In nonviolent mass protests against dictators, the military is the ultimate arbiter of regime survival. Drawing on a global survey of forty “dictator’s endgames” from 1946 to 2014, this essay examines how dictators and their militaries respond to popular protests, and what the consequences are in terms of the survival of authoritarianism or the emergence of democracy. The authors argue that the type of the authoritarian regime and the military’s legacy of human rights violations go a long way in explaining whether a military will employ violence against the protesters or defect from the ruling coalition.
About the Authors
Aurel Croissant
Aurel Croissant is professor of political science at Heidelberg University. In 2017, he was a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
Read the full essay here. Twenty years ago, there was a more thoroughgoing political pluralism in Russia than there is today. In some respects, the forms of democracy-including party consolidation-have…
A few years ago, Europe’s most important intergovernmental human-rights institution, the Council of Europe, crossed over to the dark side. Like Dorian Gray, the dandy in Oscar Wilde’s story of moral decay,…
