This study develops a leader-centric theory of civil-military relations that expands upon three broad areas of research. Specifically, the study suggests that leaders will evaluate multiple threats to their political survival and will ultimately implement strategy that is most likely to keep them in power. While Downs (1957) has noted such a tendency in democracies, this study expands this rationale to authoritarian regimes by focusing on the primary means of authoritarian removal: the military coup. In contrast to the state-centric nature of traditional international relations theory, this dissertation finds that leaders frequently undermine the power of the state in order to accomplish the self-interested goal of political survival. First, the study carefully describes a number of coup-proofing strategies that leaders can implement. These are broadly defined in terms of influencing either the military’s willingness or its ability to attempt a coup. In addition to testing the effectiveness of these strategies, this study also theoretically explores the implications of coup-proofing for other political development of the state: interstate and intrastate conflict. Second, the study considers the influence of coup-proofing on interstate conflict. This study builds on the diversionary literature by investing coup risk as an incentive to use diversionary tactics as well as coup-proofing as a potential disincentive. The latter can both undermine the necessity of diversion as well as military capabilities, making leaders less capable of utilizing international conflict as a political tool. Third, the dissertation considers the influence of coup-proofing on intrastate conflict. The theory argues that the capability-reducing practice of coup-proofing can have important domestic consequences. Specifically, the practice can increase the mobilizational potential of would-be insurgents, can reduce the mobilizational capacity of the state, and leaders that are particularly fearful of a coup will likely tolerate the rise of an insurgency.

Evaluation des mutations de la stratégie politico-militaire américaine depuis l'occurrence de la Revolution in Military Affairs jusqu'au processus actuel de "Transformation". L'analyse des évolutions vues - y compris à l'aune des opérations menées en Afghanistan et en Irak - montre, au delà du phénomène de technicisation (i.e. le processus d'intégration de nouvelles technologies aux armées) un phénomène de "technologisation". Dans ce cadre, le discours stratégique américain, examiné au travers des débats stratégiques et des contributions doctrinales, tendrait à être sur-déterminé par la technologie, du niveau tactique au niveau politique, de sorte que ledit discours tendrait à devenir en soi une technologie.

Since its independence, the Latin America has been prone to unstable and military dominated politics. Mexico, however, has proven to be an exception. The purpose of this dissertation, therefore, is to explain Mexico's stability and civilian dominated polity. The dissertation draws upon personal interviews with Mexican and American military officers, Mexican military documents and secondary sources. From these sources four foci, professionalization, social background of military and civilian leaders, civilian political behavior, and extranational influences, appeared to offer the greatest amount of explanation for the Mexican case. Professionalization's impact appears to result from the low level of political efficacy generated by the Mexican military educational system and the inculcation of values encouraging loyalty to civilian institutions. The social background of Mexican officers appears to support the values and norms common to the military institution, including those conducive to civilian domination. The social disparity between the more humble family background of most officers and the higher family social background of civilian politicians also appears to be a factor. The civilians political party system appears to be critical. In a multiparty system, like Brazil, multiple civilian opposition groups, through co-optation, generate corresponding military support groups. Civilian opposition groups with military backing therefore will always be present and represent a potential threat. In a single party dominant system, like Mexico, though, military identification will always be with the government, rather than an opposition political group. Finally, the influences of the United States and Soviet Union do have an impact on Mexican civil-military relations. However, rather than the super powers' manipulating the Mexican military and causing coups supportive of super power foreign policy objectives, Mexico appears to use the super powers' resources and images to stabilize civil-military relations. The importance of this dissertation is that it offers explanations for the difference in behavior between the stable, civilian dominated Mexican model, and the military dominated models found throughout most of the Latin American region. The dissertation also presents new interpretations regarding the relationships between professionalization and political efficacy, and social background and social efficacy.

This thesis examines the challenge of coordinating civilian and military efforts within a so-called ‘whole-of-government’ approach to stability operations. The empirical analysis focuses on British and American attempts to implement an integrated civilian-military strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2010. Unlike many existing analyses, the thesis consciously avoids jumping to the search for solutions to fix the problem of coordination and instead offers a nuanced explanation of why it arises in the first instance. Empirical data was gathered through personal interviews with a wide range of civilian and military practitioners between 2007 and 2011. Together with the in-depth study of official documents released by, and on, the defence, diplomatic and development components of the British and American governments, they provide the basis for a fine-grained analysis of obstacles to interagency coordination. The thesis offers a framework for analysis that is grounded in organisation theory and distinguishes between material, bureaucratic and cultural dimensions of obstacles to interagency coordination. It identifies organisational cultures as a crucial force behind government agencies’ reluctance to participate and invest in an integrated approach. The empirical chapters cover interagency dynamics within the government bureaucracy and in operations on the ground, including the role of specialised coordination units and Provincial Reconstruction Teams in the pursuit of coordination. The thesis concludes that stabilisation remains an inherently contested endeavour for all organisations involved and that the roles and expectations implied by contemporary templates for coordination clash with prevailing organisational identities and self-perceptions. These findings caution against the procedural and technocratic approach to interagency coordination that permeates the existing literature on the subject and many proposals for reform. While the thesis examines a specific empirical context, its conclusions have broader implications for civilian-military coordination and the quest for an integrated approach to security in the twenty-first century.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / The 1992 European Union (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP, Maastricht Treaty) marked a turning point in the trans-Atlantic relationship. The Balkan conflicts and broader political changes in the 1990s compelled the EU to assume more responsibility in peace operations. The EU's 60,000 strong Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) is planned to be operational in 2003. Will the EU be able to conduct Petersberg-type peace operations? This thesis analyzes policy and military shortfalls of the Balkan peacekeeping effort. Questions about the legitimacy of armed humanitarian interventions, about difficulties in common policy formulation and translation to sound military objectives are the core problems of civil-military relations in European peace operations. The case studies focus on the EU failure to resolve the Bosnian crises between 1992-95, and on the gaps between NATO policies and military objectives in the operations of 'Implementation Force' in Bosnia and 'Allied Force' in Kosovo. The thesis considers developments in EU CFSP institutions and EU-NATO relationship as well as the EU's response to terrorist attacks on September 11 2001. The thesis argues that the difficulty in EU CFSP formulation limits the effective use of RRF in military operations. / Major, Hungarian Army

Thesis advisor: Timothy Crawford / This thesis focuses on United States civil-military relations during the first decade of the twenty-first century. It examines interactions between principal-level civilian and top-tier military leadership during three strategic decision-making moments. Each case involves examples of subjective civilian control. The author's goal is to investigate and then categorize the processes that were used, assessing how variables influenced the nature of subjective control. Qualitative process tracing is the primary methodology. The author focuses on available sources from myriad avenues including but not limited to journalism, memoirs, primary documents, and social science literature. Case study analysis identifies numerous variables. Presidential leadership and process organization were found to be the most influential, spanning from engaged to "delegatory" and orderly to ad-hoc, respectively. Correlations are identified between the variables. Then, theories from established literature are reviewed and applied when possible. Research finds that subjective civil-military relations became increasingly moderate and theoretically "pure" over each case, chronologically. The author uses his analysis to create new typologies of subjective civil-military control, focusing on the relationships between presidential leadership and process organization. The resulting typologies are intended to assist political scientists' identification and categorization of varying civil-military relationships on the subjective end of Huntington's spectrum. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2017 / The thesis analyses civil-military relations in Zimbabwe since independence, but especially during the period from 2000 through 2013. A central question is why an outright military coup has not occurred, despite severe political and economic crises. Thequestion is broken down into two linked sub- -military relations question of why the military have not seized power from civilians and (2) the question why no "populist military revolt" has occurred, despite the kind of hyperinflation that has triggered such revolts in countries like Ghana and Ethiopia: [Abbreviated Abstract. Open document to view full version] / XL2018

Cette thèse étudie pourquoi et comment les forces armées déploient des activités anticriminelles, et évalue l'impact de ces interventions sur les régimes démocratiques. À partir de l’institutionnalisme historique et de la théorie du choix rationnel, la thèse porte sur deux villes, Rio de Janeiro (Brésil) et Tijuana (Mexique), où les gouverneurs de l'Etat ont demandé aux militaires d’assister dans les tâches de sécurité publique entre 2007 et 2014. À partir de l'analyse des 100 entretiens semi-structurés, des archives historiques et des informations obtenues grâce à des lois sur la liberté d'information, la recherche suit les différentes phases des opérations militaires en matière de sécurité, de la prise de décision à la mise en œuvre de ces politiques. L'analyse systématique des statistiques criminels avant et après les opérations montre que ces actions ont un effet très limité sur la réduction permanente de la violence criminelle. En autre, les interventions militaires sont généralement suivies d'une série d'actions sociales susceptibles d'améliorer la réputation des forces armées au détriment de l'image des agences civiles. Finalement, la recherche montre que ces interventions militaires transforment la législation, la juridiction, la doctrine militaire et l’éducation, et entraînent des changements permanents dans la portée des activités militaires et des actions policières. En raison de ces modifications institutionnelles, les politiciens de façon générale et les gouverneurs des États en particulier sont plus que jamais tentés d’utiliser les forces armées pour obtenir des gains politiques à court terme, même au détriment de la dimension libérale de la démocratie. / This thesis investigates why and how Armed Forces deploy anti-crime activities, and it assesses the impact such interventions entail for democracies. Combining historical institutionalist and rational choice approaches, the thesis focuses on two cities, namely, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Tijuana (Mexico), where the state governors requested the military to assist public security efforts from 2007 to 2014. Relying on analysis of 100 semi-structured interviews, archival sources and information obtained through freedom of information acts, this research tracks the different phases of military operations in security, from decision-making to policy implementation. The systematic analysis of criminal statistics before and after operations indicate that such actions have a limited effect on permanently reducing lethal violence. Moreover, military interventions are usually followed by a set of social actions that will potentially improve the reputation of the Armed Forces to the detriment of the image of civilian agencies. Finally, and contrary to conventional wisdom that military urban patrols are merely temporary events, the research in this thesis demonstrates that military interventions in anti-crime activities transform legislation, jurisdiction, military doctrine and education, and that they bring long-lasting changes in the scope of military and police actions. Due to institutional modifications, politicians in general, and state governors in particular, are more tempted than ever to rely on Armed Forces for short-term political gains, even at the expense of the liberal dimension of democracy.

The changing security environment in Asia has led to a renewed interest in the Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF). However, the SDF itself remains a black box: assessed either in terms of its problematic legal standing or physical military capacity, but with limited understanding of the people within; who they are, what they do, and how they think. This dissertation opens up the black box and brings the SDF officers into the analysis of civil-military relations in post-war Japan. I present a theoretical framework inspired by principal-agent theory, in which I hypothesize that the type of control (ex-ante or ex-post) and preference divergence between the civilians and the military produces four different outcomes in civil-military relations: containment, auto pilot, conflictual, and cooperative (possibly excessive). I examine how civil-military relations in Japan evolved over time and across three realms of defense policy making, budget, personnel, and use of force; utilizing the findings from an opinion survey conducted among SDF officers and civilian elite addressing the "civil-military gap," oral history records of former SDF leaders and civilian defense officials, and interviews with active duty SDF officers and civilian officials. My research shows that civil-military relations in Japan was generally calm, not because the ex-ante constraints were strong and suppressed the opposing views of the SDF, but because the policy preferences of SDF officers and civilian bureaucracy converged in support of the alliance relationship with the United States. Such preference convergence made it possible for the politicians to continue "auto-pilot control" of the SDF, which was convenient for politicians who preferred to avoid dealing with military matters in face of the anti-militaristic public. However, this led to two paradoxical outcomes: (1) the SDF came to enjoy their relative autonomy within the ex-ante constraints, and (2) the ex-ante constraints turned out to be self-binding for politicians, possibly hampering their ability to control the SDF ex-post. Institutional changes through the electoral and administrative reforms in the 1990s along with the perceived changes in the security environment surrounding Japan enhanced both the incentive and capacity of politicians to release the ex-ante constraints and to control the SDF in their own hands. Re-interpretation of the constitution to allow for collective self defense is a step in the same direction. Looking towards the future, the shift from ex-ante to ex-post control may result in tension between the civilians and SDF officers, in cases where their preferences diverge.

This dissertation explores civil-military relations in democratizing contexts, specifically how the historical relationship between the military and the broader public shapes responses to political crises such as riots and revolutions. I develop a novel theory, rooted in civil-military relations literature from political science and sociology, for how an army's historical interactions with the population and with foreign sponsors create doctrine by shaping organizational culture and practices toward the population. Doctrine, in turn, influences the military’s response to a popular uprising. The foundations of military doctrine are historical and include the military's institutional origins, role in national independence, and relationship to the ruling party. Subsequently, doctrinal innovation occurs as a result of interacting with the domestic population and foreign military sponsors. The dissertation features qualitative case studies of Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria during the Arab Spring and a quantitative data analysis of major uprisings worldwide since 1950. Both qualitative and quantitative evidence demonstrate that the nature of military doctrine explains soldiers' behavior during popular uprisings better than alternative arguments based on capacity, patronage, and ethnicity.