Avoiding the Coup-Proofing Dilemma: Invited Interventions in Africa and Beyond

• In Event: International Influences on Security Forces

Abstract

Existing scholarship on civil-military relations suggests that rulers face a fundamental trade-off: having a strong, unified, and effective security apparatus helps to tackle external threats—such as insurgencies—but raises the risk of an internal coup by improving the capacity of security forces. But is such a dilemma inevitable? We argue the answer is no: rulers often use a variety of techniques to alleviate this tradeoff; one such strategy is “invited intervention”–in which host states allow foreign states and intergovernmental organizations to take on domestic law enforcement functions–helping to reduce the risk of both coups and civil war. Direct integration of foreign military personnel into the security apparatus can help deter potential internal plots, while soliciting outside help to combat insurgencies allows rulers to tackle external threats on the cheap without investing in reforms that would make domestic militaries more effective but more threatening to the leader. In this paper, we outline the logic of invited interventions, including potential advantages and disadvantages to rulers. Introducing an original dataset that tracks all such interventions in 44 African countries between 1980 and 2015, we demonstrate that the onset of invited intervention is positively correlated with various measures of coup vulnerability, including incidence of past coups, aggregate indices of latent coup risk, and the prevalence of other coup-proofing measures, including so-called “ethnic stacking” and “counterbalancing.” The results highlight how rulers instrumentally exploit foreign intervention to bolster their chances of survival and underscore the prevalence of a common but understudied form of coup-proofing.

Authors

• Aila M. Matanock, University of California, San Diego

• Andrew Wojtanik, University of California - Berkeley