Policing the Organizational Threat in Morocco: Protest and Public Violence in Liberal Autocracies

Abstract

As a prominent form of state violence against civilians, protest policing represents the type of coercion that “liberal” autocrats seek to minimize. Departing from aggregate notions of “mass threat” that dominate studies of authoritarian response to contention, this article develops an event‐level model of protest policing centering the role of social movement organizations in shaping elite threat perceptions and, hence, the likelihood that protests will face state violence. More than public protest per se, I argue that liberal autocrats fear the rise of autonomous, national‐level organizations capable of providing unregulated channels for citizen claim‐making. Having forsworn the ability to control which networks become active as social movement organizations, liberal autocrats use protest policing to dissuade citizens from mobilizing with autonomous organizations and to protect the near‐monopoly of embedded organizations over contention. I illustrate these arguments with unique protest event data from Morocco. I draw implications for the durability of liberalized regimes.