Measuring Repression through Restrictions on Civil Society
On December 29, 2011, Egyptian security forces raided the offices of several international NGOs, leading to a year-long public trial in absentia for the NGO staff involved. In June 2013, 43 NGO employees were convicted of operating unregistered organizations and accepting illegal foreign funding, with prison sentences ranging from one to five years (Loveluck, 2013). While these organizations had technically violated Egypt’s Law 84 of 2002, which required specific registration guidelines and limited foreign funding, they had worked with tacit state approval for much of the decade preceding the Arab Uprisings (Amnesty International, 2013). However, as the post-revolutionary military regime faced growing domestic pressures throughout 2011, the state decided to enforce the long-dormant regulations and shut down the NGOs.
This anti-NGO raid and subsequent trial in Cairo are part of a growing global phenomenon of closing civic space (Carothers & Brechenmacher, 2014; Chaudhry, 2022; Chaudhry & Heiss, 2022a; Dupuy et al., 2021), where states use bureaucratic regulations to repress civil society while avoiding international criticism typically associated with violent human rights abuses. In this chapter, I explore how administrative crackdown presents unique measurement challenges for human rights researchers and suggest ways to address them, informed by my past and ongoing research.
What is civil society and why do states repress it?
The first challenge in quantifying and measuring civil society repression is defining civil society itself. “Civil society” can be defined broadly as “the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes, and values” (Howell et al., 2008, p. 91), and includes both formal and informal
Cover for Innovations in Human Rights: Concepts, Data, and Measurement
Publication day! Check out my chapter on how to measure restrictions on civil society in the new Innovations in Human Rights book (edited by @kellyzvobgo.bsky.social and Francesca Parente) #PoliSky #PoliSciSky
- Preprint: stats.andrewheiss.com/purple-parrot/
- Book: www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/inn...
