Coercion is the practice of forcing another party to act in an involuntary manner (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats

or intimidation or some other form of pressure or force. In law, coercion is codified as the duress crime. Such actions are used as leverage, to force the victim to act in the desired way. Coercion may involve the actual infliction of physical pain/injury or psychological harm in order to enhance the credibility of a threat. The threat of further harm may lead to the cooperation or obedience of the person being coerced. Torture is one of the most extreme examples of coercion i.e. severe pain is inflicted until the victim provides the desired response. Overview The purpose of coercion is to substitute ones aims to those of the victim. For this reason, many social philosophers have considered coercion as the polar opposite to freedom. Various forms of coercion are distinguished: first on the basis of the kind of injury threatened, second according to its aims and scope, and finally according to its effects, from which its legal, social, and ethical implications mostly depend. Physical Physical coercion is the most commonly considered form of coercion, where the content of the conditional threat is the use of force against a victim, their dear ones or property. An often used example is "putting a gun to someone's head" (at gunpoint) or putting a "knife under the throat" (at knifepoint or cut-throat) to compel action. These are so common that they are also used as metaphors for other forms of coercion. Armed forces in many countries use firing squads to maintain discipline and intimidate the masses, or opposition, into submission or silent compliance. However, there also are nonphysical forms of coercion, where the threatened injury does not immediately imply the use of force. Byman and Waxman (2000) define coercion as "the use of threatened force, including the limited use of actual force to back up the threat, to induce an adversary to behave differently than it otherwise would."[1] However, coercion does not necessarily amount to destruction. Psychological In psychological coercion, the threatened injury regards the victims relationships with other people. The most obvious example is blackmail, where the threat consists of the dissemination of damaging information. However, many other types are possible e.g. so-called "emotional blackmail", which typically involves threats of rejection from or disapproval by a peer-group, or creating feelings of guilt/obligation via a display of anger or hurt by someone whom the victim loves or respects. Another example is coercive persuasion. Psychological coercion along with the other varieties - was extensively and systematically used by the government of the Peoples Republic of China during the Thought Reform campaign of 1951-1952. The process carried out partly at revolutionary universities and partly within prisons was investigated and reported upon by Robert Jay Lifton, then Research Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University: see Lifton (1961). The techniques used by the Chinese authorities included a technique derived from standard group psychotherapy, which was aimed at forcing the victims (who were generally

intellectuals) to produce detailed and sincere ideological confessions. For instance, a professor of formal logic called Chin Yueh-lin who was then regarded as Chinas leading authority on his subject was induced to write: The new philosophy [of Marxism-Leninism], being scientific, is the supreme truth Legal Government agencies may use highly intimidating methods during investigations e.g. the threat of harsh legal penalties; such coercion is typically legal. The usual incentive to cooperate is some form of plea bargain i.e. an offer to drop or reduce criminal charges against a suspect in return for full cooperation. Social Some people speak of cultural coercion when the fear of falling out with the group may force people into wearing a certain style of dress, publicly reciting a creed or a pledge of allegiance which they find ethically reprehensible or starting to smoke when they would have preferred not to etc. Within the definitional framework adopted here, all such things amount to (psychological) coercion if and only if the fear of falling out with the group is the result of purposeful threats by someone. See Peer pressure, Sociology of religion, Pledge of Allegiance. Aims Predatory The purely selfish kinds of coercion are a form of predatory behavior by the coercing party, whose aim is to narrow down the scope of other peoples actions so as to make them instrumental to its own personal interests. According to many social philosophers, this sort of predatory behavior will become the prevailing one. According to others it has been the prevailing one for millennia. The victim determines his or her own choice among the alternatives of any feasible set. Thought coercion is thus generally meant to be only temporary. Once the desired change in values has been brought about, the victim is expected to conform spontaneously, without any need for further coercion. Whether and under what conditions this final aim can in fact be stably achieved is a difficult question, and it will be considered in the section devoted to the effects of coercion. Here it is necessary to point out that, whatever its effectiveness, thought coercion has in fact been used very extensively throughout history. Ideological Ideological coercion is the use of thought coercion in the attempt to modify peoples social and political philosophy. This is of course quite different from plain propaganda, or even the simple persecution of political opponents, because its objective is to force individual ideological conversions. Unlike religious coercion, it is a quite recent phenomenon, confined to some of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The most notable example of ideological coercion was the already mentioned Chinese Thought Reform campaign of 1951-52, which was unique due to both thoroughness and number of people

involved. Yet, Chinese authorities found it necessary to follow that up with a new, albeit slightly milder, campaign as part of the Maoist Cultural Revolution of 1966-1968. Starting from the political purges in the Soviet Union during the Thirties, similar brainwashing techniques were intermittently and less systematically used by most Stalinist regimes of the twentieth century. By contrast, the Fascist and Nazi regimes of Italy and Germany tended to confine their coercive activities to purely political aims, without any serious attempt to force the ideological conversion of their opponents. The use of (physical) ideological coercion was however theorized by some Fascist philosophers, like Giovanni Gentile and Jared Harfield Disciplinary Somewhere in the middle between predatory and pedagogic coercion one finds the forms of coercion that are used as the main coordination tools of command systems. These are organizations that use coercion to enforce on their members patterns of division of labor aimed at reaching the organizations goals, which for a variety of reasons may not always be consistent with each members personal aims. The most typical example of a command system is a military organization, which is typically called a government, but any large production team may easily fall into this category. Through the punishment system of disciplinary coercion, each individual member is typically forced into altruistic behavior in the interest of the whole group. This kind of coercion is predatory, is thought coercion, but may often be accepted in advance by the members of the group. Scope The scope of coercion has to do with who uses a conditional threat against whom. It is closely linked with some of the other aspects already surveyed above, and may be of paramount importance in determining coercions effects and implications. Specific Specific or personal coercion is the most commonly considered kind. It takes place when the conditional threat is decided upon by one particular individual or small group, and/or directed against some other individual or small group. All forms of predatory and thought coercion fall into this category. Unspecific Under unspecific or impersonal coercion the conditional threats come from well-known and socially accepted general rules and rather than any individual or sub-group and are directed against anybody in the stated conditions, according to clearly stated principles of due process. In practice, the narrowing down of individual choice may be here principally aimed at reducing the incidence of specific coercion, rather than forcing on everybody some special sub-set of positive goals. More generally, unspecific coercion may be the form taken by disciplinary coercion, and this appears to be in fact the case within the most effective command systems of the modern world. Unspecific coercion is thus the same thing as the rule of law in its widest sense. This must not however be confused with the monopoly of coercion by the State. First, State coercion may very easily be

arbitrary indeed technically very specific, according to the above definition. Second, there are welldocumented historical examples of (small) societies that have practiced unspecific coercion without the help of State institutions like Iceland in the early middle Ages. The identification between State and law is but a special normative principle introduced by (public) Roman law, which according to some, like Maitland, was for this very reason to be treated as the quintessential law of tyranny. Inspired by the general will, it should be entitled to enforcement by revolutionary coercion on the will of all. Later on, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this French revolutionary principle though not of course its specific way to identify the general will percolated into first Socialist and then Fascist political thinking. Ethical effects regarding freedom To most people, the ethical implications of individual predatory coercion are straightforward. In recent times, some have attempted to extend a similar ethical judgment to non-predatory forms of coercion by individuals. Thus, for instance, the Taking Children Seriously movement has criticized pedagogic coercion by adults, including parents, on children, holding that it is possible and desirable to act with a child in such a way that all activities are consensual. The ethical standing of wider forms of supposedly altruistic specific coercion like political and thought coercion is however much more controversial, along lines relating to the assumed relationship between coercion and freedom, which is often regarded as an ethical value in itself.