An Effective Deterrent?

Author(s):  
Erica De Bruin

This chapter examines whether counterbalancing can deter soldiers from attempting to seize power in the first place. It conducts an array of analyses of patterns of coup attempts, which show that organizing security forces outside of military command is not associated with a reduction in coup attempts. In fact, establishing a new counterweight increases the risk of a coup attempt in the following year. These results challenge the widespread assumption that counterbalancing deters coup attempts, and help to explain why counterbalancing is not even more widespread than it is. Yet the results in the chapter also raise another question: What explains why some rulers are able to establish counterweights without provoking a backlash from the military, while others are not?

Author(s):  
Erica De Bruin

This chapter examines the role of counterbalancing during individual coup attempts. It examines in detail coups staged to unseat Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya, King Hassan II in Morocco, and Manuel Noriega in Panama. In each case, counterbalancing affected the outcome of the coup attempt: while soldiers within the regular military were hesitant to take a side, presidential guards, Ministry of Interior units, and militia built up as counterweights to the military defended incumbent rulers. In contrast to most existing accounts, which suggest that counterbalancing works primarily by creating obstacles to coordination between different security forces, the evidence in these cases suggests that counterbalancing creates incentives to resist the coup.


Author(s):  
Kristen A. Harkness

The military plays a vital role in upholding Cameroon’s authoritarian government. Since independence, in 1960, the country has been ruled by a single political party and only two presidents: Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya. Both have gone to great lengths to secure military loyalty: counterbalancing rival forces, personalizing command hierarchies, ethnically stacking both the regular military and presidential guard, and providing extensive patronage benefits to soldiers. Ahidjo and Biya have both also repeatedly used the security forces to repress threats from below and stabilize their dictatorships. Combined gendarme, army, and paramilitary units have been deployed to defeat the southern maquis rebellion of the 1960s; the mass protests for democratization in the 1990s; the fight against Boko Haram, beginning in 2014; and the Anglophone separatist movement, which exploded in 2017. Whether facing nonviolent demonstrators or armed rebels, the military has never defected or refused to obey orders. Yet, as the 1984 coup attempt demonstrated, the bounds of military loyalty are not limitless. When Ahidjo retired, the northern Muslim Fulbe members of the elite Republican Guard attempted to prevent Biya—a southern Christian Beti—from rising to power.


Author(s):  
Matt Eisenbrandt ◽  
Benjamín Cuéllar

In 1980, a death squad linked to business tycoons and military commanders murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero for denouncing widespread repression and poverty in El Salvador. Romero was known as the “voice of the voiceless,” and his criticism of the oligarchs who dominated the economy and the Security Forces that tortured and murdered civilians made Romero a military target. Two decades after his assassination, the Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA) found one of the conspirators, Álvaro Saravia, living in California and launched a wide-ranging investigation into the death squad and its financiers. This book chronicles the life and death of the Catholic martyr, examining his actions and situating his years as archbishop in the broader context of the Salvadoran clergy’s embrace of Liberation Theology. It also analyzes, through excerpts from witness interviews and trial testimony, the mindset of the death squad members, their leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, and their wealthy backers, that propelled them to want Romero dead. The U.S. government played an important and contradictory role in developing the death squads and funding the military from which they sprang while also investigating their crimes and seeking to keep them in check. Within this complicated historical context, the book provides a first-hand account of the investigation and U.S. legal case that led to the only court verdict ever reached for Archbishop Romero’s murder.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 1887-1891
Author(s):  
Todor Kalinov

Management and Command253 are two different words and terms, but military structures use them as synonyms. Military commanders’ authorities are almost equal in meaning to civilian managers’ privileges and power. Comparison between military command and the civilian management system structure, organization, and way of work shows almost full identity and overlapping. The highest in scale and size military systems are national ministries of defense and multinational military alliances and coalitions. Military systems at this level combine military command structures with civilian political leadership and support elements. Therefore, they incorporate both military command and civilian management organizations without any complications, because their nature originated from same source and have similar framework and content. Management of organizations requires communication in order to plan, coordinate, lead, control, and conduct all routine or extraordinary activities. Immediate long-distance communications originated from telegraphy, which was firstly applied in 19th century. Later, long-distance communications included telephony, aerial transmitting, satellite, and last but not least internet data exchange. They allowed immediate exchange of letters, voice and images, bringing to new capabilities of the managers. Their sophisticated technical base brought to new area of the military command and civilian management structures. These area covered technical and operational parts of communications, and created engineer sub-field of science, that has become one of the most popular educations, worldwide. Communications were excluded from the military command and moved to separate field, named Computers and Communications. A historic overview and analysis of the command and management structures and requirements shows their relationships, common origin, and mission. They have significant differences: management and control are based on humanities, natural and social sciences, while communications are mainly based on engineering and technology. These differences do not create enough conditions for defragmentation of communications from the management structures. They exist together in symbiosis and management structures need communications in order to exist and multiply their effectiveness and efficiency. Future defragmentation between military command and communications will bring risks of worse coordination, need for more human resources, and worse end states. These risks are extremely negative for nations and should be avoided by wide appliance of the education and science among nowadays and future leaders, managers, and commanders.


1980 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Coad

We publish below a list of writers and journalists abducted by the security forces and numbered among the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina since 24 March 1976, the date of the military coup that installed General Jorge Rafael Videla in power. Two eye-witness accounts illustrate the way in which such abductions usually take place. Finally, Robert Cox, editor-in-exile of the daily newspaper Buenos Aires Herald, describes how independent-minded journalists and the families of los desaparecidos ( ‘the disappeared’) have been affected. The material is introduced by Index on Censorship's researcher on Latin America, Malcolm Coad.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Javier Eiroa Escalada ◽  
Luis Toribio Castro

Las banderas ya no tienen finalidad táctica, pero como símbolo de la nación, representan los valores superiores expresados en la Constitución de 1978.A diferencia de las Fuerzas Armadas, donde las banderas se mantienen como parte de las tradiciones, y aportan gran brillantez a los actos militares, en la literatura española existen pocos estudios relativos a la bandera en el ámbito de las fuerzas y cuerpos de seguridad del Estado.Tras un breve repaso a la normativa vigente en el ámbito de la Vexilología, este trabajo aborda el procedimiento para la concesión del derecho de uso de la enseña Nacional a distintas unidades de las fuerzas y cuerpos de seguridad de ámbito estatal, así como sus modalidades, uso y colocación en actos oficiales, honores y protocolo.Finalmente, se analizan las peculiaridades del ceremonial en el acto de entrega de la bandera, como distinción que se otorga en reconocimiento a la labor que desarrollan como garantes de las libertades públicas y de la seguridad ciudadana, considerando la distinta naturaleza -militar y civil- de ambos cuerpos de seguridad. _________________ The flags are no longer tactical, but as a symbol of the nation, they represent the higher values expressed in the Spanish Constitution of 1978.The Army has kept flags as part of the traditions, and provide great brilliance to the military acts. Instead, in Spanish literature there are few studies about the flag in the State Security Forces.After a brief review of current legislation in Vexillology, this paper deals with the procedure for bestowal of the use the National Flag to different units of the National Security Forces, as well as their modalities, use and placement in official events, honours and protocol.Finally, we analyze the peculiarities of ceremonial in the Act of delivery of the flag, as a distinction that is given in recognition of the work they perform as guarantors of citizen freedoms and public safety, considering the different nature - military and civil- of both security Forces.


Author(s):  
Y. S. Kudryashova

During the government of AK Party army leaders underprivileged to act as an exclusive guarantor preserving a secular regime in the country. The political balance between Secular and Islamite elites was essentially removed after Erdogan was elected Turkish President. Consistently toughening authoritarian regime of a ruling party deeply accounts for a military coup attempt and earlier periodically occurred disturbance especially among the young. The methods of a coup showed the profundity of a split and the lack of cohesion in Turkish armed forces. Erdogan made the best use of a coup attempt’s opportunities to concentrate all power in his hands and to consolidate a present regime. The mass support of the population during a coup attempt ensured opportunities for a fundamental reorganization of a political system. Revamped Constitution at most increases political powers of the President.


Justicia ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (26) ◽  
Author(s):  
Consuelo Amparo Henao Toro ◽  
Ingrid Regina Petro Gonz ◽  
Felipe Andrés Mar

El presente artículo analiza la Justicia Penal Militar colombiana, su origen y evolución desde la vigencia del Decreto 2550 de 1988, según el cual los miembros de la Fuerza Pública podían ejercer simultáneamente las funciones de comando con las funciones de jurisdicción, toda vez que quien juzgaba no se encontraba técnicamente habilitado para desarrollar esa función por carecer de formación jurídica profesional y debía depender de terceras personas para emitir sus fallos, situación que contrariaba los principios de independencia e imparcialidad. Posteriormente, con la creación de la Ley 522 de 1999, actual Código Penal Militar, esas funciones fueron separadas y prohibidas, lo que amerita analizar estos principios a la luz de esta normativa penal militar.   AbstractThis article analyzes the Penal Military Colombian Justice system, its origin and evolution from the enforcement of Decree 2550 of 1988 according to which members of the security forces could exercise the functions of command simultaneously with the functions of jurisdiction, since he was deemed not technically qualified to perform that function due to lack of professional legal training and had to rely on third parties to issue their decisions, a situation that went against the principles of independence and impartiality. Later, with the creation of the Law 522 of 1999 current Military Penal Code, these functions were separated and thus deserving prohibited discuss these principles in light of the military criminal law.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lorenzo Johnson ◽  
Ches Thurber

The ethnic composition of state security forces is believed to have important effects on the dynamics of conflict processes, but data limitations have impeded our ability to test such hypotheses cross-nationally until now. To address this problem, the Security Force Ethnicity dataset provides time-series, group-level measures of the ethnic composition of military forces in the Middle East between 1946 and 2013. We draw on an extensive review of case studies and histories to produce unique ordinal codings for participation rates in the officer corps and in the rank and file. We demonstrate the utility of the data through empirical applications, examining the relationship between military ethnic composition and the incidence of coups and repression. Our findings illustrate the theoretical and empirical importance of disaggregating ethnic representation in the military from inclusion in other institutions of the state.


Res Publica ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Guido Provoost

Studying the Belgian military and foreign policy from 1934 till 1937, one can conclude to the following working hypotheses. The conflict between the King (and His entourage) and the Cabinet about the competency over military policy and military command has had a large influence on the acute phase of the Question Royale 1940-1950.The policy of independence of 1936 which has been imputed later on to the King and for which He has been blamed, is rather contained in the military and foreign policy of the successive Belgian governments from 1930 on, inspired by Paul Hymans, minister of foreign affairs at that time.


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