We develop a conceptual framework of political repression.To motivate why states repress, we introduce the notion of the political project.The proposed framework is used to interpret two known stylized facts: 1) repression is higher in autocracies; and 2) repression has declined since the 1990s.We discuss under-researched aspects of political repression such as migration restrictions, the targeting of repression, and backlash.We conclude by bringing attention to the two main challenges for research on repression: 1) conceptualizing whether a given episode of repression is successful, and 2) the inherent selection problem in empirical measures of repression.