Recently Brazil reached the mark of eight million university students, which represents around 4 percent of the population. Although this level is less than those in developed countries, it signifies an advance in relation to the country’s starting point.
Unlike Spain, the Portuguese Empire did not create university institutions in its colonies. Following the Independence of Brazil in 1822, the new governing elite established some higher-level courses (initially medicine, law, and engineering), but these functioned in isolation, in other words, university institutions were not created. The first universities emerged only in the 1920s and were regulated during the Getúlio Vargas administration (1931). Since then, higher-level education has been the object of greater public attention—as well as political conflicts—due to both its role in development projects and its capacity to produce leaders. Between the 1940s and 1960s, university students became a relevant political force, having engaged in debates for university reform and also in favor of social changes, contributing to the process of political radicalization abruptly ended by the 1964 military coup. The dictatorship led by the military implemented an authoritarian modernization of the universities, repressing and purging the “undesirables” at the same time that it increased investment in research and graduate studies. The results were paradoxical, since although the dictatorship created a better structured university system, it was a more authoritarian and socially elitist one.
The first post-dictatorial governments maintained the university structure inherited from the previous period, but they deteriorated due to a lack of public resources caused by hyperinflation and also by the intention of reducing public expenditure on higher education.
The country managed to improve its higher-level institutions during the 20th century, which became strategic spaces for political battles and, for this reason, targets of constant state intervention. Despite the reforms and the expansion, universities were marked by elitism and social inequality, like Brazilian society itself, problems that only recently have started to be addressed. Only in the 21st century did Brazilian universities undergo a new expansionist phase, led by the center-left Brazilian governments which, in addition to expanding the public system, also invested in the inclusion of social sectors that previously had no access to higher education. It appears that this process may be interrupted, thanks to the “right turn” experienced by Brazil since 2016–2018.
Article
Erica Frantz
Dictatorships have dominated global politics for hundreds of years, from the pharaohs of Egypt to the absolute monarchs of Europe. Though democracy has since spread to much of the world, about 40% of today’s countries are still ruled by dictatorship. And yet, compared with democracies, we know very little about how dictatorships work, who the key political actors are, and where decision making powers lie. Political processes are opaque, and information is often intentionally distorted. Political survival depends not on maintaining the favor of voters, as in democracies, but on securing the backing of a considerably smaller coalition of supporters. The absence of a reliable third party to enforce compromises among key players means that power-sharing deals lack credibility, and the threat of forced ouster is omnipresent. Uncertainty pervades authoritarian politics.
Modern autocrats respond to this uncertain environment in a variety of ways. They use political parties, legislatures, elections, and other institutions typically associated with democracies to lessen their risk of overthrow. Despite the façade of democracy, these institutions are key components of most autocrats’ survival strategies; those that incorporate them last longer in power than those that do not. The specific ways in which autocratic institutions are used and the extent to which they can constrain leadership choices to prevent consolidation of power into the hands of a single individual, however, vary enormously from one dictatorship to the next. Better understanding the conditions that push autocracies down a path of collegial versus strongman rule remains a critical task, particularly given that the latter is associated with more war, economic mismanagement, and resistance to democratization.
Article
César Zamorano Díaz
Periodicals have been a significant part of Chile’s cultural history. Groups and networks of writers, intellectuals, and artists have orbited around literary and cultural periodicals with the aim of disseminating cultural and aesthetic projects. The study of periodicals addresses dialogues that have moved from the specificities of their disciplinary practice to political and social contexts. Reconstructing the trajectory of periodicals allows for the articulation of a dialogue with the voices that congregate in them to propose, question, and harbor specific currents capable of intervening in the configuration of the disciplines, the theoretical and cultural guidelines that determine an era. Dialogues that at certain junctures can transcend this resonance and expand considerably.
The history of Chile as read through cultural and literary periodicals reveals the concerns that the cultural and artistic debate promoted during two distinct periods: during the Unidad Popular project, led by the government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973), and its interruption with the coup d’état that initiated one of the bloodiest and most extensive dictatorships in Latin America (1973–1990). These concerns were articulated within a decisive collaboration of artists and writers during the Unidad Popular and altered under the persecution and rupture with the state during the dictatorship. In these two moments the journals opened debates and proposed and discussed ideas from a specific historical time, along with problematizing the exercise of their intellectual practice and reflecting on the disciplinary limits that sustain them. The analysis of the trajectory of periodicals in the cultural history of Chile recognizes the social, political, and cultural transformations of these two moments in the history of Chile.
Article
Colin M. Snider
Truth commissions have become common instruments to document human rights violations for societies emerging from authoritarian violence around the world since the 1980s. First appearing as mechanisms to attempt to address rights violations and to pursue reconciliation or justice in the aftermath of Latin American dictatorships that ended in the 1980s and early 1990s, such commissions and their published reports became important tools for societies transitioning from authoritarianism and for addressing the state’s past rights violations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. These commissions, and the reports they issue, serve to recognize the state’s responsibility in violence and repression. Such reports can be an important factor in uncovering the truth of repression and the experiences and voices of victims, victims’ family members, and survivors. These reports also often address reconciliation and even justice for victims, though such reports’ successes in these areas are more mixed. Nonetheless, truth commission reports and other truth projects from non-governmental organizations are important artifacts in documenting the repressive past for societies transitioning from authoritarian regimes.
As important as such reports—from states and from non-governmental organizations alike—are, they are also a product of their particular historical, political, and social milieus. Consequently, truth project reports are important artifacts in understanding both the violently repressive past and resistance to it, and the historical moment in which such reports on that past are produced. Memory is especially integral in the production of such documents. The voices of survivors and of victims’ families allow previously silenced memories to gain public expression, even while their framing and use of language reflects the ways power operates in memory and in transitional societies. As a result, scholars can treat such reports not just as documents of authoritarian repression, but as snapshots of societies addressing transitional justice. These moments and documents not only seek to thoroughly narrate past repression; they reflect power relations at the very moment of a report’s production. As a study of these types of reports—non-governmental and official—in Brazil reveal, such documents can thus be read for expressions of power along gendered lines. The result is an ability to read truth reports both as a document detailing repression within and resistance to authoritarian regimes, and how memory serves as a site for the intersection of power along gendered, class-based, or other social markers present in the use of language, narrative structures, and memories of repression and resistance in a post-authoritarian setting.
Article
Maria Helena Capelato
The Brazilian Estado Novo (New State) emerged from a coup led by then-President Getúlio Vargas with support from political and military groups. It was an enduring dictatorial regime (1937–1945), characterized by two distinct political moments. In the first phase, sympathy for European totalitarian regimes was evident. In addition to the violent repression of communist/socialist movements and other opponents, political propaganda—inspired by the Goebbelsian model—was put into practice: civic and sporting events, posters, and films encouraged patriotism and a cult of personality. In this period, because of the promulgation of an array of labor laws demanded by workers since the beginning of the century, Vargas was given the epithet “Father of the Poor.” The second phase began in 1942, when Brazil entered World War II in support of the Allies who fought against Nazi-fascist regimes. The contradiction of a dictatorial government in Brazil struggling for democracy abroad was patent, which contributed to the delegitimation of the regime and, consequently, the end of the dictatorship.
Article
Elizabeth Ann Stein
Considering incidents that make headline news internationally, given the modern information and communication technology revolution, the facility of citizens to rapidly mobilize represents a considerable threat to autocratic survival. While the speed with which popular movements emerge has increased exponentially, and the news of their existence spreads faster and farther, civil unrest has threatened the stability and survival of dictators for centuries. The paranoia and machinations of dictators depicted in films, such as the portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, while sensationalized, capture the astounding array of threats with which unelected leaders must concern themselves. On the one hand, they must worry about insider threats to their standing, such as conspiratorial plots from people within the dictator’s own circle or mutiny among government soldiers. On the other hand, dictators also must monitor threats originating from non-regime actors, such as new alliances forming among once-fragmented opposition groups or the possibility of sustained insurgency or a popular revolution. From force to finesse, autocratic leaders have developed a broad and evolving range of tactics and tools to diminish both internal and external domestic threats to their reign. The success of dictators’ endeavors to insulate their regimes from forces that might challenge them depends on accurate and reliable information, a resource that can be as valuable to the leader as would a large armory and loyal soldiers. Dictators invest significant resources (monetary as well as human capital) to try to gather useful information about their existing and potential opponents, while also trying to control and shape information emitted by the regime before it reaches the public. New information and communication technologies (ICTs), which have drawn a great deal of scholarly attention since the beginning of the 21st century—present both risks and rewards for dictators; inversely they also create new opportunities and hazards for citizens who might utilize them to mobilize people opposed to the regime. While civil unrest could encompass the full range of domestic, nonmilitary actors, there also needs to be a specific focus on various forms of mass mobilization. Historically, more dictators have been forced from office by elite-initiated overthrows via coups d’état than have fallen to revolution or fled amid street protests. Civil unrest, in its many forms, can affect autocratic survival or precipitate regime breakdown. While mass-based revolutions have been a relatively rare phenomenon to date, the actions of many 21st-century dictators indicate that they increasingly concern themselves with the threats posed by popular protests and fear its potential for triggering broader antigovernment campaigns. The ease of access to information (or the lack thereof) help explain interactions between authoritarian regimes and citizens emphasizes. The role of information in popular antigovernment mobilization has evolved and changed how dictators gather and utilize information to prevent or counter civil unrest that might jeopardize their own survival as well as that of the regime.
Article
Aaron Coy Moulton
Between 1944 and 1959, conflicts with anti-dictatorial exiles and democratic leaders against dictatorial regimes and dissident exiles shaped inter-American relations in the Caribbean Basin. At the end of World War II, anti-dictatorial exiles networked with students, laborers, journalists, and politicians in denouncing the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, and Honduras’s Tiburcio Carías. Opponents of and dissident exiles from the 1944 Guatemalan Revolution and Venezuela’s Trienio Adeco (Adeco Triennium) under Rómulo Betancourt likewise turned to dictatorial regimes for aid. By 1947, a loose coalition of anti-dictatorial exiles with the help of Cuba, Guatemala, and Venezuela’s democratic leaders formed what would become known as the Caribbean Legion and organized the abortive Cayo Confites expedition against Trujillo. Seeking regional stability, U.S. officials intervened against this expedition and Caribbean Basin dictators and dissident exiles’ attempts to air-bomb Guatemala City and Caracas.
Caribbean Basin leaders and exiles focused upon these inter-American conflicts, rather than the international Cold War. José Figueres’s rise to power in Costa Rica provided a pivotal ally to democratic leaders and anti-dictatorial exiles, and Caribbean Basin dictators began working with the Venezuelan military regime after the 1948 military coup. In 1949, Trujillo’s regime coordinated a counter-intelligence operation that destroyed the Caribbean Legion’s expedition at Luperón and brought greater attention to the region.
By the early 1950s, dictatorial regimes operated as a counter-revolutionary network sharing intelligence, aiding dissident exiles, supporting Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 coup in Cuba, and lobbying U.S. officials against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Figueres in Costa Rica. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) utilized these dictators and exiles during Operations PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS to overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1954, but U.S. officials intervened when the counter-revolutionary network invaded Costa Rica in 1955.
From 1955 onward, anti-dictatorial exiles from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Venezuela continued organizing expeditions against Caribbean Basin dictatorships, and multiple groups conspired against Batista’s regime. Among Cuban exiles, Fidel Castro rose to prominence and received important resources and alliances through anti-dictatorial exiles. Dictators shared intelligence and gave aid to Batista, yet Caribbean Legion veterans, Cuban exiles, Betancourt, Figueres, and others helped Castro undermine Batista. In 1959, Castro supported anti-dictatorial expeditions, most notably those against Trujillo and Luis Somoza. However, Castro disagreed with many former exiles and Betancourt and Figueres’s policies, so the resulting tension separated Castro from democratic leaders and divided the region among dictatorial regimes, democratic governments, and Castro.
Article
Clement Fatovic
Despite scholarly disagreements over the meanings of both the rule of law and emergency, there is broad agreement that emergencies often invite and justify departures from the formal requirements and substantive values identified with the rule of law as a normative ideal. It is often argued that strict adherence to existing laws, which are typically enacted during periods of normalcy in order to prevent arbitrary forms of rule associated with tyranny, could inhibit the government’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to the often unexpected and extraordinary challenges posed by an emergency such as war or natural disaster. Consequently, the temporary use of extraordinary measures outside the law has been widely accepted both in theory and in practice as long as such measures aim to restore the normal legal and political order. However, understandings of the tension between emergency and the rule of law have undergone a significant shift during the 20th century as emergency powers increasingly get codified into law. The use of extralegal measures that violate the formal and procedural requirements of the rule of law is still considered a dangerous possibility. However, as governments have come to rely increasingly on expansions of power that technically comport with standards of legality to deal with a growing list of situations characterized as emergencies, there is concern that extraordinary exercises of power intended to be temporary are becoming part of the permanent legal and political order.
Article
António Canales
Education under the Franco regime was divided into two clearly differentiated periods. The first 2 decades of the regime (1936–1959) were characterized by a policy inspired by a radical rejection of the modernization program designed by liberal Spain and especially of the progressive and secular policy of the Second Republic. The principles that formed the backbone of this first stage were a forced re-Christianization of education, a renewed role for ideologization and deprofessionalization of teachers, a contraction of the school network, and an emphasis on privatization. During this period, education was subordinated to the Catholic Church, with the state assuming a subsidiary position that allowed for an outstanding expansion of religious schools. At the beginning of the 1960s, there was a Copernican turn in the regime’s educational policy as a result of the directives of international organizations that sought economic development. The state abandoned its subsidiarity, and throughout the 1960s promoted an exponential growth of the country’s rickety education system. This new policy culminated in a general reform of the education system, the General Education Act of 1970, which put an end to the dual system inherited from the 19th century, and introduced comprehensive education in Spain.
Article
The province of Tucumán, Argentina, has been used as a test case for the fallacious “theory of the two demons” because it is both where a guerrilla movement formed in 1974 and where the country’s first clandestine detention center was established in the “escuelita” of Famaillá during “Operativo Independencia” in 1975. This “theory” reduces the conflict in the province to a confrontation in the Tucumán hills between no more than 150 combatants of the People’s Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, ERP) and 5,000 soldiers of the Argentine Army. This, however, largely conceals the social catastrophe suffered by Tucumán and the high levels of conflict that had already been taking place for more than a decade.
Previously, in August 1966, the provincial territory had been militarized by the new dictatorial government led by Juan Carlos Onganía. On that occasion, militarization sought to guarantee the closure of sugar mills. This generated an unprecedented economic and social crisis. Between 1966 and 1968, eleven mills were closed out of a total of twenty-seven, more than 50,000 jobs were eliminated in the sugar agro-industry alone, medium and small sugarcane producers were severely affected, and more than a quarter of the total population of the province was forced to emigrate in search of new sources of work. Such were the root causes of social conflict, led mainly by the sugar working class assembled in the Tucumán Workers Federation of the Sugar Industry (Federación Obrera Tucumana de la Industria Azucarera, FOTIA), which the 1976 dictatorship was intent on reining in.
Article
Debbie Sharnak
Uruguay passed the Ley de Caducidad de la Pretensión Punitiva del Estado (Law on the Expiration of the Punitive Claims of the States or Law of Expiry) in December 1986, which provided amnesty for all members of the military and security personnel involved in crimes during the nation’s military rule (1973–1985). A referendum in 1989 democratically affirmed the law, producing a silencing about accountability efforts in Uruguay in subsequent years. As such, much of the literature that emerged in the 1990s about the field of transitional justice excluded Uruguay, considering it a failure to engage with justice initiatives. Since 2000, however, Uruguay has followed a winding path toward employing accountability measures. This has included a difficult process of overturning its amnesty law, some selected domestic court cases, as well as some truth-telling initiatives, reparations, and memorialization. Overall, Uruguay’s experience and evolution toward engaging transitional justice initiatives represent a nonlinear progress of accountability that depended on a combination of domestic political will, friendly courts or judges, international legal and norm shifts, and sustained civil society activism.1 Both Uruguay’s eventual engagement with justice initiatives and expanding ideas about what constitutes transitional justice have driven the country’s re-emergence in scholarship within the field of transitional justice. Uruguay’s thirty-five-year battle Offers an example of a non-teleological path of transitional justice. Additionally, the case of Uruguay urges consideration of understanding the longer timeframes that justice might take to achieve, even in stable democracies.
Article
Eric Paul Roorda
On August 29, 1916, the USS Memphis wrecked on the coast of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. A series of enormous waves drove the heavy armored cruiser ashore, killing forty-five sailors. The fact that the death toll was not much higher is owed to the heroic efforts of Dominicans to rescue the survivors of the shipwreck. This was despite the fact that the US Marine Corps had invaded their country three months before, initiating an occupation with unwonted violence. The US Marine occupation of the Dominican Republic would last for eight years, compiling a record of brutality inflicted on the civilian population that Senate hearings documented in excruciating detail. In the aftermath of the traumatic occupation, the shipwreck of the USS Memphis itself, rusting away in plain sight along the seaside boulevard in the Dominican capital city, became symbolic of US imperialism. The dictator Rafael Trujillo, a Marine protégé who seized power in 1930, pointed to the wreck as a relic of the days before US domination, contrasting it with the happy days after national sovereignty had been attained under his own strong rule. In order to implement the Good Neighbor Policy, an effort to expunge the negative legacy of the era of intervention and occupation known as “Gunboat Diplomacy,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the removal of the wreck of the Memphis after taking office in 1933. The wreck’s removal finally took place in 1937.
Article
Friedrich E. Schuler
General Victoriano Huerta (1850–1916) stands out as the bête noire of twentieth-century Mexico. He was a career army officer who had attained the rank of general. Other generals and the old economic and social hierarchy supported him as a transitional national leader who could restore order following Francisco Madero’s revolution and presidency. Huerta has become the national bête noire because of his assumed responsibility for the assassination of Madero and his vice president, along with several governors and congressmen of the revolutionary regime. His seizure of power resulted in a new phase of the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, and his involvement with German Mexico and the area along the border with the United States. After going into exile, he attempted to return to power by invading Mexico. He was arrested by U.S. officials and interned at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, where he died during emergency surgery.
Article
Thomas C. Field Jr.
The Cold War in Latin America had marked consequences for the region’s political and economic evolution. From the origins of US fears of Latin American Communism in the early 20th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, regional actors played central roles in the drama. Seeking to maximize economic benefit while maintaining independence with regard to foreign policy, Latin Americans employed an eclectic combination of liberal and anti-imperialist discourses, balancing frequent calls for anti-Communist hemispheric unity with periodic diplomatic entreaties to the Soviet bloc and the nonaligned Third World. Meanwhile, US Cold War policies toward the region ranged from progressive developmentalism to outright military invasions, and from psychological warfare to covert paramilitary action. Above all, the United States sought to shore up its allies and maintain the Western Hemisphere as a united front against extra-hemispheric ideologies and influence. The Cold War was a bloody, violent period for Latin America, but it was also one marked by heady idealism, courageous political action, and fresh narratives about Latin America’s role in the world, all of which continue to inform regional politics to this day.
Article
Safia Aidid
Although Somali women have played a dynamic and important role in the making of Somalia’s history, their histories have been obscured by archival limitations and androcentric scholarship. Women in traditional Somali society—pastoralists, agriculturalists, and urbanites alike—were central to their communities for their reproductive and productive labor. They embodied social capital, as the practice of exogamous marriage that brought them to other communities also created important reciprocal relations between different kinship groups. Although a deeply patriarchal culture defined their life roles primarily as wives and mothers, Somali women used that very culture and the indigenous resources available to them to exercise agency, negotiate their positions, and carve out their own spaces. The advent of colonial rule, which partitioned the Somali peninsula between Britain, France, Italy, and the Ethiopian empire, drastically altered women’s lives. It fused traditional patriarchal relations with European ones, codified tradition and flexible communal identities, treated women as dependents of their male relatives, and created opportunities for men in education and employment that were not available to women. Though Somali women were at the forefront of the anticolonial struggle, the male elite who inherited the state after independence excluded women from the political sphere. Women’s rights took on a prominent role in the military dictatorship of General Mohamed Siad Barre, yet the repression and state violence that characterized his rule affected women acutely. The civil war that followed the disintegration of the Somali state has similarly affected women intimately. In addition to the gendered experience of violence, the increasingly conservative nature of Somali society has resulted in the loss of many gains made for women’s rights after independence. From precolonial society to colonial rule, dictatorship, and civil war, Somali women have exhibited the resilience, agency, and fortitude to make the most of their circumstances.
Article
Alison J. Bruey
Chile was one of the first countries in the world to undergo a transition to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism became official state policy in 1975, during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), during which time it generated two deep economic crises and historicall high unemployment. Since 1990, civilian administrations have continued to administer the neoliberal model, popularly referred to as el modelo, with selective reforms. Despite economic growth and reductions in poverty rates since 1990, el modelo has become ever more controversial. In the 21st century, public protest has increased as broad sectors of society negatively affected by the privatization of education, healthcare, and pension systems, among other ills, have organized collectively to express their discontent.
Article
João Fábio Bertonha
Far-right movements, groups, and parties are a constant in Brazilian history. Following the first moment in which we can identify the presence of the radical right in Brazil (1889), its history had several phases and moments: ultraconservative movements and monarchists in the early years of the Old Republic (1889–1930), reactionary leagues fighting socialism and the labor movement during and after World War I (1917–1922) and the first groups and fascist movements (1922–1932). In the 1930s, in turn, the formation of the largest fascist movement outside Europe, Integralism (1932–1938), and Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo (1937–1945) represented the peak of the far right in the country, when it almost became a valid alternative to power.
Between 1945 and 1964, the far right rebuilt itself in reactionary Catholic and anti-communist groups, close or not to neofascism. Under the military dictatorship of 1964–1985, it was in the fringes of power, remaining in the shadows after the redemocratization in 1985. In the 21st century, in turn, it acquired power and visibility, equaling or perhaps even surpassing that of the 1930s.
Recent Brazilian historiography, after attempts to reconstruct the history of the national right wing, has been moving toward a comparative approach in order to understand the dialogue between the national and the international within the specific field of the radical right. Dialogue is a fitting term, since the far right in Brazil was never completely original, but nor was it simply a copy of a foreign model. It is the role of the historian to understand this dialogue through the investigation of the links and mechanisms of transmission of ideas, concepts, and perspectives, the symbolic and material exchanges, between the world and Brazil.
Article
Peter Leman
Authors in the global Anglophone world have long been interested in the phenomenon of dictatorships, often more by necessity than by choice as many of them personally witnessed the horrors of authoritarian rule. Among scholars, increasing attention is being given to dictatorships and the fictions that depict or otherwise respond to them in Anglophone contexts. Africa, in particular, has seen an explosion of literary texts and scholarly output, although there are important contributions from authors in South Asia, the Caribbean, and even the United States. Throughout these texts, which include novels, short fiction, plays, and poetry, authors take the authoritarian and his methods, enemies, and inevitable downfall as their subject. The reasons for doing so vary. Some authors barely veil the inspiration for their fictional leaders, intending to challenge actual dictators, sometimes at great risk and sacrifice. Others use fictional dictatorships to explore issues of sovereignty, neocolonialism, gender inequality, literary form, and more, suggesting the extent to which dictatorships cannot simply be thought of as a “third-world” phenomenon, as many do in the West, but as a problem that has both global implications and, often, global (i.e., colonial and neocolonial) origins.
Whatever their reasons and whatever their narrative approach, writers throughout the Anglophone world and beyond are engaged in a widespread and ongoing conversation about ultimate power and the cultish personalities that strive for it. The growing body of research from the social sciences underscores the diversity of circumstances and factors that give rise to dictatorships in different parts of the world, but the equally diverse fictions also reveal recurring patterns and themes. Nearly every dictator depends deeply on performance and spectacle, for example. They also seek to control their nations by controlling narrative, something writers are particularly equipped to challenge. Dictatorships and the fictions that portray them are also extended meditations on the nature of sovereign power, which dictators believe, and try to prove, to be absolute. This belief and a need for proof are fed by desperation and lead to various forms of personality worship, transcendence, and the dictator’s self-deification. At the same time, dictatorships also employ some of the least transcendent techniques imaginable to control populations (i.e., bureaucracy and red tape). Finally, as dictators discover they are not gods but mortals and even puppets, they are inevitably brought down from their imagined heights by international forces, other aspiring dictators, freedom fighters, and death itself.
Article
Aqil Shah
The military has dominated politics and national security in Pakistan since the decade following independence from British colonial rule in August 1947. The country appears to be caught in a persistent praetorian trap: It has experienced three military coups (1958, 1977, 1999, and an intra-military coup led by General Yahya Khan against President and Field Marshall Ayub Khan in 1969), and each of them was followed by military or quasi-military governments (1958–1969, 1969–1971, 1977–1988, 1999–2007) that have left behind legacies curtailing the authority of civilian governments long after the generals exited power. Scholars have examined the causes of military intervention, the role of the military in democratic transitions, and the patterns of civil–military relations under elected rule, which are perennially defined by military autonomy and weak civilian control.
The military established its most recent dictatorship under General Pervez Musharraf in 1999, which lasted for 8 years. The subsequent transition to civilian rule in 2008 resulted in the first ever transfer of power from the government of the left-of-center Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which had completed its constitutional tenure, to the right-of-center Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N of Nawaz Sharif) in 2013. Bipartisan reforms enacted in 2010 restored the 1973 constitution’s federal parliamentary structure and removed several authoritarian distortions (e.g., the power of the president to arbitrarily sack elected governments) introduced under military rule. In the subsequent 2018 vote, the incumbent PML-N government peacefully yielded power to the right-of-center Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI). Despite multiparty elections followed by executive turnovers, civil–military relations remain fraught and the generals continue to retain their vast prerogatives and reserve domains under elected regimes, including institutional affairs, defense allocations, commercial interests in vital sectors of the economy, foreign policy, nuclear weapons, intelligence, and even civilian administration. Between 2008 and 2017, civilian government made repeated attempts to erode its privileges (e.g., the PPP government’s decision to place the country’s main intelligence agency, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), under civilian control) and challenge its presumptions of impunity (e.g., the decision of the PML-N government to prosecute Musharraf for “high treason”). The military responded by publicly contesting civilian policies, resisting or rejecting directives, and mobilizing its civilian proxies to destabilize elected rule. In 2018, the generals manipulated the polls to install the pro-military PTI in power. The country’s weak democracy has since mutated into a hybrid regime where formal democratic political institutions mask undeclared martial rule.
Article
Jimmy D. Kandeh
The recurrence of subaltern coups and the involvement of politicians in these usurpations of state power are key features of military interventions in Sierra Leone. The losers of the 1967 and 1996 general elections instigated and/or supported coups that toppled the elected governments, and the coups of 1968 and 1992 also attracted the support of many disgruntled politicians. The country’s first two coups and the 1992 coup were pro-SLPP (Sierra Leone People’s Party) while the 1968 and 1997 coups were broadly supportive of the All People’s Congress party. Collusion between military factions and politicians permeates all ranks of the army but is particularly salient among senior officers, who share the same class location with politicians but not with armed subalterns whose ties to politicians are based not on shared class interests but on patronage and communal solidarity. Subaltern usurpations of state power in Sierra Leone reflect, inter alia, the extent to which senior officers have been clientelized by political incumbents and rendered less prone to stage coups in the contemporary period. Far more likely to attempt coups are armed regulars who, as a substratum, are unclientelizable, malleable, and often unpredictable. That the last three coups (1997, 1992, 1968) were carried out by this insurgent militariat is indicative of how senior officers have been displaced as major coup plotters since the 1960s. The underlying causes of these coups are rooted in state failures, low levels of institutional development, endemic corruption, politicization of the military, and the failure of the country’s political class to deliver development and good governance. Deterring coups in the future will depend as much on what politicians do as on what subaltern factions of the military are planning or capable of doing, but distancing politicians from the military and prolonging democratic rule are critical to reducing the probability of coups. Neither civilian nor military factions of the country’s political class are genuinely committed to democratic governance, but the two most important factors holding the military in check are the relatively long duration of constitutional rule (1998 to the present) and the global community’s hostility to military seizures of power. Four elections have been held since the last coup in 1997, with power twice (2007, 2018) alternating between the two main political parties. Elections are no longer precipitating coups, and the more of them that are held freely and fairly the better the prospects for military disengagement from politics and democratic maturation.
