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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd2023-1461 |
| Date | 01 January 2024 |
| Creators | Ben Hammou, Salah |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024 |
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