INVENTING WITHIN LIMITS
Until now my discussion appears to suggest that institutional settings somehow dictate state action through preexisting institutional routines, norms, or logics of appropriateness. Such a determinist understanding of repression, however, would be misguided. As this book's case studies demonstrate in detail, states respond creatively to rules and institutional settings, taking structural constraints into consideration while simultaneously devising new methods of violence.[50] State repression is not cleanly produced by institutional rules, but is rather created through a
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chaotic negotiation process in which soldiers, police, and paramilitary gunmen work with, around, and through institutional rules.[51] At the same time, however, room for maneuver is not unlimited, and institutional settings do matter. As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggests, social action is a process of "invention within limits."[52] To discover how this works in practice, we must closely examine the nuts and bolts of repression in individual settings of violence.