(iPoster) Escalatory Catalysts to Diversions: Some Comparative Empirical Observations

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy I

Abstract

This paper seeks to generate insight regarding the catalysts that lead to escalations in diversionary crises on the part of personalist regimes. While it has been proposed that autocratic states do possess the opportunity to engage in multiple diversionary strategies, there is little discussion as to why beleaguered states may be willing to risk further internal strife by escalating diversionary crises via violence. While other states may be able to relegate their diversionary strategies to bellicose remarks, military mobilizations and other actions short of war, the diversionary literature on personalist autocracies appears to be dominated by violence.

This paper analyzes two well-known events in the diversionary literature (the Second Taiwan Strait crisis and the Gulf War) and posits that violence is uniquely predisposed to generate diversionary benefits in personalist regime owing to the overt centralization, lack of sophisticated governing institutions and an inability to permeate society via other means. Additionally, I argue that violence serves the added purpose of ensuring that autonomous centers of competing power do not emerge in personalist states, ensuring the autocrats continuity and serving to continue to centralize power around a singular individual. This accounts for the proposed "diversionary benefits" a personalist state is liable to generate, outside of the traditional modus inherent in democratic states given that an autocrat neither relies upon or is beholden to the general electorate.

This paper broadens the diversionary theory of war to better account for autocratic diversions and catalysts to violence outside of failing approval ratings and a desire to be re-elected, as well as helping to erode the near-monopoly democracies maintain within the literature.

Author

• Thomas Reilly, Rutgers University