informal control over society. In this chapter, I show how local officials in China encourage the establishment of lineage associations, temple organizations, and social clubs as a way to infiltrate local society and increase their informal authority. I draw on case studies and a national dataset to show how the presence of these groups helps local officials requisition land and suppress protest. Governments outside China, from Asia to Latin America, have engaged in similar forms of informal control, suggesting the theory may not be limited to China. The flip-side of informal control is that if communities lack strong social organizations, activists can find creative ways to mount spontaneous, leaderless resistance.

Chapter 6 investigates how Kenyatta established an institutional order that kept his political authority insulated from potential challengers. It argues that by controlling the funds and distribution of land resources, Kenyatta successfully isolated competing political actors and institutions, thus preventing various political grievances to spill over into his government. The chapter first highlights the continuity between colonial and post-colonial land politics, but also emphasizes the Kenyan government’s agency in facilitating land accumulation by the elite. Exploring land files from the British and Kenyan National Archives, it shows that Kenyatta had concerns about certain sensitive land settlement schemes, but preferred to secure political order by marginal and well-timed adjustments, instead of profound reforms to change colonial economic structures. The chapter then shows how the quasi-limitless presidential powers established an institutional imbalance, which Kenyatta cultivated very carefully, sparsely meting out personal promises and favours. The competition between parliament and civil administration shows how Kenyatta used informal, yet far-reaching powers to prevent both institutions from escaping his presidential authority, all while remaining unexposed. This subtle imbalance may also explain why the landless and poor remained locked into kafkaesque bureaucratic procedures.