The power to control: State forces’ action and student contentious politics in the Argentine educational field

Student movements in Latin America have historically been at the forefront of democratization and progressive social action. This article seeks to understand state-led protest control against students and their movements in Argentina in the last decades (1997–2007). By drawing on a database of contentious politics events in Argentina using newspaper data, analysis of secondary sources, and in-depth interviews of actors, it closely examines when, why, where, and how the state contains student protests and how the power relations between them and the state unfolds over time. A main finding underlying this study is that the nature of state repression of students is related to (a) the tactics being used, (b) the demands being made, (c) the actors that are protesting alongside them, and (d) the political party in power. The article shows how the associational ties between students, teacher movements, political parties, and other movements change during moments of economic crisis and political shifts in government, and how this, in turn, results in changes in state control. Against common sense understandings, we find that changes toward more politically ‘progressive’ governments do not necessarily imply less amount of repression even though the nature of state control changes.