Slow Rolls, Shoulder-Taps, and Coups: Building a Research Program in Military Dissent Across Regime Types

Abstract

This article advances a research program in military dissent, contributing to growing scholarly interest in the subject. It first outlines a variety of “tactics of dissent,” discriminating among them according to the pathway through which they shape political leaders’ decisions and the related audiences and objectives of the method. These sets of tactics are domestic politics, bureaucratic, coercive, and organizational. The article illustrates these tactics with examples from across advanced democracies, developing democracies and autocracies, and with lengthier treatments of Brazil, Egypt, and the U.S. In so doing, the article helps bridge subfield divides in the study of civil-military relations, arguing that neglecting these tactics truncates variation in the character and intensity of dissent within and across regime types. In addition, it outlines several questions to guide future research, including efforts to better understand the metrics and drivers of dissent, the efficacy of these tactics in undermining civilian initiatives and their larger consequences for democracy and civil-military relations.