While democracy is the least likely outcome of any given democratic transition from authoritarianism, this dissertation argues that the likelihood for democratization diminishes even further in a praetorian state. This is because the military continues to play a decisive role in the transition either directly or indirectly. If the transitions appears bound to bring about civilian control, the military will decide to rule overtly. At a broad conceptual level, this project adds to the existing literature on democratic breakdown that has been comparatively overlooked in relation to transitions and consolidation. The research also expands on the civil-military literature, and aims to explore the role praetorian militaries play during political transitions and processes of democratic consolidation. In particular, it seeks to explain the conditions under which a guardian or a moderator praetorian army would opt to become a ruling praetorian army, and, therefore, preclude the possibility of democratic consolidation. Indeed, this work aims to identify the factors responsible for the undoing of Egypt’s electoral advances, and whether or not that outcome was inevitable. The general assertion here is that the imbalance of power within the state, caused by the army’s oversized political role, and within society, caused by the Brotherhood’s relative organizational prowess, meant a confrontation between the two was virtually unavoidable. Fearing the prospect of subjective civilian control imposed by a potentially hegemonic party, a praetorian military is bound to check that party’s rise by waging a coup d’état in order to maintain the army’s institutional autonomy, economic privileges and right to rule. The rest of the political class aids this process by playing the role of the disloyal opposition paving the way for the officers to remove civilian officials, and carry out a restorative coup. While praetorian armies prefer to delegate the burden of governing to pliable civilians, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ (SCAF) failure to orchestrate a political transition into a tutelary democracy drove the army to shift its posture into ruling praetorianism. Contrary to their wishes and interests, the political transition engendered an intolerable situation for the army: the emergence, in the Muslim Brotherhood, of a potentially hegemonic party that repeatedly attempted (and failed) to subject the military to civilian control. / 2028-02-29T00:00:00Z

<p>For more than three decades the Moscow-based conceptual artist group "Collective Actions" has been organizing actions. Each action, typically taking place at the outskirts of Moscow, is regarded as a trigger for a series of intellectual activities, such as analysis, interpretation, narration, and description. The artists have systematically recorded and transcribed these activities, collecting and assembling texts, diagrams, and photographs in a ten-volume publication entitled "Journeys Outside the City." Five volumes of this publication concern the activities of the group before, and five after, 1989. Over the years the "Journeys Outside the City" became an idiosyncratic, self-sufficient aesthetic discourse arrayed along a constellation of concepts developed by those engaged in "Collective Actions." In its elusive hermeticism and self-referentiality the aesthetic framework constructed by these artists formed a closed system, gathering bundles of signs that seldom referred to anything concrete outside the horizon of Moscow Conceptualism. It is in this regard that the early volumes of the "Journeys Outside the City" can be compared to the similarly closed ideological discourse of the Soviet Politburo. After 1989, however, with the transition from socialism to capitalism, the aesthetic and artistic language of this group began to change as its text-based self-sufficient system began to open up under pressure from new socioeconomic conditions introduced by the processes of democratization and liberalization. </p><p> My dissertation "Transition in Post-Soviet Art: `Collective Actions' Before and After 1989" is neither a history of nor a monographical work on "Collective Actions," but rather an analytical exploration of aesthetic, artistic and institutional changes that have transpired in the "Journeys Outside the City" during the transition from socialism to capitalism. As the artists migrated from one art historical category into another (from the status of "unofficial artists" to that of "contemporary artists"), their aesthetics and art revealed a series of stylistic, technical, formal, textual, and aesthetical transformations and metamorphoses that paralleled broader cultural conversions taking place in post-Soviet and Eastern European art during the transition to capitalism.</p> / Dissertation

Ukraine and Belarus are two post-Soviet states and neighboring countries that, to some extent, demonstrate successful and failed democratization respectively. The purpose of the study is to, based on a theory-consuming approach, investigate which deep structural and proximate actor-oriented explanatory causes may constitute prerequisites and/or obstacles for democratization in these countries. The empirical material draws inspiration from Lachapelle and Hellmeier (2022), from which the explanatory factors are borrowed. The factors are categorized in this study based on relevant theories that Møller and Skaaning (2013) have outlined. Of the deep causes, Belarus' high degree of modernization speaks for the country's good conditions for democratization. Despite Belarus' superiority in the modernization factors, Ukraine has advantages in other deep causes, above all the very strong civil society. In Belarus, there is a lack of proximate causes that can favor democratization, while Ukraine has very favorable conditions – albeit with a high degree of corruption. The study confirms the hypothesis that deep and proximate causes co-vary with each other and with the outcome, but also contradicts, to some extent, an absolute relationship between modernization factors and other deep structural causes as well as the causal direction between proximate and deep causes and suggests an opposite causal relationship. Deep structural causes in combination and interaction with proximate causes determine the development of democracy in these countries. No single theory alone can provide answers to our questions.

Le Myanmar traverse un processus de libéralisation politique qui a été entamé par le haut. Le régime militaire a tenu des élections générales en 2010, lesquelles ont placé au pouvoir un nouveau gouvernement composé à la fois de civils et de militaires. Depuis, la majorité des sanctions imposées par plusieurs États occidentaux au Myanmar ont été levées, et on observe une diversification des relations internationales du pays. Imbriqué à la sphère d’influence chinoise depuis quelques années, celui-ci rétablit des contacts diplomatiques et économiques avec l’Occident. Peu de chercheurs ont tenté d’expliquer les causes de cette transition politique, et le lien entre libéralisation politique et diversification des relations internationales n’a pas encore été expliqué. Ce mémoire propose de le faire en utilisant un modèle théorique issu de deux types de littérature, celle sur la culture stratégique et celle sur les transitions politiques. Il suggère que la libéralisation politique du Myanmar s’explique par les luttes d’influences au sein du régime entre deux sous-cultures stratégiques, les hardliners et les softliners. L’application des normes favorisées par les hardliners ayant échoué dans l’atteinte des objectifs stratégiques du régime, les softliners ont pu imposer leurs propres préférences normatives. Il propose également que la libéralisation politique était une étape nécessaire pour que le gouvernement birman puisse diversifier ses relations internationales. / Myanmar is going through a political liberalization process which was initiated from above. The military regime held a general election in 2010, which brought to power a new government composed of both civilians and militaries. Since then, most of the sanctions imposed to Myanmar by Western states were lifted, and we observe a diversification of the country's international relations. Nested in the Chinese sphere of influence in recent years, Myanmar restores diplomatic and economic ties with the West. Few researchers have attempted to explain the causes of this political transition, and the links between the political liberalization and the diversification of international relations has not yet been explained. This thesis proposes to do so by using a theoretical model derived from two types of literature, the one on strategic culture and the one on political transitions. It suggests that Myanmar’s political liberalization is due to power struggles within the regime between two strategic subcultures, the hardliners and softliners. The application of norms favored by hardliners having failed in achieving the strategic objectives of the regime, softliners were able to impose their own normative preferences. It also suggests that the political liberalization process was a necessary step for the Burmese government to be able to diversify its international relations.