Keywords

comparative politics; civil-military relations; revolution; military coups; dictatorship; regimes

Abstract

What shapes a state’s political order after a successful military coup? While the bulk of academic and public perspectives center on the power and preferences of the soldiers physically seizing power, this dissertation argues that civilians should be critical to our analyses of coup politics. Specifically, I use the concept of civilian praetorianism - the process in which civilians instigate or consolidate military coups - as my point of departure. First, I build on recent efforts to delineate military coup agents by rank and identity and present a similar logic to understand the powers and preferences of civilian coup collaborators. Civilian insiders - those tied to the incumbent regime - are well-positioned to coordinate and instigate military coups because of their available elite-based resources. While civilian outsiders - those outside the regime’s orbit - lack access to such resources, they can wield mass-based sources of power to consolidate military coups. Second, I argue that the primary type of civilian collaborator - insiders vs. outsiders - in a given coup shapes the post-coup political order along two critical dimensions: the degree to which an executive can monopolize political power, and whether the new regime seeks to redistribute powers and privileges within the state’s sociopolitical hierarchies.

I rely on qualitative and quantitative tools to refine and test these propositions. First, I pair a Most-Similar-Systems Design (MSSD) and within-case process tracing to illustrate the varieties of civilian praetorianism on three coup episodes from post-colonial Sudan (1958; 1969; 1989). Using a wide array of qualitative material from participant testimonies to declassified material from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Foreign Office, I demonstrate that civilian agency plays a critical role in shaping their type of involvement in military coups. Next, I test the broader consequences of civilian involvement on a global sample. Specifically, I develop the first comprehensive dataset on civilian involvement in all successful military coups between 1950 and 2017 to examine the variation in personalization and policy preferences in post-coup states. By demonstrating the salience of civilian agency and involvement in coup politics, this project makes valuable contributions to the study of military coups political instability, and authoritarian politics.

Completion Date

2024

Semester

Summer

Committee Chair

Powell, Jonathan

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs

Degree Program

Security Studies Ph.D.

Format

application/pdf

Release Date

8-15-2029

Length of Campus-only Access

5 years

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Campus-only Access)

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

Accessibility Status

Meets minimum standards for ETDs/HUTs

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Restricted to the UCF community until 8-15-2029; it will then be open access.

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