Steven Z. Bao
Department of Sociology , THE Ohio State University
Welcome
Hello! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at The Ohio State University and an affiliate of the Institute for Population Research. My research spans social movements, political sociology, conflict and violence, social theory, and computational methods.
My work examines how collective action generates social change and how it is shaped and constrained by structural conditions. My dissertation draws on an original dataset of approximately 40,000 formal and informal social movement organizations in the United States to study collaboration, interorganizational funding, and congressional lobbying—and how these organizational networks shape movement persistence and political outcomes. Beyond the dissertation, I pursue a broader research agenda on contentious politics, including mass-atrocity forecasting and theoretical work on power and legitimacy.
Outside academia, I am a keen traveler, a film photographer, and a cook.
Selected Publications
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Forthcoming. Nzitatira, Hollie N., Jack Wippell, and Steven Z. Bao. "Judging the Past: How Rwanda's Gacaca Courts Shaped Narratives of Genocide."
In Law, Culture, and Mass Violence: Joachim J. Savelsberg's Contributions and Beyond, edited by Ryan King. Routledge. [Abstract] -
Abstract
Transitional justice initiatives are central to how societies respond to mass violence, and can have longstanding political, social, and cultural legacies. One such legacy is in shaping how mass violence is remembered, as court records formalize a specific account of the events. As such, the legal institutions tasked with implementing transitional justice actively shape what forms of knowledge can be produced and remembered. Drawing on Joachim Savelsberg’s theorization of the constraints of criminal legal systems, this chapter examines how Rwanda’s gacaca courts shaped collective memories of the 1994 genocide. Using court records and extensive qualitative research with judges, defendants, witnesses, survivors, and community members, we examine how four features of criminal law—the individualization of responsibility, evidentiary procedures, legal classifications, and binary judgments—structured the narratives produced through gacaca. We argue that, while gacaca created important opportunities for communities to discuss violence and assign responsibility, its legal structure simultaneously narrowed understandings of the genocide by privileging individual culpability over structural explanations, excluding some forms of suffering, and simplifying otherwise complex experiences of victimhood and participation. These dynamics highlight how the institutional logics of the law and associated legal systems shape collective memories, even within ambitious community-based transitional justice projects. -
2026. Beck, Colin J., Eric Schoon, and Steven Bao. "All the Terrorism Fit to Print: A New Dataset on Media Coverage of Militant Groups."
Critical Studies on Terrorism: 1-26. [Abstract] [PDF]
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Abstract
That news media coverage is an important aspect of terrorism has long been recognised. Yet quantitative research on the phenomenon has been limited by partial and selective data. This article introduces a new comprehensive dataset to address this shortcoming: All the Terrorism Fit to Print. The dataset features information about 1551 militant groups found in the Global Terrorism Database and reports their annual coverage rates from 1970 to 2019 in the New York Times, the Times of London, and the Associated Press. Key trends of media coverage are explored by time and space, organisational activity, key tactics, and group ideology. Regression analyses of the determinants of this English-language news coverage find that annual media coverage is affected primarily by the number of victims, the number of attacks, and whether an organisation targeted Americans. -
2025. Bao, Steven Z. "Tactics and Targets: Labor Protest and State Response in China."
The Sociological Quarterly 66 (1): 3-30. [Abstract] [PDF]
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Abstract
Repression has long been regarded as the main response of the state when encountering contentious actions. Although recent studies point out that repression may vary by regime types and state-level concerns regarding international reputation, few analyses to date have analyzed how movement dynamics and movement targets jointly shape state responses. In this article, I analyze over 7,500 episodes of labor protests in mainland China to advance scholarship on state responses to social movements. I develop a typology of state responses, from active coercion to accommodation and even tolerance. I then explore differences in state responses based on protest tactics and whether they are against private or state-affiliated targets. My results show that state responses differ based on the tactics that movements employ. Furthermore, these effects are moderated by whether activists target state-affiliated or private entities. This research offers important insights into the dynamic relations between state and social movement, the diverse ways highly bureaucratic governments use to manage social unrest, and the conflict between maintaining legitimacy and social control in both authoritarian and democratic contexts.
