Coup risk, counterbalancing, and international conflict

Security Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 140-177

  Bflkin, Aaron ^a   Schofer, Evan ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 29244435001     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410591002527     Document Type: Review

References (296)

1. Michael R. Gordon, "U.S. Is Given Papers That Israelis Assert Tie Arafat to Terror," New York Times, 12 April 2002, Al.
2. Our analysis is based on Aaron Belkin, United We Stand: Divide-and-Conquer Politics and the Logic of International Hostility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005);
3. and Aaron Belkin and Evan Schofer, "Toward a Structural Understanding of Coup Risk: Concepts, Measurement, and Implications," Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 5 (October 2003): 594-620.
4. The literature on military counterbalancing is enormous. Important discussions can be found in Bruce W. Farcau, The Coup; Tactics in the Seizure of Power (Westport: Praeger, 1994);
5. Edward N. Luttwak, Coup d'état (London: Penguin Press, 1908);
6. Samuel E. Finer, The Man on Horseback; The Role of the Military in Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988);
7. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988);
8. Peter D. Feaver, "The Why, What, and How of Civilian Control: Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force," paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 31 August-3 September 1995;
9. Peter Feaver, "Crisis as Shirking: An Agency Theory Explanation of the Souring of American Civil-Military Relations," Armed Forces & Society 24, no. 3 (spring 1998): 407-34;
10. Jendayi Frazer, "Sustaining Civilian Control: Armed Counterweights in Regime Stability in South Africa," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1994;
11. Alain Rouquie, The Military and the State, in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
12. and Alfred Stepan, "The New Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military Role Expansion," in Armies and Politics in Latin America, ed. Abraham F. Lowenthal and John Samuel Fitch (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 244-57.
13. On military counterbalancing in Syria, see Middle East Watch, Syria Unmasked; The Suppression of Human "Rights by the Asad Regime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 41, 52, 174;
14. Mark Heller, ed., The Middle East Military Balance (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post Press, 1983), 229-30;
15. Richard F. Nyrop, ed., Syria: A Country Study (Washington: American University, 1978), 216;
16. Nikolaos van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria; Sectarianism, Regionalism, and Tribalism in Politics, 1961-1978 (London: Croon Helm, 1979), 90;
17. Hanna Batatu, "Some Observations on the Social Roots of Syria's Ruling Military Group and the Causes of Its Dominance," Middle East Journal 35, no. 3 (summer 1981): 331-44;
18. Alasdair Drysdale, "Ethnicity in the Syrian Officer Corps: A Conceptualization," Civilisations 29 (December 1979): 372;
19. and Itamar Rabinovich, "Syria," in Security Policies of Developing Countries, ed. Edward A. Kolodziej and Robert E. Harkavy (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1982), 269.
20. On Asad's survival strategies more generally, see Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States;
21. Fred H. Lawson, "From Neo-Ba'th to Nouveau: Hafiz al-Asad's Second Decade, " Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 14 (winter 1990): 1-21;
22. Fred. H. Lawson, Why Syria Goes to War: Thirty Years of Confrontation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996);
23. Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Peasant and Bureaucracy in Ba'thist Syria (Boulder: Westview, 1989);
24. Raymond A. Hinnebusch, "Asad's Syria and the New World Order: The Struggle for Regime Survival," Middle East Policy 2, no. 1 (1993): 1-14;
25. Adeed I. Dawisha, "Syria under Asad, 1970-78: The Centres of Power," Government and Opposition 13, no. 3 (summer 1978): 341-54;
26. and Patrick Seale, Asad (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988).
27. For a study of military counterbalancing in the Middle East, see James T. Quinlivan, "Coup-proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East," International Security 24, no. 2 (fall 1999): 131-65.
28. On Georgian civil-military relations in the early years of Shevardnadze's presidency, see Irakli Aladashvili, "Georgian Internal Forces," Army and Society in Georgia 4, nos. 1-2 (January-February 1996): 11-13;
29. Roy Allison, "Military Forces in the Soviet Successor States," Adelphi Paper no. 280 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1993);
30. David Darchiashvili, Elections in Georgia 5 November 1995 (Tbilisi: Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy, and Development, 1995);
31. David Darchiashvili and Irakli Aladashvili, "The 11th Brigade - The Past and the Present," Army and Society in Georgia 4, no. 5 (May 1996): 10-14;
32. Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl and Melvin A. Goodman, The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997);
33. Charles H. Fairbanks, "Postcommunist Wars" Journal of Democracy 6, no. 4 (October 1995): 18-34;
34. Elizabeth Fuller, "Georgia's National Guard," Report on the USSR 3, no. 7 (February 1991): 18-19;
35. Stephen F.Jones, "Adventurers or Commanders? Civil-Military Relations in Georgia since Independence," in Civil-Military Relations in the Soviet and Yugoslav Successor States, ed. Constantine P. Danopoulos (Boulder: Westview, 1996), 35-52;
36. and Tamara Pataraia, "Some Problems of Conscription in Georgian Army," Army and Society in Georgia 4, nos. 1-2 (January 1996): 13-15.
37. On Georgian state-building more generally, see Jonathan Aves, Georgia: From Chaos to Stability? (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1996);
38. Revaz G. Gachechiladze, The New Georgia: Space, Society, and Politics (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995);
39. Stephen F. Jones, "Georgia's Power Structures," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report 2 (1993): 5-9;
40. and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2d ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
41. The diversionary hypothesis holds that leaders use aggressive foreign policies including war to divert the public's attention away from domestic problems. The closely related rally-around-the-flag hypothesis suggests that leaders who engage in aggressive foreign policies benefit from a rally, or boost in domestic popularity. See Robert B. Smith, "Disaffection, Delegitimation, and Consequences: Aggregate Trends for World War II, Korea and Vietnam," in Public Opinion and the Military Establishment, ed. Charles Moskos (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1971);
42. John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973);
43. and Michael B. MacKuen, "Political Drama, Economic Conditions, and the Dynamics of Presidential Popularity," American Journal of Political Science 27, no. 2 (spring 1983): 165-92.
44. Both claims are grounded in the ingroup-outgroup hypothesis, the notion that conflict with an external group promotes internal cohesion in pre-existinggroups that face a common threat and that believe that they can address the threat. See Georg Simmel, Conflict, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, ILL.: Free Press, 1955);
45. Lewis A. Coser, The Function of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1956).
46. The ingroup-outgroup hypothesis has been confirmed in many psychological, anthropological, and sociological studies (see Arthur A. Stein, "Conflict and Cohesion: A Review of the Literature," Journal of Conflict Resolution 20, no. 1 [March 1976]: 143-72),
47. and the idea is so well accepted that one scholar claimed it "to be a general law that human groups react to external pressure by increased internal coherence" (Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964], 58,
48. quoted in Jack S. Levy, "The Diversionary Theory of War: A Critique," in Handbook of War Studies, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989], 261).
49. Despite the robustness of the ingroup-outgroup hypothesis, however, scholars have debated whether and under what conditions leaders might use aggressive foreign policies to promote domestic rallies. Baker and Oneal, Miller, Gelpi, Levy, Stohl, and others note that although some historical studies have explained leaders' willingness to use force in terms of efforts to divert the public's attention from domestic problems and bolster their own domestic standing, other quantitative studies have found quite limited empirical support for this proposition. See William D. Baker and John R. Oneal, "Patriotism or Opinion Leadership?: The Nature and Origins of the 'Rally "round the Flag' Effect," Journal of Conflict Resolution 45, no. 5 (October 2001): 661-87;
50. Ross A. Miller, "Regime Type, Strategic Interaction, and the Diversionary Use of Force," Journal of Conflict Resolution 43, no. 3 (June 1999): 388;
51. Christopher Gelpi, "Democratic Diversions: Governmental Structure and the Externalization of Domestic Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41, no. 2 (April 1997): 255;
52. Levy, "The Diversionary Theory of War";
53. Michael Stohl, "The Nexus of Civil and International Conflict," in Handbook of Political Conflict: Theory and Research, ed. Ted R. Gurr (New York: Free Press, 1980), 297-330;
54. Raymond Tanter, "Dimensions of Conflict Behavior Within and Between Nations, 1958-1960," Journal of Conflict Resolution 10, no. 1 (March 1966): 41-64;
55. and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, ed., Conflict Behavior and Linkage Politics (New York: David McKay, 1973).
56. Thus, recent work has focused on the analysis of mediating factors that might help explain when leaders use aggressive foreign policies to promote domestic popularity, and when the use of force leads to a rally effect. Some scholars, for example, have focused on the impact of regime type. While Jack S. Levy and Lily I. Vakili in "Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes: Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas Case," in The Internationalization of Communal Strife, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky (London: Routledge, 1992), find authoritarian states more likely to use aggressive foreign policies to promote rally effects, others such as Gelpi in "Democratic Diversions" argue that democratic leaders are more likely to use force to promote domestic popularity.
57. Another group of scholars explores whether interaction opportunities influence willingness to use force for domestic purposes. Miller in "Regime Type, Strategic Interaction, and the Diversionary Use of Force," notes that "although democratic leaders may be willing to engage in diversionary behavior, would-be adversaries anticipate this willingness and limit their interactions with those leaders" (389). See also Brett Ashley Leeds and David R. Davis, "Beneath the Surface: Regime Type and International Interaction, 1953-1978," Journal of Peace Research 36, no. 1 (January 1999): 5-21;
58. and Alastair Smith, "Diversionary Foreign Policy in Democratic Systems," International Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1 (March 1996): 133-53.
59. Others, such as Kurt Dassel and Eric Reinhardt in "Domestic Strife and the Initiation of Violence at Home and Abroad," American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 1 (January 1999): 56-85,
60. claim that the type of domestic strife influences the likelihood of diversionary action. For recent reviews see Gelpi, "Democratic Diversions";
61. Karl DeRouen, Jr., "Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force: A Research Note," International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 2 (June 2000): 317;
62. and Baker and Oneal, "Patriotism or Opinion Leadership?";
63. for older reviews see Levy, "The Diversionary Theory of War";
64. and Stohl, "The Nexus of Civil and International Conflict."
65. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourse (New York: Random House, 1950), 410.
66. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982);
67. and Frazer, "Sustaining Civilian Control," 196.
68. Samuel P. Huntington, keynote address, conference on "Civil-Military Relations and the Consolidation of Democracy," International Forum for Democratic Studies, Washington, D.C., March 1995, text available at http://www.ned.org/publications/publications.html;
69. Stephen R. David, Defending Third World Regimes from Coups d'État (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985);
70. and Stephen R. David, Third World Coups d'état and International Security (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
71. We compiled our list of coups from Luttwak, Coup d'etat;
72. Gregor Ferguson, Coup d'etat: A Practical Manual (New York: Sterling, 1987);
73. Rosemary H.T. O'Kane, The Likelihood of Coups (Brookfield: Avebury, 1987);
74. Finer, The Man on Horseback;
75. and Keesing's Contemporary Archives;
76. we sought to ensure the accuracy of our list by sharing it with regional experts and checking discrepant cases in the New York Times and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service bulletins when possible. Between 1960 and 2000, there were 7 failed coup attempts and 1 successful coup in Western Europe, 3 failed coup attempts and 6 successful coups in Central Europe, 22 failed coup attempts and 18 successful coups in Central America, 25 failed coup attempts and 12 successful coups in Asia, 20 failed coup attempts and 24 successful coups in South America, 23 failed coup attempts and 25 successful coups in the Middle East, and 72 failed coup attempts and 60 successful coups in Africa. Military conspiracies constitute a much more common threat to leaders than revolutions, which have toppled only a handful of regimes. See Stephen M. Walt, "Revolution and War," World Politics 44, no. 3 (April 1992): 325.
77. Some of the best recent work in the literature on civil-military relations includes Deborah D. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994);
78. Deborah D. Avant, "Conflicting Indicators of 'Crisis' in American Civil-Military Relations," Armed Forces & Society 24, no. 3 (spring 1998): 375-87;
79. Michael N. Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in Egypt and Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992);
80. David, Defending Third World Regimes';
81. David, Third World Coups d'État; Michael
82. C. Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin America and United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
83. Michael C. Desch, "Soldiers, States, and Structure: The End of the Cold War and Weakening U.S. Civilian Control," paper prepared for conference on "A Crisis in Civilian Control? Contending Theories of American Civil-Military Relations," John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University, 11-12 June 1996;
84. Michael C. Desch, "War and State Strength," International Organization 50, no. 2 (spring 1996): 237-68;
85. and Michael C. Desch, Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). With just a few exceptions that are mentioned below, however, most of this important new work tends to remain silent on whether leadership efforts to reduce coup risk might lead to international outcomes.
86. Coups d'état are defined here as efforts by small military coalitions to replace the regime. For a typology of coups, see Ekkart Zimmermann, Political Violence, Crises and Revolutions: Theories and Research (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).
87. Following Ted R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 185, regimes are defined here as the incumbents who control the government. "The state" refers to governinginstitutions. Finally, civilian and military regimes are equated here because both must protect themselves from the risk of coups d'état. Indeed, approximately half of all coups are launched against military regimes.
88. See Samuel E. Finer, "The Military and Politics in the Third World," in The Third World, ed. W. S. Thompson (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1983), 82.
89. Thus, civilian and military leaders are referred to herein as "the regime" and the "military-as-institution" is referred to as "the military." On this distinction, see Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 30.
90. For the literature on the origins of war in the developing world, see Kalevi J. Holsti, "Armed Conflicts in the Third World: Assessing Analytical Approaches and Anomalies" paper prepared for the thirty-fourth annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Acapulco, Mexico, 23-27 March 1993;
91. Edward E. Azar and Chung-in Moon, eds., National Security in the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
92. Manus I. Midlarsky, ed., The Internationalization of Communal Strife (London: Routledge, 1992);
93. Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear; The National Security Problem in International Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983);
94. Brian L. Job, ed., The Insecurity Dilemma; National Security of Third World States (London: Lynne Rienner, 1992);
95. and Mohammed Ayoob, "The Security Problematic of the Third World," World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 257-83.
96. According to these studies, competing ethnic and religious groups contest the central authority of regimes that rest on narrow social bases, and the administrative capacities of state agencies fail to keep pace with the demands of growing populations. As a result, war in the underdeveloped world occurs when domestic violence "spills over" into interstate conflict, as was arguably the case in the India-Pakistan war of 1971 (Holsti, "Armed Conflicts in the Third World"). State weakness, then, is identified as a cause of war. Its operationalization, however, almost never includes vulnerability to the armed forces, depending instead on limited coercive capacity, scarcity of resources, institutional and administrative incompetence, and lack of national cohesion.
97. These exceptions include Desch, When the Third World Matters;
98. Desch, "Soldiers, States, and Structure";
99. Desch, "War and State Strength";
100. Stephen Biddle and Robert Zirkle, "Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare in the Developing World," Journal of Strategic Studies 19, no. 2 (June 1996): 171-212;
101. Kurt Dassel, "Civilians, Soldiers, and Strife: Domestic Sources of International Aggression," International Security 23, no. 1 (summer 1998): 107-40;
102. and Dassel and Reinhardt, "Domestic Strife and the Initiation of Violence."
103. Most scholarship on civil-military relations, however, tends to ignore the causes of war. Sociologists who dominate the largest academic society in the field, the Inter-University Seminar, are not trained in international relations theory, and they tend to conceptualize civil-military relations as a dependent variable. With a few important exceptions, many of the political scientists who study civil-military relations are comparativists who tend not to study the causes of war (Finer, The Man on Horseback, 315-29).
104. As Kasza notes in a review of the literature, "comparativists rarely analyze the politics of the military in the context of its war-making mission or when the country under study is at war" (Gregory J. Kasza, "War and Comparative Politics," Comparative Politics 28, no. 3 (April 1996): 355-56).
105. Although some scholars do incorporate various aspects of civil-military relations as an independent variable, usually their aim is to account for domestic consequences of civil-military relations. For example, a subset of the literature explores the political role of the military, in particular whether service in the armed forces undermines ethnic affiliations. See John J. Johnson, ed., The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962);
106. Morris Janowitz, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964);
107. and Henry Bienen, "Armed Forces and National Modernization: Continuing the Debate," Comparative Politics 16, no. 1 (October 1983): 1-16.
108. A few scholars do use civil-military relations as an independent or mediating variable to explain international outcomes, including Elizabeth Kier, "Culture and Military Doctrine: France between the Wars," International Security 19, no. 4 (spring 1995): 65-93;
109. Stephen Van Evera, Causes of Wan Power and the. Roots of Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999);
110. Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984);
111. Jack L. Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive; Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984);
112. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, trans. H. Norden (New York: Kelley, 1951);
113. and Biddle and Zirkle, "Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare."
114. Van Evera, for example, argues in Causes of War that militaries cause war as an unintended side effect of efforts to protect their own organizational interests when they purvey myths that exaggerate the necessity and utility of force. Posen in Sources of Military Doctrine argues that the degree of international threat influences whether or not civilians allow military preferences for offensive doctrines to prevail. Although this literature sheds light on important issues such as the origins of doctrine and the influence of military culture (Kier, "Culture and Military Doctrine"), scholars in this subfield tend to base their accounts on great powers, for whom the risk of coups d'état usually is low. As a result, their analyses tend to ignore the risk of coups. Thus, the majority of scholarship on civil-military relations does not seek to account for the causes of international conflict. Moreover, those scholars who do use civil-military relations to explain international outcomes tend not to address the critical aspect of civil-military relations that is central to this project: leadership efforts to protect themselves from their own militaries.
115. For example, Dassel and Reinhardt argue in "Domestic Strife and the Initiation of Violence" that domestic instability is most likely to lead to international conflict when the military's interests are challenged. Their argument is premised, however, on the incorrect assumption that "demonstrations, rebellions, and revolutions frequently lead to military coups" (59). Popular protest, however, does not cause coups d'état. Most coups take place absent popular disorder, and most disorder does not lead to coups. Indeed, to the extent that coups and domestic instability are related, it is probably the case that military disloyalty causes domestic instability by opening a window of opportunity for popular protest.
116. See Katharine Campbell Chorley, Armies and the Art of Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1943);
117. Ted R. Gurr, The Conditions of Civil Violence: First Tests of a Causal Model (Princeton: Center for International Studies, 1967);
118. Gurr, Why Men Rebel, 251;
119. Diana E.H. Russell, Rebellion, Revolution, and Armed Force: A Comparative Study of Fifteen Countries with Special Emphasis on Cuba and South Africa (New York: Academic, 1974);
120. and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Dassel and Reinhardt's theoretical mechanism is heavily dependent on the assumption that domestic instability leads to coups, and this assumption is incorrect. In addition, like almost all of the rest of the literature on domestic politics and war, Dassel and Reinhardt assume that the military is a unitary actor. They fail to "unpack" the military or to theorize the origins and international implications of military fragmentation. Dassel in "Civilians, Soldiers, and Strife" does theorize the international implications of military fragmentation, but as in Dassel and Reinhardt, "Domestic Strife and the Initiation of Violence" "(63), Dassel's 1998 study is heavily dependent on the unquestioned assumption that "international crises encourage a 'rally "round the flag effect'." Finally, Dassel and Reinhardt assume that "the military uses force to protect itself" without explaining how and why this may be the case.
121. Levy, "The Diversionary Theory of War," 264;
122. and Stohl, "The Nexus of Civil and International Conflict."
123. See, for example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Randolph M. Siverson, and Gary Woller, "War and the Fate of Regimes: A Comparative Analysis," American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (September 1992): 638-46;
124. and Frazer, "Sustaining Civilian Control."
125. See, for example, Quinlivan, "Coup-proofing";
126. Feaver, "The Why, What and How of Civilian Control";
127. Rouquié, The Military and the State;
128. and Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
129. Sec Belkin and Schofer, "Toward a Structural Understanding"
130. For a review of the causes of coups d'état, see Zimmermann, Political Violence, Crises and Revolutions. A conceptualization of background causes is developed below.
131. Robert W. Jackman, Power without Force; The Political Capacity of Nation States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
132. As Feaver suggests, "the history of American civil-military relations has been rich with conflict." Peter D. Feaver, "The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control," Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 2 (winter 1996): 157.
133. The literature on the principal-agent problem provides a theoretical foundation for understanding such conflict in terms of the costs and benefits of delegating decisions about force management to the military. See Peter D. Feaver, "Civil-Military Conflict and the Use of Force," in U.S. Civil-Military Relations: In Crisis or Transition? ed. Donald Snider and Miranda A Carlton-Carew (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1995), 113-44;
134. and Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change. Despite the tradition of military resistance to civilian authority in the United States, however, our findings suggest there is no chance of coup as long as background causes of coups remain absent.
135. Even Israel experienced an early, violent episode over civil-military relations. See Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Anatomy of the Israeli Army (New York: Hippocrene, 1979), 62.
136. Rouquié, The Military and the State, 52.
137. Stepan, "The New Professionalism of International Warfare," 41.
138. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, 212.
139. See Frazer, "Sustaining Civilian Control."
140. There are many ways to divide the armed forces. Alternatives include the creation of competing service branches, intelligence agencies, paramilitaries, militias, new units within the military, and networks of watchdogs that monitor and infiltrate the chain of command. In many cases, the creation of alternative paramilitaries may be the best strategy for avoiding a coup. Syria's late president, Hafez al-Asad, for example, cultivated at least six different ground forces including the regular army, the Special Forces, the Presidential Guard, the Struggle Companies, the Popular Army, and the Defense Units. Syria experienced twenty-one regime changes via coups d'état between 1946 and 1970, but Asad's use of counterbalancing put an end to this tradition. See Batatu, "Some Observations on the Social Roots'";
141. Dawisha, "Syria under Asad";
142. Drysdale, "Ethnicity in the Syrian Officer Corps";
143. Hinnebusch, Peasant and Bureaucracy in Ba'thist Syria;
144. and Gerard Michaud, "The Importance of Bodyguards," MERIP 12 (1982): 29-32. In other cases, however, leaders may rely on navies and air forces to reduce the risk of a coup. As Luttwak, Coup d'état, notes, in "certain geographical settings... the transport element of naval and air forces make them even more important than the army" (65).
145. For example, while Hafiz al-Asad recovered from an illness in the Syrian countryside in 1984, his brother Rif'at tried to use his private army to displace the regime. See Belkin, United We Stand, 22-29, for a discussion of the limitations of seven different strategies that leaders use to subordinate their own armed forces. The strategies are remuneration (bribery), indoctrination, promotion of corporate spirit (military autonomy), professionalization, patrimonialization (ethnic stacking and random shuffling), selling national autonomy to foreign powers who protect the leadership from its own forces, and strengthening civilian oversight. Strengthening civilian oversight, of course, is the most desirable strategy, but it is often unavailable to illegitimate leaders who are highly vulnerable to a coup.
146. The evidence below is taken from both poorly integrated forces in the developing world as well as the best Western militaries. Such evidence is presented here not to show that Western states are vulnerable to coups, but to suggest that international conflict is so powerful a determinant of military jealousy that it can lead to inter-service rivakies even in the best-trained forces.
147. Janice G. Stein, "Calculation, Miscalculation, and Conventional Deterrence I: The View from Cairo," in Psychology and Deterrence, ed. Robert Jervis, Richard N. Lebow, and Janice G. Stein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 46.
148. Richard. K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 115-38.
149. For a history of the rivalry between the Air Force and the Navy in the United States over strategic planning, see Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 232-47;
150. and Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin's, 1981), 29, 93, 167.
151. Kaplan, in Wizards of Armageddon, for example, describes the 1949 "Admirals' Revolt," in which, in response to cuts to the Navy's budget, "the entire top echelon of naval offers broke all tradition of subordination and publicly testified against the official emphasis being placed on the atom bomb, on the Strategic Air Command, [and] on the Air Force's B-36 bombers" (232).
152. Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai; Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the first Marine Division, 1941-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 153.
153. Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands (New York: Norton, 1983), 218.
154. Yehuda Ben Meir, Civil-Military Relations in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 82, explains that after the 1949 Israeli war of independence, the commander of the Israeli Air Force "lobbied strongly for an independent air force organized as a separate service." The Air Force lost its bid for autonomy and was integrated into the Israel Defense Forces. That said, the Air Force's desire for increased autonomy did not disappear. For example, Ben Meir notes that in the early 1970's, the commander of the Air Force claimed entitlement to direct access to the defense minister and "contended that the air force was subordinate to the CGS [chief of the general staff] only, claiming that the various branches and departments of the general staff ... function with regard to the air force in a coordinating capacity with no command authority" (82).
155. Cameron, American Samurai, 169.
156. See Ben Meir, Civil-Military "Relations in Israel, 78;
157. Biddle and Zirkle, "Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare," 4;
158. and Coser, Function of Social Conflict, 88, 92.
159. Seale, Asad.
160. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this example. For more information on Stalin's purges, see Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from Beginning to End (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
161. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment; Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York : Oxford University Press, 1998);
162. Geoffrey A. Hosking, The First Socialist Society; A History of the Soviet Union from Within (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990);
163. Dimitry Antonovich Volkogonov, Stalin; Triumph and Tragedy, trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991);
164. and David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb; The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Random liouse, 1993).
165. Biddle and Zirkle, "Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare," 13.
166. Biddle and Zirkle, "Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare."
167. Eric A. Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics; Military Coups and Governments (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977);
168. Amos Perlmutter, The Military and Politics in Modern Times; On Professionals, Praetorians, and Revolutionary Soldiers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977);
169. and Finer, The Man on Horseback.
170. Luttwak, Coup d'état;
171. and Finer, The Man on Horseback, 5.
172. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., "Welcome to the Junta: The Erosion of Civilian Control of the us. Military," Wake Forest Law Review 29, no. 2 (summer 1994): 362. That said, the point made above, that as long as background causes of coups remain absent there is no chance of an American coup d'état, warrants reiteration.
173. See Coser, Function of Social Conflict.
174. Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
175. On the importance of unit cohesion, see Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, "Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II," Public Opinion Quarterly 12, no. 2 (summer 1948): 280-315;
176. S.L.A. Marshall, Men against Fire; The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (New York: William Morrow, 1947);
177. and Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier, Vol. 2: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949).
178. Each case consists of a regime-year. For example, Spain-1969 is one case and Spain-1970 is another case.
179. International Institute of Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 1994-95 (London: Brassey's, 1995), 5.
180. Summary statistics follow: for the counterbalancing index, mean = .01, min. = -4.03, max = 5.75; for the number of military organizations, mean = 4.50, min. = 1, max. = 12; for the relative size of the paramilitary, mean = .28, min. = 0, max. = .9. The pearson correlation coefficient for these two dimensions is .443; p < .001. As scores were quite stable over time, we measured each dimension for every country in every fourth year and then used the SPSS linear interpolation function to compute scores for intermediate years.
181. We also tried other measures of coup risk in other common ways, such as by a measure of recent coups. Results of our statistical models were not affected.
182. See Douglas A. Hibbs, Mass Political Violence; A Cross-National Causal Analysis (New York: John Wiley, 1973);
183. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1908);
184. Finer, The Man on Horseback;
185. and Luttwak, Coup d'état.
186. Francis Fukuyama, Trust (New York: Free Press, 1995);
187. and Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, 26.
188. David, Defending Third World Regimes, 5;
189. Luttwak, Coup d'état, 33, 103;
190. Jackson and Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa, 64;
191. and Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, 206-37.
192. Hibbs, Mass Political Violence, 102 (emphasis in original).
193. See Hyeyoung Moon and Evan Schofer, "The Globalization of Geological Science," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 2004.
194. Ted R. Gurr, Polity II: Political Structures and Regime Change, 1800-1986 (Ann Arbor: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1990).
195. Gurr, Polity II, 17.
196. To determine whether our findings are sensitive to decisions about operationalization, however, we also measured legitimacy in terms of the age of the political system as coded by Gurr in Polity II, 41. Jackman argues that age is a useful proxy for legitimacy because rules take time to set in and because old political regimes are more likely to depend on legitimacy to sustain themselves than young regimes.
197. See Jackman, Power without Force. The respecification does not influence the direction or significance of our findings, reported below, and only minimally influences the magnitude of coefficients.
198. Ben Meir, Civil-Military Relations in Israel.
199. We scaled this variable in proportion to the number of actors in the region to account for the fact that regions with many nations are likely to have more conflict, and we experimented with both five- and ten-year variants. Conflict data were taken from Michael Brecher, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Sheila Moser, Handbook of International Crises (New York: Pergamon, 1988). We also ran our models using a different specification of this variable that consisted of a dichotomous measure that we set to one if the regime was involved in an international dispute in the previous ten years and zero if it was not involved in such a conflict. The alternative specifications did not change the positive, significant relationship between coup risk and counterbalancing.
200. Charles L. Taylor and David Jodice, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, 3d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). We also ran our models with a variable that emphasized recent economic instability rather than political strife. This was a dichotomous variable that identified nations in which the prior moving average (over three years) of gross domestic product (GDP) was less than 1.0. In other words, the variable indicates if a nation experienced three or more years of economic stagnation or a short-term economic crisis in which current GDP dropped below the GDP of the prior three years. Economic crises did not influence the direction or significance of the findings, and it had only a slight impact on the magnitude of other coefficients.
201. Stephen Peter Rosen, Societies and Military Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
202. This variable reflects the probability that any two people randomly chosen from the country are of the same ethno-linguistic group. A score of 100 indicates a totally homogeneous country. Charles L. Taylor, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators II: Sections II.-V, Annual Event Data, Daily Event Data, Intervention Data, Raw Data, 2d ed. (Ann Arbor: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1976).
203. For the latest wealth data previously published by Robert Summers and Alan W. Heston, see "The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An Expanded Set of International Comparisons, 1950-1988," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106, no. 2 (May 1991): 327-68.
204. See also the Penn World Tables, Mark 5.6, at http://www.nber.org/pub/ pwt56/.
205. For military size, see David J. Singer and Melvin Small, "National Material Capabilities Data, 1816-1985" (computer file) (Ann Arbor: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1990).
206. For regime type, see Gurr, Polity 77.
207. Models were estimated using STATA version 7.0. (Stata Statistical Software Rel. 7.0, Stata Corp., College Station, Texas).
208. As can be seen in the table, coup risk is a predictor of counterbalancing even after controlling for other possible causes of military fragmentation.
209. To interpret the meaning of this result, note that the coup-risk score ranges from a minimum of -4.53 to 5.34 and the counterbalancing score ranges from -4.03 to 5.75. See note 45 for details.
210. This finding is not biased by serial correlation even though many of the variables are correlated over time. For example, the level of coup risk in any country at any point in time likely is related strongly to the level of coup risk in the previous year. Corollary analyses, however, make it clear that these findings are not biased by such autocorrelation. We ran our model 21 times (once for each year in the data set), and the direction and magnitude of the effect of coup risk on counterbalancing are consistent at every point in time over the 1960-86 period. The variable was statistically significant at the .05 level in 18 of the 21 years and nearly so in the others.
211. Analyses available upon request from the authors. A final point to mention is that it is very unlikely that our finding is biased by backward causation (endogeneity). In other words, it is very unlikely that the positive correlation between coup risk and counterbalancing results from the possibility that counterbalancing causes coup risk. The reason is that we conceptualize and operationalize coup risk in terms of deep, structural factors, and it seems implausible to argue that the number of military organizations and the size of the paramilitary are important causes of the strength of civil society (as measured by INGO membership) or level of legitimacy (as measured by competition and regulation or age of the political system).
212. MID data are available at http//pss.la.psu.edu/MID_DATA.HTM. Charles Gochman and Zeev Maoz, "Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1975," Journal of Conflict Resolution 29, no. 4 (December 1984): 585-615;
213. and Brecher, Wilkenfeld and Moser, Handbook of International Crises.
214. Gochman and Maoz, "Militarized Interstate Disputes," 586,
215. quoted in Bruce M. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 75.
216. Brecher, Wilkenfeld, and Moser, Handbook of International Crises, 5,
217. quoted in Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, 75.
218. Because our interest is in the initiation of conflict rather than the length of a dispute, we set our conflict variables to one for any regime-year in which a dispute began and zero for all other years.
219. Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, "Enduring Rivalries - Theoretical Constructs and Empirical Patterns," International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 2 (June 1993): 147-71.
220. For details on the different specifications of this variable that we used in our models, see note 56. The alternative specifications did not change the positive, significant relationship between counterbalancing and conflict.
221. Levy, "The Diversionary Theory of War";
222. and Stein, "Conflict and Cohesion."
223. Taylor and Jodice, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. We ran our models with another specification of this variable that emphasized recent economic instability rather than political strife as described above in note 57. The alternative specification did not influence the direction or significance of other coefficients in the model and had only a slight impact on the magnitude of other effects.
224. For wealth, see the Penn World Tables, Mark 5.6.
225. For military size, see Singer and Small, "National Material Capabilities Data." For level of democracy,
226. see Gurr, Polity II. The coup risk variable is described above.
227. If time resolution was insufficient to distinguish between two events that occurred at similar points in time, we divided the time periods into equal portions and assumed that the events occurred evenly spaced within those smaller periods. This is a safe assumption that is unlikely to have any substantial
228. In doing so, we assumed that variation in the rate of events is due to changes in covariates, rather than any inherent function of time. We find little difference, however, when we specify some other form of event history model.
229. Because our dependent variable, the act of a nation's engaging in conflict, is a discrete event initiated at a single point in time, we use event history analysis to model the process. These models, explicitly designed to deal with dynamic time-varying processes, have several advantages over pooled time-series models. See Nancy B. Tuma and Michael T. Hannan, Social Dynamics; Models and Methods (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984).
230. The sign of the effect and level of statistical significance can be interpreted similarly to OLS regression. Models were estimated using RATE. See Nancy B. Tuma, Invoking Rate (Palo Alto: DMA Corporation, 1992).
231. Note that a 1.17 multiplier is equivalent to a 17 percent change in the dependent variable. To interpret the meaning of this result, recall that our counterbalancing index ranges from-4.03 to 5.75. See note 45 for details.
232. Because international disputes are dyadic phenomena, we also used a data set of dyad-years to capture the interactive nature of conflict when we estimated our second model (Spain-Portugal-1966 is an example of a dyad-year). When we used dyad-years instead of regime-years to estimate our second model, we found that counterbalancing was related positively and significantly to international conflict. For a complete description of this procedure, see Belkin, "Civil-Military Relations as a Cause of International Conflict."
233. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, 74.
234. Indeed, it is because counterbalancing does not lead automatically to interservice rivalries that we argue that leaders use international conflict to promote mistrust among their own forces. Dassel's conceptualization of divided militaries reflects political cleavages. See Dassel "Civilians, Soldiers, and Strife," 136.
235. Stephen F. Jones, "Georgia: A Failed Democratic Transition," in Nation and Politics in the Soviet Successor States, ed. Ian A. Bremmer and Ray Taras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 298.
236. Adrian Karatnycky, Alexander J. Motyl, and Boris Shor, eds., Nations in Transit 1997 (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997), 165;
237. and Ghia Nodia, "The Georgian Perception of the West," Georgia Profile 1, no. 9 (September 1996): 20-29.
238. Aves, Georgia: From Chaos to Stability? 17;
239. and Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy, and Development. "Developing a National Security Concept for Georgia," conference proceedings, Tbilisi, 1-2 April 1996.
240. Aves, Georgia: From Chaos to Stability? 58-59;
241. and Karatnycky, Motyl, and Shor, Nations in Transit 1997, 147.
242. For a list of these powers see Jones, "Georgia's Power Structures," 7;
243. and Aves, Georgia: From Chaos to Stability? 8-9.
244. Jones, "Georgia's Power Structures," 7;
245. Aves, Georgia; From Chaos to Stability? 24;
246. Levan Tarkhnishvili, "Parliament of Georgia: The Fight of Bulldogs under the Carpet," Georga Profile 1, nos. 7-8 (July-August 1996): 20-21;
247. and Darchiashvili, Elections in Georgia.
248. Bodyguards helped Shevardnadze out of the burning car and he suffered only minor wounds. See Georgian Chronicle, October 1995, 1. The minister of state security, Igor Giorgadze, never faced trial, as he escaped to "Moscow with the help of Tbilisi-based Russian troops.
249. Georgian Chronicle, November 1994, 1-2.
250. Author interview, Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy, and Development, Tbilisi, July 1997.
251. Shevardnadze developed three additional military organizations - the Air Defense Forces, the Air Force, and the Navy - but these tiny forces were not cultivated to protect the regime from coups. See Jones, "Adventurers or Commanders?" 37;
252. Allison, "Military Forces in the Soviet Successor States," 69;
253. and Georgian Chronicle, November 1995, 4.
254. Author interviews, Parliamentary Committee on Defense and Security, Tbilisi, July 1997 and March 1998.
255. Georgian Chronicle, November 1994, 1-2.
256. One exception to this claim is that the regime did use patrimonialization effectively to reduce the risk of a coup. Aside from counterbalancing, this was its only important survival strategy. Patrimonialization refers to purging, shuffling, and other tactics designed to replace adversaries in the armed forces with political loyalists. From 1992 until 1995, eleven different ministers ran the Ministries of Defense, Internal Affairs, and State Security. See Georgian Chronicle, December 1992, September 1993, and December 1995.
257. In addition, Shevardnadze appointed incompetent subordinates to senior military posts. In 1992, for example, he appointed thirtyone-year-old philosopher Irakli Batiashvili to head the Bureau of Information and Intelligence, the successor to the Department for National Security and the Georgian KGB. See Jones, "Georgia's Power Structures," 5.
258. Strategic Affairs Group, Georgia (Villahermosa: Strategic Affairs Group, 1996).
259. Alexander Wendt and Michael N. Barnett, "Dependent State Formation and Third World Militarization," Review of International Studies 41, no. 4 (October 1993): 335-70;
260. John W. Meyer, "Institutionalization and the Rationality of Formal Organizational Structure," in Organizational Environments; Ritual and Rationality, ed. ) J. W. Meyer and W. Richard Scott (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983).
261. Belkin, "Civil-Military Relations as a Cause of International Conflict";
262. and Ben Meir, Civil-Military Relations in Israel.
263. David Darchiashvili, "Georgia-The Search for State Security," unpublished manuscript, photocopy obtained from the author.
264. David Darchiashvili, "Russian-Georgian Military Relations," Georgia Profile 1, no. 8 (August 1996): 12. Note that this article by Darchiashvili was published in several installments of Georgia Profile in 1996 and 1997.
265. Edward W. Walker, "No Peace, No War in the Caucasus: Secessionist Conflicts in Chechnya, Abkhazia, and Karabakh," manuscript, photocopy obtained from the author, 11.
266. Monitor, 30 October 1997.
267. The relationship between Georgia and Russia can be characterized in terms of broad trends that are punctuated by a few critical junctures. Darchiashvili specifies four distinct periods of recent Georgian-Russian relations: (1) During the initial period under Zviad Gamsakhurdia in 1991, Gamsakhurdia poisoned relations by supporting Chechen separatist demands, using blatantly anti-Soviet rhetoric, declaring Soviet troops in Georgia to be an occupying force, and refusing to criticize frequent attacks on Soviet bases; (2) Shevardnadze improved relations in 1992 and 1993 although the Georgian public resented Russian military support for Abkhazian separatists and Tbilisi attempted gently to break free of Moscow's orbit; (3) Relations warmed after the Georgian surrender in Sukhumi forced Shevardnadze join the Commonwealth of Independent States in early 1994; (4) Open friction became apparent in early 1996 as Georgians tired of waiting for long-promised Russian assistance to restore territorial integrity and settle the Abkhazian conflict. The point here is neither to periodize Georgian-Russian interactions nor to explain specific events. Rather, it is to identify one factor that explains why even during the warmest periods of recent relations, tensions persisted. See Darchiashvili, "Georgia - The Search for State Security."
268. Jones, "Adventurers or Commanders?"
269. Feaver, "Civil-Military Conflict and the Use of Force," 28.
270. Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development, 47.
271. Author interviews, Parliamentary Committee on Defense and Security, Ministry of Defense, and State Department of the State Frontier Guard, Tbilisi, July 1997.
272. Author interviews, Ministry of Defense and State Department of the State Frontier Guard, Tbilisi, June 1997, July 1997, and March 1998.
273. Nadibaidze was replaced as defense minister by a the Western-oriented Davit Tevzadze in 1998.
274. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Daily Report, no. 80 (27 April 1994);
275. David Darchiashvili, "Russian Troops in Georgia - The Aims and the Means," Georgia Profile 1, no. 7 (July 1996): 12-16;
276. Darchiashvili, "Russian-Georgian Military Relations," Georgia Profile 1, no. 8 (August 1996): 11-18;
277. Darchiashvili, "Russian-Georgian Military Relations," Georgia Profile 1, no. 9 (September 1997): 12-17;
278. and Army and Society in Georgia, August-September 1996, 6.
279. Georgian Military Chronicle, December 1994, 1.
280. Author interview, State Department of the State Frontier Guard, Tbilisi, July 1997.
281. Army and Society in Georgia, December 1996, 4.
282. For example, about 35,000 Georgian men were eligible for the draft each year, but only 5,000-8,000 new recruits were needed to serve. Because service conditions were extremely harsh, potential recruits were desperate to avoid their two-year service commitment. According to one Western expert, most new recruits were individuals who could not afford to pay a bribe of about $500. Hence, this bribery alone probably yielded a total of over $14 million per year for the Army. While this may seem like a small amount, the total official Army budget for 1997 was only about $50 million; this form of bribery was only one of the Army's unofficial mechanisms for funding itself. See Archil Melikadze, "Financing the Country's Defense," Army and Society in Georgia 5, no. 1 (January-February 1997): 22.
283. Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 46.
284. Author interviews, Ministry of Defense and State Department of the State Frontier Guard, Tbilisi, June 1997, July 1997, and March 1998.
285. Darchiashvili, "Russian Troops in Georgia,"
286. and Darchiashvili, "Russian-Georgian Military Relations," 1996 and 1997.
287. Michael Mihalka, "European-Russian Security and NATO's Partnership for Peace," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report 3 (1994): 34-45.
288. At the May 1996 CFE negotiations in Vienna, Russia was permitted to exceed limitations on armaments that it could deploy in its southern flank zone. Georgia had been prepared to trade part of its era quota to Moscow in exchange for desperately needed Russian hardware. When Russia was allowed to exceed previous zone limits, the Georgians were left empty-handed.
289. Author interviews March 1998 and April 1998.
290. Georgian Military Chronicle, December 1994, 3.
291. Army and Society in Georgia, December 1996, 14.
292. There are many important determinants of Georgian-Russian conflict, including memories of Russian and Soviet imperialism as well as Moscow's military intervention in support of Abkhazian separatists. This discussion is not intended to minimize the importance of these or other factors. Yet even though these other factors influenced bilateral relations, the persistence of Georgian-Russian conflict since 1993 probably was in part a result of Georgian civil-military relations.
293. It is important to acknowledge the presence of endogeneity or backward causation in the Georgian case. In particular, the conflict with Russia was a partial cause of coup risk. Even though Russians helped plan at least one attempted coup, however, Georgian-Russian conflict was not the critical determinant of regime vulnerability. In other words, even if the Russians never helped sponsor a coup in Tbilisi, coup risk still would have been high in Georgia, because background causes of coups (weak civil society and low legitimacy) were present.
294. Robert O. Keohane, Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 191.
295. Levy, "The Diversionary Theory of War," 283;
296. Robert H. Jackson, review of Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, in American Political Science Review 89, no. 2 (June 1995): 520.