This chapter generalizes patterns of judicial and extrajudicial repression in cross-national context. Using original archival data on regime threats and coup plots in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa, I provide statistical evidence that patterns of punishment adhered to strategies of repression as predicted by the main theory: Insider elites were significantly more likely to go to trial; outsider elites were significantly more likely to face extrajudicial repression. I also explore variation in judicial and extrajudicial repression outcomes.

This chapter uses case studies of postcolonial Tanzania and Sierra Leone to examine pathways of persecution and punishment during pivotal moments of autocratic contestation and consolidation. Through careful process tracing, I analyze how the politics of the early independence period, which were fundamentally shaped by the struggle for national control, influenced strategies of judicial and extrajudicial repression in the years that followed. My analysis draws on a variety of archival sources that provide a rare window into the challenges faced by new autocrats, including how threats to autocratic survival were perceived in real time.