Pitfalls of Professionalism? Military Academies and Coup Risk

Military academies tend to be strongly linked to the professionalization of the armed forces. This explains why many countries in the world have created such institutions. The following article studies a potential negative externality stemming from military schools: increased coup risk. We argue that military academies may create, inculcate, and strengthen cohesive views that could conflict with incumbent policies, and that these schools establish networks among military officers that may facilitate coordination necessary for plotting a putsch. We also contend and empirically demonstrate that these negative side effects of military academies are in particular pronounced in nondemocracies, that is, military academies have diverse effects across regime types. This work has significant implications for our understanding civil–military relations. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature on military education and professionalization, as we suggest that military academies are important vehicles through which coups can emerge predominantly in authoritarian states

The Dictator’s Legionnaires: Foreign Recruitment, Coups, and Uprisings

Data de publicació electrònica: 14-11-2023Includes supplementary materials for the online appendix.Several countries recruit foreign nationals into their armed forces. This is despite the norm of citizen armies and the strong idea that individuals join the military to defend their home country while military service socializes them into good citizens. We argue that foreign recruits can have very specific benefits for some authoritarian governments. Because they lack strong links to society, their loyalties lie with whoever recruited and pays them, not the nation, country, or its citizens. As such, we argue, first, that their recruitment is especially attractive for personalistic rulers. Second, we propose that foreigners’ presence in the armed forces stymies these forces’ ability to carry out coup attempts and deters the occurrence of mass uprisings by signalling the security forces’ willingness to respond with violent repression. Empirical tests for the period 1946–2010 support these arguments. This research expands our understanding of legionnaire recruitment, civil–military relations, and comparative authoritarianism

Preventing Dissent: Secret Police and Protests in Dictatorships

Includes supplementary materials for the online appendix.This article examines the impact of secret police organizations on the occurrence of antiregime protests in authoritarian regimes. We argue that such organizations are related to lower levels of protests via two related mechanisms: intelligence gathering and an increased perception of risk among citizens, which reduce citizens’ ability and willingness to mobilize, respectively. Using new data on secret police organizations in dictatorships covering the post–World War II period, our findings support the main expectation. This research contributes to our understanding of security institutions, antiregime protests, and the repression-dissent nexus

The determinants of low-intensity intergroup violence: the case of Northern Ireland

Includes supplementary materials: online appendix; replication fileWhat accounts for low-intensity intergroup violence? This article explores the determinants of low-intensity sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which has marked the post-1998 peace agreement period. Low-intensity violence comprises a variety of events from riots to attacks against other civilians as well as against homes and symbolic buildings such as churches. We argue that this violence is more likely and prevalent in interface areas where similarly sized rival communities are geographically in contact with each other. Parity and contact spur intergroup competition and threat perception, and they increase the viability of violence. We use original cross-sectional time-series violence data for the 2005–12 period at a disaggregated subnational level, the ward, and a wide variety of social and economic indicators to test our hypotheses. In particular, we assess the impact of within-ward ethnic composition, on the one hand, and the ethnic composition of neighboring wards, on the other. We find that the number of intergroup violent events peaks in wards where there is parity between groups, and in predominantly Catholic (Protestant) wards that border predominantly Protestant (Catholic) wards. The article makes two main contributions: it shows that micro-level dynamics of violence can expand beyond local territorial units, and it suggests that ethnic segregation is unlikely to prevent intergroup violence

Economic sanctions and the duration of civil conflicts

This article studies the impact of economic sanctions on the duration and outcome of intrastate conflicts. Sanctions are argued to foster the convergence of beliefs over parties’ capacity, to reduce the utility of victory and to increase the costs of continuing fighting. Using a sample of 87 wars and new data on sanctions and sanction types, the author shows that sanctions and their durations are statistically associated with shorter intrastate conflicts. It is also shown that total economic embargoes are the most effective type of coercive measure in these cases and that sanctions imposed either by international organizations or by other actors have similar negative effects on war duration. In the second part of the article, the dependent variable is disaggregated, and I demonstrate that sanctions imposed by international institutions increase the likelihood of conflict resolution, whereas those sanctions not imposed by such institutions tend to increase the probability of a military victory. Moreover, if the targeted state is a member of the international institution imposing the sanctions, the effect of such coercion is even greater. Economic embargoes are also proven to increase the likelihoods of a military and a negotiated end, whereas international arms embargoes reduce the likelihood of a military victory

Violence, Repression and Terror in Mass Dictatorships: A View from the European Margins

Repression remains the core feature of dictatorships, and fear, terror, violence, intimidation and surveillance are at the core of the systems of political domination and maintenance of modern dictatorships. Nevertheless, if repression is a structural dimension of mass dictatorships, "political" and\or "state terror," while always potentially present) is not when we define the latter as the arbitrary extermination of individuals by organs of political authority or groups

Do authoritarian institutions mobilize economic cooperation?

Authoritarianism, Dictatorship, Taxation, Institutions, H24, H27, H71,