Military Rule

Abstract

Military rule as a form of autocratic governance can mean either rule by a military strongman unconstrained by other officers or rule by a group of high-ranking officers who can limit the dictator's discretion. We label the latter form a military regime. Both military strongmen and military regimes are more likely to commit human rights abuses and become embroiled in civil wars than are civilian dictatorships. The behavior of strongmen diverges from that of more constrained military rulers in other areas, however. Military strongmen start more international wars than either military regimes or civilian dictators, perhaps because they have more reason to fear postouster exile, prison, or assassination. Fear of the future may also motivate their resistance to transition. Military strongmen are more often ousted by insurgency, popular uprising, or invasion than are military regimes or civilian dictators. Their tenures rarely end in democratization, whereas the opposite is true of military regimes.

Russia’s Arlington? The Federal Military Memorial Cemetery near Moscow

“…Whereas power-concentration gives autocrats wider latitude in foreign policy matters-freer of elite constraints, they are in theory more prone to launch or escalate an international conflict (Weeks 2012: 335)-in bureaucratic/oligarchic systems a group of high-ranking officials or military officers can refuse to enforce the leader's adventurous foreign policy decisions (Geddes et al 2014).…”

Does State Violence Translate into a More Bellicose Foreign Behavior?

“…Disaggregating the "junta" category into two sub-types according to similar elite-constraint levels, a military regime where the leader is constrained by the elite can appear to operate as an oligarchy (a "military machine", as does Tajikistan according to John Ishiyama), which is arguably less conflict-prone than, for example, an unconstrained personalist leader building his authority on a military audience (Slater 2003), as does Putin in Russia. Whereas power-concentration gives autocrats wider latitude in foreign policy matters-freer of elite constraints, they are in theory more prone to launch or escalate an international conflict (Weeks 2012: 335)-in bureaucratic/oligarchic systems a group of high-ranking officials or military officers can refuse to enforce the leader's adventurous foreign policy decisions (Geddes et al 2014).…”

What autocracies say (and what citizens hear): proposing four mechanisms of autocratic legitimation

“…In this new wave of research, questions of legitimation were of secondary importance, if they featured at all. Scholarly reviews on the state of the art in general (Art, 2012;Brancati, 2014;Pepinsky, 2014), on military rule (Geddes, Frantz, and Wright, 2014), on one-party regimes (Magaloni & Kricheli, 2010), and on the role of elections in authoritarian regimes (Gandhi & Lust-Okar, 2009) barely reference legitimation. The research has instead concentrated on explaining durability, persistence, and stability through a focus on the delicate balance between intra-elite cohesion on the one hand and the usage of coercive instruments and tactics on the other hand.…”