Study title

The dataset is part of a project to investigate justifications of repression in North African autocracies. It was set up to answer the question to what extent and how repressive incidents were communicated and justified in Morocco and Tunisia from 2000 to 2010, before the beginning of the Arab uprising protests.
The event dataset is the first to disaggregate data on repressive incidents in two countries over the course of a decade, providing information about the forms of repression, its targets, the actors involved in repression and its justification, and the communication of state violence. All variables are available in textual form, although the forms of repression and repressive actors are all also listed in binary form to facilitate software-supported analysis. The dataset contains in total 439 repressive incidents: namely, 280 for Tunisia and 159 for Morocco. The data was collected from publicly available reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the U.S. State Department, and organizations and news outlets that covered repressive events and their respective justifications. We complemented these English-language sources with further information from French and Arabic sources and provide all data in English. This systematic collection enables us to assess the extent of justification, as opposed to denial or cover-up, and also to dig into the substantial arguments that were brought forward here. It includes not only cases of protest repression, but also more mundane everyday restrictions on dissidents, and other human rights violations. This gives insight into the political communication of autocracies and their strategies to mitigate the risk of backlash that usually comes with the use of state violence.