Civil-military Relations and the Emergence and Outcome of Mass Protest

• In Event: Defender of Last Resort? Security Force (Dis)loyalty in the Face of Mass Protest

Abstract

Recent advances in the literature on military responses to non-violent protests in non-democracies argue that characteristics of the military and its relationship with the regime and society are a major factor in whether it engages in mass repression. Most of that scholarship, however, explores how features of civil-military relations affect the decision to repress only after protest has emerged. Not yet fully explored is how civil-military relations might also affect the likelihood that protests emerge in the first place—i.e., neglected in the literature is the endogeneity of protests to states’ civil-military relations. In this paper we develop a theory of how the autocrat’s strategy for maintaining political control of the military affect both whether mass protests emerge and how the military then responds to them. We identify two causal mechanisms that link the autocrat’s strategy for controlling the military to whether protests occur. We then show how features of the military that vary with the strategy of control help determine whether protests emerge, and then whether the military represses them. Case studies of the uprisings in Jordan, Egypt, and Syria in 2011 illustrate our causal mechanisms. We then test these expectations cross-nationally using data on non-violent protest and civil-military relations in autocracies.

Authors

• Risa A. Brooks, Marquette University

• Peter White, Auburn University