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.
The political struggle between President Erdoğan and opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu is a fierce battle for the country’s democracy. But it goes deeper than that. It is also a struggle…
Liberal societies are those which offer refuge from the very people they empower—through individual choice, mobility, and the possibility of exit. This is the form of liberty that most clearly…
