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      Exit, Resistance, Loyalty: Military Behavior during Unrest in Authoritarian Regimes

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      Perspectives on Politics
      Cambridge University Press (CUP)

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          Abstract

          A few years into the most recent wave of popular uprisings—the Arab Spring—studying regime trajectories in countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Yemen still seems like shooting at a moving target. Yet what has not escaped notice is the central role military actors have played during these uprisings. We describe how soldiers have three options when ordered to suppress mass unrest. They may exitthe regime by remaining in the barracks or going into exile, resistby fighting for the challenger or initiating a coup d’état, or remain loyaland use force to defend the regime. We argue that existing accounts of civil-military relations are ill equipped to explain the diverse patterns in exit, resistance, and loyalty during unrest because they often ignore the effects of military hierarchy. Disaggregating the military and parsing the interests and constraints of different agents in that apparatus is crucial for explaining military cohesion during such crises. Drawing on extensive fieldwork we apply our principal-agent framework to explain varying degrees and types of military cohesion in three Arab Spring cases: Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Studying military hierarchy elucidates decision-making within authoritarian regimes amid mass mobilization and allows us to better explain regime re-stabilization, civil war onset, or swift regime change in the wake of domestic unrest.

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          Most cited references32

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          Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989

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            The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective

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              Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                applab
                Perspectives on Politics
                Perspect. polit.
                Cambridge University Press (CUP)
                1537-5927
                1541-0986
                March 2016
                March 21 2016
                : 14
                : 01
                : 38-52
                Article
                10.1017/S1537592715003217
                93ede7c5-f2e0-447a-b82a-f4503ea1d0ea
                © 2016
                History

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