Protesters, Soldiers and the State: Re-Examining Military Response to Resistance

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Widespread public resistance poses a common dilemma for military organizations, as they are often forced to choose between supporting the regime or backing protesters, and must decide whether to respond with restraint or with violence. These choices are further complicated by the military’s degree of autonomy, as well by the fraught relationships between soldiers, officers, competing units, and with broader society. Under what conditions do militaries choose violence over restraint in the face of public resistance? With a wide range of survey data, archival evidence and novel datasets, the papers on this panel address this question through re-examination of the historical structures shaping civil-military relations and the relationship between the army and society; and by considering the agency of officers and individual soldiers operating within these durable structures. Two papers from Pruett, and from Casey, Slater and LaChapelle consider the contested origins of military organizations, while work from Mattingly and Grewal highlights internal variation within the armed forces. Casey, et al. examine the varied autonomy of military organizations in regimes that emerged from violent conflict, helping explain why armies in some rebel regimes defend the state against mass protest, while others seize power for themselves. Pruett considers how European responses to widespread resistance shaped the ethnic make-up of colonial militaries in Francophone West Africa, demonstrating the limitations of existing, Anglocentric theories on legacies of ethnic bias in the armed forces. Mattingly’s chapter draws on new data on the strategic deployment of specific units in China’s People’s Liberation Army during the 1989 protests to understand how party elites navigated officer’s social ties to ensure the military would crack down on student protests despite their sympathies. With experimental findings from a survey in Algeria, Grewal highlights preferences of individual soldiers for restraint or repression, shedding light on why the Algerian military adopted widely different responses to recurrent protests between 1988 and 2020.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Crackdown: Explaining Military Repression of the 1989 Protests in China - Daniel Mattingly, Yale University

• Race, Resistance and Recruitment: Evidence from French West Africa - Lindsey Pruett, Cornell University

• The Durability of Rebel Regimes - Adam E. Casey, University of Michigan; Dan Slater, University of Michigan; Jean Lachapelle, University of Montreal

• Military Repression and Restraint in Algeria - Sharan Grewal, College of William & Mary

Chair

• Lindsay P. Cohn Naval War College

Discussants

• Risa A. Brooks Marquette University

• Roya Izadi University of Rhode Island