Policing is a mainstay of modern states, yet police abuses persist even in democracies. This article advances a new explanation for repression, arguing that police impose not only social order, but also economic order in developing economies. This model, called labor repressive policing, theorizes that landowners mobilize police when they have incentives to control workers but the costs of private coercion are high. I study this process through a mixed-methods examination of the tea plantation economy of Assam, India, where over one million workers descend from British indentured laborers. Using nearly four decades of media reports and the complete record of legal cases documenting police abuses, I employ a spatial regression discontinuity design across plantation boundaries and their catchments. Policing sharply increases in catchment areas surrounding plantations, the residential zones where laborers live beyond employers’ direct control. Catchment areas experience a 13% increase in policing events compared to both remote rural areas and plantations. A novel surname-based measure of the labor population from 24 million geocoded voter records shows that increased policing responds specifically to labor concentration, not to marginality more broadly. Qualitative evidence from over 60 interviews reveals how landowners use private coercion on plantations while relying on police beyond their reach. This project demonstrates how police repression is shaped by landowner incentives, revealing how state coercion enforces economic hierarchies in developing democracies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Emily Russell is the 2026-2027 Gerhard Casper Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL. She received her Ph.D. in political science at Stanford University focusing on comparative politics. Emily’s dissertation project examined the role of the police in enforcing economic order through the function of labor repression in unequal enclaves in democracies, with a focus on the tea plantation economy in northeast India. In other ongoing research, she focuses on carceral institutions, the intersection of development and contention, and land and labor politics. To study these topics, Emily takes a mixed-methods approach, leveraging administrative data, open-source environmental and text data, archival materials, in-depth interviews, and participant observation. Regionally, Emily often focuses on India with broader interest in South Asia and the Americas. At Stanford, Emily was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Prior to graduate school, Emily received her B.A. in Political Science and Environmental Science from the University of Michigan.