Coercion in the context of "Security"

In political science, power is the ability to influence or direct the actions, beliefs, or conduct of actors. Power does not exclusively refer to the threat or use of force (coercion) by one actor against another, but may also be exerted through diffuse means (such as institutions).

Power may also take structural forms, as it orders actors in relation to one another (such as distinguishing between a master and an enslaved person, a householder and their relatives, an employer and their employees, a parent and a child, a political representative and their voters, etc.), and discursive forms, as categories and language may lend legitimacy to some behaviors and groups over others. The term authority is often used for power that is perceived as legitimate or socially approved by the social structure. Scholars have distinguished between soft power and hard power.

Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy, primarily targeting the state and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations. A historically left-wing movement, anarchism is usually described as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement (libertarian socialism).

Although traces of anarchist ideas are found all throughout history, modern anarchism emerged from the Enlightenment. During the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for emancipation. Various anarchist schools of thought formed during this period. Anarchists have taken part in several revolutions, most notably in the Paris Commune, the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, whose conclusion marked the end of the classical era of anarchism. In the last decades of the 20th and into the 21st century, the anarchist movement has been resurgent once more, growing in popularity and influence within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation movements.

A chilling effect is generally understood to be when an individual, organization, or group is prevented from exercising their legal rights, self-censoring either the sharing of information or abstaining from doing an activity, out of fear of repercussions and harm if they act. Outside the legal context in common usage; any coercion or threat of coercion (or other unpleasantries) can have a chilling effect on a group of people regarding a specific behavior, and often can be statistically measured or be plainly observed. For example, the news headline "Flood insurance [price] spikes have chilling effect on some home sales," and the abstract title of a two-part survey of 160 college students involved in dating relationships: "The chilling effect of aggressive potential on the expression of complaints in intimate relationships."

In politics, hard power is the use of military and economic means to influence the behavior or interests of other political bodies. This form of political power is often aggressive (coercion), and is most immediately effective when imposed by one political body upon another of less military and/or economic power. Hard power contrasts with soft power, which comes from diplomacy, culture and history.

According to Joseph Nye, hard power involves "the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will". Here, "carrots" stand for inducements such as the reduction of trade barriers, the offer of an alliance or the promise of military protection. On the other hand, "sticks" represent threats - including the use of coercive diplomacy, the threat of military intervention, or the implementation of economic sanctions. Ernest Wilson describes hard power as the capacity to coerce "another to act in ways in which that entity would not have acted otherwise".

Intimidation is a behavior and legal wrong which usually involves deterring or coercing an individual by threat of violence. It is in various jurisdictions a crime and a civil wrong (tort). Intimidation is similar to menacing, coercion, terrorizing and assault in the traditional sense.

This includes intentional behaviors of forcing another person to experience general discomfort such as humiliation, embarrassment, inferiority, limited freedom, etc and the victim might be targeted based on multiple factors like gender, race, class, skin color, competency, knowledge, wealth, temperament, etc. Intimidation is done for making the other person submissive (also known as cowing), to destabilize/undermine the other, to force compliance, to hide one's insecurities, to socially valorize oneself, etc. There are active and passive coping mechanisms against intimidation that include, but are not limited to, not letting the intimidator invade your personal dignity and space, addressing their behavior directly, understanding those behaviors as methods to bypass ethical norms and exploit fear as a means of securing compliance or dominance, or sometimes as final straws the person has to achieve their antisocial goals, avoiding the person, being cautious around them, honing breakaway skills, documenting, etc. Victims of intimidation would reasonably develop apprehension, experience fear of injury or harm, etc from the unwanted behaviors or tools of intimidation that include, and not limited to, condescending, rudeness, sarcasm, disrespecting, patronizing, degrading, disparaging, etc. However, it is not legally necessary to prove that the behavior caused the victim to experience terror or panic.

A threat is a communication of intent to inflict harm or loss on another person. Intimidation is a tactic used between conflicting parties to make the other timid or psychologically insecure for coercion or control. The act of intimidation for coercion is considered a threat.

Threatening or threatening behavior (or criminal threatening behavior) is the crime of intentionally or knowingly putting another person in fear of bodily injury.

Rape is a type of sexual assault involving sexual intercourse, or other forms of sexual penetration, carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or against a person who is incapable of giving valid consent, such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, has an intellectual disability, or is below the legal age of consent (statutory rape). The wrongness of the rape is not merely or, on many occasions even primarily, the violence against the body of the victim but the violence against the very person of the victim. The term rape is sometimes casually used interchangeably with the term sexual assault.

The rate of reporting, prosecuting and convicting for rape varies between jurisdictions. Internationally, the incidence of rapes recorded by the police during 2008 ranged, per 100,000 people, from 0.2 in Azerbaijan to 92.9 in Botswana with 6.3 in Lithuania as the median. Worldwide, reported instances of sexual violence, including rape, are primarily committed by males against females. Rape by strangers is usually less common than rape by people the victim knows, and male-on-male prison rapes are common and may be the least reported forms of rape.

Political freedom, also called political autonomy or political agency, is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Political freedom has been described as freedom from oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions for an individual and the fulfillment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion in society, such as economic compulsion.

Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action and the exercise of social or group rights. The concept can also include freedom from internal constraints on political action or speech such as social conformity, consistency, or inauthentic behaviour. The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.