Politicians at Arms: Civilian Recruitment of Soldiers for Middle East Coups

Abstract

Why would politicians recruit soldiers for military coups d’état? The civil–military relations literature assumes politicians aspire to supremacy over the military; enabling praetorianism would risk their future rule. While civil–military relations widely recognizes the empirical fact of civilian participation in military takeovers, no study specifies or theorizes the topic. This essay examines the conditions in which politicians recruit soldiers to seize power by investigating the understudied processes of military takeovers. Using British Foreign Office documents, Arabic language memoirs, and Polity data, I find that civilian statesmen in Iraq (1936) and Syria (1951) could not tolerate their civilian rivals’ incumbency but were unable to challenge them peacefully, so they recruited like-minded officers for coups. This suggests that while politicians do not necessarily want the army in the chambers, they sometimes favor praetorianism to the continued rule of their civilian opponents.