Myanmar’s decades-long systematic discrimination against its non-Buddhist minorities is inherently repressive. India’s new marginalization of its 200 million Muslims is clearly repressive. Ethiopia’s invasion and war against Tigray counts as state repression. So do Sudan’s past and possible ongoing genocidal acts in Darfur. Equatorial Guinea’s leaving its mainland inhabitants without access to human and economic rights is repressive. When Mozambique excludes its northernmost citizens from schooling and medical care, that is also repressive. Madagascar’s long neglect of its coastal inhabitants, favoring the lighter-skinned inhabitants of the central plateau, is also repressive.

State repression is governmental behavior “that is enacted by … designated agents of … authority” who employ coercive power to compel national inhabitants to do what the state (and the leader of the state) wants them to do irrespective of their own individual, or even cultural and group, preferences. When Mao sent Chinese elites (including Xi Jinping) into the...

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