Jumping on the Bandwagon: Differentiation and Security Defection during Conflict

Abstract

<jats:p> When confronted with mass uprisings, governments deploy their security forces for crowd control or repression. However, sometimes security agencies choose to side with the opposition movement. Recent work shows that “fragmentation” contributes to defection: fragmenting the security forces into parallel units leads to oversight problems and grievances among soldiers, which raises the risk of members of the security forces defecting to the opposition movement. However, I argue that the effect on defection is strongly moderated by the circumstances under which states choose to fragment their military: fragmentation for the purpose of security specialization, called “differentiation,” even decreases its risk. Employing Bayesian multilevel modeling, the findings corroborate this distinction. The study contributes to the fundamental discussion on civil–military relations, shedding light on why some conflict situations see security defections while others do not. Understanding this phenomenon is a pivotal element to explaining how conflicts develop, escalate, and end. </jats:p>

Force Structure and Local Peacekeeping Effectiveness: Micro-Level Evidence on UN Troop Composition

“…This follows findings in military studies that show how effectively addressing asymmetric threats requires specialized training and equipment( Dworschak 2020 ;Kalyvas 2006 ;Lyall and Wilson 2009 ;Pilster, Böhmelt, and Tago 2016 ). While peacekeeping is different from counterinsurgency operations at the strategic level, they are increasingly involved in similar conflict environments at the tactical level( Friis 2010 ).Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/66/4/sqac072/6753239 by guest on 12 October 2022…”

State breakdown and Army-Splinter Rebellions

“…Officers themselves are often elites contesting for better access to wealth and power; civilian elites with control over patronage may seek to recruit followings in the armed forces to improve their chances, through identity appeals or funding; and armed forces riddled with clientelistic relationships are unlikely to build cohesion or trust, creating pools of soldiers willing to defect from their regimes. These soldiers can switch sides to uprisings—indeed, Dahl (2016), Lutscher (2016) and Dworschak (2020) note an important relationship between personalist regimes and defection, which, as noted, sometimes results in an army-splinter rebellion. I extend this insight to note that disgruntled military personnel can also launch their own rebellions without waiting for an uprising, a point that existing defection scholarship does not consider.…”

“…Defection during uprisings from below has received significant scholarly attention (McLauchlin 2010; Chenoweth and Stephan 2011; Nepstad 2013; Makara 2013; Lee 2015; Dahl 2016; Lutscher 2016; Barany 2016; Dworschak 2020), and I draw on some of that scholarship to theorize ASR origins. It is natural to ask what is different about the concept of army-splinter rebellions.…”

“…8I do not include a standard measure of coup-proofing, the number of independent land-force branches (Escribà-Folch, Böhmelt, and Pilster 2019), for two reasons: there is a loss of over 1400 cases due to missing data, and these different branches often indicate military specialization rather than coup-proofing (Dworschak 2020; De Bruin 2020b). De Bruin’s (2020b) State Security Forces dataset is, at present, available for a random sample of countries and thus would also entail a large loss of cases; with only 43 ASRs, this is a risk.…”