Civil-Military Relations in the Aftermath of Coups: How Does Coup Failure Affect Counterbalancing in Autocratic Regimes?

Endgames: Military Response to Protest in Arab Autocracies

This article contributes to growing efforts to explain when nonviolent resistance campaigns emerge in autocratic regimes. Building from a novel framework for distinguishing civil-military relations in autocracies, it contends that regimes in which military and political leaders engage in a ‘grand bargain’ generate opportunity structures that are especially amenable to nonviolent resistance. Militaries in these regimes exhibit distinctive characteristics – they are corporate, cohesive institutions as opposed to fragmented in structure and also wield political influence in regime institutions. Consequently, these militaries are especially inclined to care about their societal reputations and to retain their institutional independence from the regime’s political leaders. These factors together can lessen expectations among activists that the military will repress protests and increase the odds of elite splits in the face of mass movements. They also render the military more receptive to nonviolent protest tactics. We operationalize the concept of grand bargains with indicators from three datasets on civil-military relations and autocratic regimes. We then test the argument quantitatively using data on the onset of nonviolent resistance campaigns, as well as events-level data on nonviolent resistance campaigns. The findings support claims that civil-military grand bargains make nonviolent resistance in autocracies more likely, contributing to scholarship on this vital topic.

This study examines the relative unknown strategic decisions inside the ‘black box’ of Ben Ali's authoritarian regime under stress, and questions the broader narrative claiming that the fall of his regime was mainly the result of the mass uprising. Making use of new primary and secondary material, the author argues that the demise of the autocratic ruler was caused by the failure of the regime's controlling strategies due to the defunct communication among key security figures that represented its coercive apparatus: military, ministries of Defense and Interior, and different domestic security organisations. Indeed, the dysfunctional intra-regime dynamics were responsible for the outcome of the popular uprising, not the number of the demonstrators across the country. In this regard, Ben Ali's departure was the unintended outcome due to his misreading of the civil–military relations, as well as his own ambiguous perception of the military as a protector and potential threat that led to a lack of loyalty on the side of senior army officers. His departure was not the result of a deliberate decision or a coup d’état, per se, but rather the consequence of miscommunication between representatives from different bodies in the security establishment. In addition, the article shed lights on the role the military played in securing the country's political transition during the immediate aftermath of the dictatorship's fall.

Civil–Military Relations and the Security Apparatus

A Spanish colony since the mid-1500s, the Philippine Islands became an American colony after a period of warfare at the turn of the twentieth century, and achieved Commonwealth status and limited domestic autonomy in 1935. The archipelago saw brutal fighting after its occupation by Japan in 1941; granted independence in 1946, it was then governed by a series of democratically elected presidents. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the government sought to suppress a rebellion by the Communist Hukbalahap insurgency. The sixth president, Ferdinand Marcos, was elected in 1965 and re-elected in 1969. Unable to run for a third term, Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, and remained in office until deposed by a combination of military coup-defection and mass uprising – the so-called People's Power revolution – in 1986. This chapter examines the origins of Marcos’ internal security apparatus, particularly the coercive institutions that operated from the declaration of martial law in September 1972 to his fall from power in 1986. Like Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, Marcos had the opportunity to reorganize the Philippines’ coercive apparatus and did so. However, Marcos chose the opposite kind of coercive institutional design to that of Chiang: one that was fragmented and socially exclusive. This chapter examines why. It shows that fragmentation and exclusivity were not dictated either by external American influence or by the social factors and institutions that Marcos inherited. If either American assistance or preferences were decisive, the Philippines should have emphasized unitary internal security forces, especially police, to handle the popular threat of communist subversion. If institutional inheritance were determinative, then the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) should have remained socially inclusive, and Marcos would not have been able to pursue unitary internal security institutions as a democratically elected leader but then create fragmented ones as he moved toward dictatorial rule. For a complete explanation of why Marcos chose to pursue fragmentation and exclusivity in the coercive apparatus after 1972, then, we must look to his own perceptions of threat. This chapter shows that Marcos created this apparatus primarily to deal with the threat of a coup by the military and security forces, which he feared would pave the way for one of the other elite families in the Philippines to replace him as President.

Part 1: The Fall of Communism and the Rebirth of Russia 1. Soviet communism and its dissolution 1.1 The Soviet system 1.2 Perestroika 1.3 The emergence of Russia 1.4 Popular insurgency and regime decay 2. The disintegration of the USSR 2.1 The August coup 2.2 The disintegration of the USSR 2.3 Problems of state building 3. Phoney democracy, 1991-1993 3.1 Phoney democracy - the road to October 1993 3.2 Genesis of a tragedy 3.3 The troubled path to the constitution Part 2: Political Institutions and Processes 4. Constitutionalism and the law 4.1 The 1993 constitution 4.2 The Constitutional Court 4.3 The legal system and its reform 4.4 Law and constitutionalism 5. Crime, corruption and security 5.1 Crime and the mafia 5.2 Corruption, meta-corruption and anti-corruption 5.3 The security apparatus and politics 5.4 Human and civil rights 6. The executive 6.1 The presidency 6.2 The government 6.3 Prime ministers and their policies 6.4 Public administration: from nomenklatura to civil service? 7. Party development 7.1 Stages of party development 7.2 Normative framework of party development 7.3 The party system today 7.4 Problems of social representation 8. Electoral politics 8.1 Founding elections and electoral management .2 The electoral system and its reform 8.3 The experience of elections 8.4 Direct democracy: referendums 8.5 Electoral engagement 9. The legislature 9.1 The State Duma 9.2 The Federation Council 9.3 Parliamentarianism and Russian politics Part 3: Nationalism, Federalism and Regionalism 10. National identity and state building 10.1 From empire to state 10.2 Russian nationalism and national identity 10.3 State building: borders and citizenship 11. Federalism and the new state 11.1 Ethno-federalism and its legacy 11.2 Russian federalism 12. Segmented regionalism and the new federalism 12.1 Segmented regionalism 12.2 Putin's 'new federalism' 12.3 Segmented regionalism and asymmetrical federalism Part 4: Economy and Society 13. Russian capitalism 13.1 The road to the market 13.2 The Russian economy today 13.3 Evaluation of market reform 14. Society and social movements 14.1 Social structure and dynamics 14.2 Welfare and incomes 14.3 Social movements 14.4 Para-constitutionalism and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 15. Cultural transformation 15.1 The media 15.2 Culture and the intelligentsia 15.3 Religion and the state 15.4 Political culture and public opinion 15.5 Crisis of values Part 5: Foreign, Security and Neighbourhood Policy 16. Foreign policy 16.1 The development of Russian foreign policy 16.2 The structure of policy-making 16.3 The debate over foreign policy 16.4 Russia and the world 17. Defence and security policy 17.1 The end of the Soviet armed forces 17.2 The great retreat 17.3 Military and security doctrines 17.4 Nuclear politics and non-proliferation 17.5 Military reform 17.6 Civil-military relations 17.7 New security paradigms 18. Commonwealth, community and fragmentation 18.1 The Commonwealth of Independent States 18.2 Regional organisations 18.3 Minorities and Russians abroad Part 6: Dilemmas of Democratisation 19. Problems of transition 19.1 The challenge of history 19.2 Transitional justice 19.3 Models of transition 20. Democracy in Russia 21. Problems of democracy 22. Regime politics 23. Leadership and regime change 24. A struggling democracy? Appendix The Russian constitution Select bibliography Index

This study focuses on the use of the Nigerian military as an internal security apparatus under a democratic government. In view of the recent secessionists’ agitation in the South-East region, renewed militancy in the South-South, insurgency in the North-East, kidnapping and ritual killings in the South-West and herder-pastoralist’s conflict in the Middle-Belt region which have caused serious security challenges in the country. In response to these challenges, the Nigerian Military, acting under the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces directives, launched various military operations. These operations include; Operation ‘Python Dance 2’; ‘Crocodile Smile’; Operation ‘L’afiya Dole’ (interpreted as peace by force); Operation ‘Crocodile Smile 2’; Operation Cat Race; and the ‘show of force’. These military operations have not only generated tension and threatened civil-military relations in the different regions; they have also raised questions on the constitutional roles of the Armed Forces in a democracy. Besides, there has been a debate on whether these responses are in conformity with the constitution and if they are politically-expedient at this time. While this article queries the deployment of military as a security apparatus, it however raises a more fundamental question of what is the rationale behind the deployment of military forces against para-military security component statutorily charged with the responsibilities of maintaining peace, order and security. Secondly, the article raises the question of how effective are these military options in the face of public outcry. Lastly, what implication does this have on civil-military relations in Nigeria? Article visualizations:

Civil–military relations is traditionally concerned with the nature and interaction among three societal actors namely military institutions, political elites, and the citizenry. The nature of this complex relationship and whether it is harmonious to prevent military intervention in politics depends on how these societal actors cooperate on certain societal variables. Civil–military relations of West African countries are influenced by those countries’ colonial and postindependence experiences. The military establishments of most African states were birthed from colonial armies. Historically rooted pathologies about the role of the security and defense forces in society created deep cleavages between state and the military, and their relations to political authority on the one hand, and society on the other. The use of African armies for political and imperialist purposes during the colonial era and their roles in the struggle for independence were important factors in shaping the behavior of African armies after independence. Most colonial states did not attain independence with indigenous, nationalist-oriented military institutions. The transition of colonial regiments into the national armies of newly independent states were met with challenges in terms of establishing legitimacy and effectiveness, as these institutions had been set up under conditions that were not ideally suited to the needs of new states. Most postindependence African leaders missed the opportunity to build democratic and national militaries; instead, they maintained the status quo, as these leaders appeared more interested in building large armies for the purposes of regime stability. Successive political leaders resorted to deleterious devices such as patron–client systems, ethnic manipulation, and politicization of the military. These practices undermined the professionalism of the security apparatus and provided breeding grounds for pretorian tendencies. As the military became conscious of their political power, coups d’état became a common feature in the political dispensation of West African states. Frequent military interventions in West Africa often came with destabilizing consequences such as devastating military rules, intra-military conflicts, insurgencies, and even civil wars. Even in those countries where civil wars did not occur, the military were influential in the political landscape, in which autocratic regimes ruled with an iron hand and often used the military to inflict severe hardship on the citizens. With the return to constitutional democracies from the late 1980s, it was widely expected the role or influence of the military in the political space would be diminished as those states became more professional and democratic. However, coups d’état have reduced in the region, rather than going away completely, and the military as a state institution with a monopoly over legitimate force remains a very strong political actor, even under civilian governments. Former metropoles have been providing defense and security assistance programs to West African states for diverse reasons, including maintaining strategic hold on former colonies. Some of these interventions that aim at professionalization of the military have produced mixed outcomes in the region. In Anglophone West Africa, the British colonial policy of indirect rule contributed to the class division between the upper class (civilian politicians) and the lower class (the military and common people). This, coupled with the use of the military as agents of repression to safeguard colonial interests, created a popular dislike and negative image of colonial armies. State militaries went on to become destabilizing forces in political processes across the region. After independence, United Kingdom maintained a fluctuating presence in its former colonies due to its imperial past and strategic interests. In French West Africa, Africans were recruited from French colonies into the French army serve France’s military interests. African soldiers played diverse roles in their countries’ struggles for independence, which led to the military’s having a central role in the politics of postindependence Francophone states. France’s Africa policy differs from that of other former colonial powers in terms of its postindependence engagements with former colonies. In other parts of West Africa, Portuguese colonialism contributed to the creation of a central role for national liberation forces, which metamorphosed into postindependence military and political actors, with destabilizing consequences.

How do autocracies structure their civil–military relations? We contend that personalist dictators are more strongly associated with counterbalancing than other authoritarian regime types. Personalists are characterized by weak institutions and narrow support bases, a lack of unifying ideologies and informal links to the ruler. They thus have strong incentives to coup-proof and, as we contend, counterbalancing seems particularly attractive. Quantitative analyses of autocratic regimes’ counterbalancing efforts since the 1960s provide support for this expectation. By showing that institutional coup-proofing significantly varies across autocratic forms of government, we contribute to the literature on comparative authoritarianism and civil–military relations.

This chapter explores civil–military relations from the perspective of special operations forces (SOF) in the American context. It begins with a modified framework connecting a more rigorous exploration of civilian calculations of political risk, which subsume military risk. The chapter argues that a modified civil–military relations theory is necessary given the unique place SOF occupy in the national security apparatus. Working and monitoring problem–the 'unintended acceleration' of SOF ahead of policymaker preferences–comprises the fundamental problematique of SOF civil–military relations. Scholarship on civil–military relations in the United States is recent relative to the age of the Republic. The chapter explains why SOF is sufficiently different and outside existing evaluative frameworks due to their specific attributes. Civilian control over SOF is a function of the degree of political risk associated with their activities. SOF is long overdue for more and more varied academic treatment, particularly by social scientists.

The differences in the coercive apparatus under Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan, described in Chapter 5, shaped the patterns of state violence that Korean society experienced during their different periods of rule. The structure and social composition of the coercive apparatus in these two cases help us understand both the within-country temporal trends in levels of state violence, which were the main focus of the chapters on state violence in Taiwan and the Philippines (Chapters 6 and 7), and how the Korean cases compare cross-nationally, to the cases in the previous two chapters. Moreover, coercive institutional design can also shed light on sub-national variations in the execution of state violence, including cross-unit variations in state violence executed by different parts of the coercive apparatus and regional variations in the distribution of protest repression. To a much greater degree than either Taiwan or the Philippines, the presence of an external threat in South Korea limited the degree of coup-proofing present in the coercive apparatus, particularly the externally focused military. By cross-national comparative standards, therefore, state violence in South Korea was relatively low. The non-military parts of the internal security apparatus, however, had important differences under Park, compared to Chun, that help to explain why violence in the two regimes took on a somewhat different character. Park's more fragmented and regionally exclusive regime engaged in intra-apparatus violence as organizations attempted to counterbalance and investigate each other, resulting in the arrest and sentencing of a number of internal security personnel. It also engaged in disproportionately high repressive violence against protests in Chŏlla, compared to the rest of the country, culminating in the Kwangju incident of May 1980. Chun Doo Hwan, on the other hand, had a unitary internal security apparatus but one that was divided in terms of exclusivity: somewhat more inclusive of Chŏlla at the top levels but entirely inclusive and representative in terms of its ground-level policing of protest. The difference in the social composition of Chun's riot police units helps explain several findings that are otherwise surprising and counterintuitive to scholars of Korea's authoritarian history: that in fact Chun seems to have been less violent on average in his non-protest repression than Park, that his repression of popular protest was usually less violent and less regionally biased, and that, despite these considerations, his use of repression ended up being far more reviled.

The termination of martial law in Taiwan on July 15, 1987 marked the end of a record: after thirty-eight years, the world's longest unbroken stretch of martial law was lifted on the island. Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for the first half of the twentieth century, and had come under the administration of the Republic of China's Nationalist (or Kuomintang, KMT, 國民黨) government in 1945, in accordance with an agreement made at the Cairo Conference of 1943. Soon after the Japanese surrender, fighting on the Chinese mainland began again, between Nationalist forces and those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 1949, the collapsed Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan. There, the KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, presided until 1987 over a period of authoritarian rule known in Taiwan as the martial law era ( jieyan shiqi , 戒嚴時期). This chapter examines how Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT constructed the coercive institutions that implemented their four-decade rule, and why Chiang chose to organize these institutions as he did. In particular, it scrutinizes how and why Taiwan's coercive apparatus underwent profound organizational reforms in the early 1950s that shifted it from a fragmented and exclusive model of internal security to one that was unitary and inclusive. As Chapter 6 will show, these organizational reforms had profound consequences for state violence in Taiwan, but their origins have, thus far, remained unexplained. If some kind of path-dependent argument were at work, then Taiwan's coercive apparatus should have mirrored one of two inherited institutional legacies: either that of Japanese colonial policing, or that of the internal security apparatus used by Chiang and the KMT on the mainland. If external influence were at work, one would expect to see police and military structures preferred by, or modeled on, those of the United States. Neither of these factors, however, turns out to be determinate. Instead, this chapter demonstrates that Taiwan's coercive apparatus during the martial law period, and in particular the changes to that apparatus that occurred in the early 1950s, emerged directly from the threat perceptions of Chiang Kai-shek. The first section of the chapter illustrates that prior to 1949, Chiang's primary concern was about how to govern Republican (mainland) China, where the dominant threat that he perceived came from disloyal elite rivals and regionally based warlords.

ABSTRACTWhat explains the use of disciplined repression in some autocratic regimes and undisciplined repression in others? Despite its relevance to these broader debates on authoritarianism, this question remains inadequately explained in conventional approaches to repression. This article proposes that autocrats’ discipline over the use of state repression is a consequence of their differential control over illicit commercial networks. Autocratic regimes that consolidate their control over rents become dependent on security apparatuses to deepen and maintain that control. These regimes invest in and support the development of coercive capabilities, which leads to more disciplined state repression. Where autocratic regimes do not control illicit networks and rents, their dependence on security offices is low. Consequently, their investment in coercive capacity suffers, giving rise to patterns of undisciplined repression. This article explores the empirical implications of these regime trajectories through a controlled comparison of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, two drug transit states in post-Soviet Eurasia whose coercive institutions and patterns of state violence have developed in markedly different ways.

The Army has played a significant role in the contemporary history of the Middle Eastern states. This fact was determined not only by the frequency of wars and military crises but mainly by the role of the military in domestic politics. In the past few decades, the army and security apparatus presented a focal point of Arabian countries’ politics. The military was the center of the power and decision-making mechanism in Middle Eastern countries. In the 1980–1990-s Arab rulers managed to curb the appetites of their military for power and military coups. Further developments of “Arab spring” proved this tendency wasn’t irreversible. The author studies universal Russian and Western methodological and theoretical approaches and criteria for examining civil-military relations. Based on the given results the author attempted to work out an original model for studying the civil-military relations in the Middle Eastern countries regards specific of its developments and in view of the special characteristics of the Arabic society. The main attention is paid to historical preconditions for the formatting of the armed forces in Arab countries. The author also examines the interaction between politics and military, military and society and tries to show the main reasons behind the army’s seizure of power in many Arab countries from the social, political, and economic backgrounds of military rule. The criteria of the civil control under the military and different approaches for preventing army’s intervention in politics are in the focus of this article. The author stresses the role of the national and religious factors in the system of civil-military relations. The role of the ruler and ruling élites in determining the behavioral patterns of the military are the subject of the author’s investigation as well.

Coercive institutions exist to safeguard an autocratic ruler in power. Their construction is among the most fundamental tasks he can undertake, and their performance determines his longevity in office and the manner of his exit. These institutions also matter deeply for the millions of ordinary citizens that the autocrat governs, because they affect the levels of violence experienced by those people. This chapter outlines the logic behind the creation and operation of autocratic coercive institutions. The first half of the chapter begins by reviewing the threats that an autocrat must address to stay in power. It then identifies how different threats lead to the creation of distinct types of coercive institutions, proposing that autocrats face a “coercive dilemma” because managing the risk of a coup and managing the threat of popular unrest call for different optimal levels of fragmentation and social exclusivity: coup-proofing calls for fragmented and exclusive coercive institutions, while managing popular unrest is best accomplished using a unitary and inclusive internal security apparatus. Ultimately, autocrats negotiate this organizational tradeoff by crafting their coercive institutions to address the dominant perceived threat at the time they come to power. The second half of the chapter turns from using coercive institutional design as the dependent variable to making it an independent variable that explains variations in state violence. I isolate two primary mechanisms by which coercive institutions affect levels of state violence, which I term the intelligence pathway and the incentives pathway . Fragmentation and exclusivity both provide incentives, either social or material, that predispose coercive agents toward higher levels of and less discriminate violence. Both characteristics also hamper the collection, analysis, and transmission of intelligence that might enable more targeted, pre-emptive, and non-violent repression, thereby raising the probability of higher levels of and less discriminate violence. Through these pathways, the coercive apparatus has an independent effect on levels of state violence that cannot be accounted for by other factors. The fact that authoritarian coercive institutions have varying intelligence capabilities also suggests a set of fairly restrictive conditions under which we should see institutional change, and suggests the likely direction of such change when it occurs. The chapter therefore outlines a set of predictions for when and how coercive institutional change should happen, and contrasts this theory of change with explanations grounded in path dependence and rational design.