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 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.

Surveillance, The Cold War, And Latin American Literature is a cultural and aesthetic analysis of the relationship between secret police agencies and the intellectuals and writers in Latin America during the Cold War. It examines the period from 1950 to 1989 from an interdisciplinary perspective, providing an original understanding of how the Cold War produced stories and created ‘truths’ at a national level through its mechanisms of surveillance and control and how that modus operandi transformed the broader society and its culture. It combines analysis of novels, short stories, and poems by Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, José Revueltas, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, among others, with spy reports and declassified documents from Mexican, Guatemalan, Chilean, and Uruguayan police archives, as well as the CIA, FBI, and Stasi archives. Surveillance traces how the paradigmatic change that began in the Renaissance with Brunelleschi’s re-invention of perspective radically transformed the human locus of enunciation, allowing for the emergence of a new world vision. This consequence of modernity created a basis for paranoid societies like those that emerged during the Cold War in Latin America.

At Eumeneia (Işıklı) distinctive phrasing was used in the third century on the gravestones of Christians. Even at the time of Decius (249–251), it seems, fear of persecution was not severe enough to deter Christians from making their gravestones identifiable in this way. Like other Phrygian cities, Eumeneia seems to have flown below the radar of official scrutiny – a fact which facilitated change in the sacred canopy. Over a hundred Eumeneian formula gravestones survive, some of them dated. The dated examples were erected between 246 and 274. These dated stones (reproduced in Appendix 2) are discussed. They commemorate a partial cross-section of the Christian community at Eumeneia and Apameia (Dinar). On the imperial estates in the Phrygian–Pisidian borderland to the east of Eumeneia, a series of inscriptions attests a cult-based association (the Tekmoreian Guest-Friends) whose purpose was to demonstrate loyalty to the emperor. These inscriptions, with their lengthy lists of contributors, show that polytheist religion was lively and capable of innovation in the rural districts at the time when the Eumeneian formula was in use not far away in Eumeneia and Apameia.