Threats to Leaders’ Political Survival and Pro-Government Militia Formation

ABSTRACT

It is puzzling why leaders delegate authority to pro-government militias (PGMs) at the expense of professional armed forces. Several state-level explanations, ranging from low state capacity to blame evasion for human rights violations have been proposed for the establishment of PGM linkages. These explanations lack focus on the individuals making decisions to form PGMs: national leaders. It is argued that leaders create linkages with PGMs to facilitate leaders’ political survival in the event of their deposition. Threats to leaders’ survival come from the military, foreign powers, or domestic actors outside the ruling coalition. As costs of leader deposition are low for the state, leaders facing threats from one or all of these sources must invest in protection from outside of the security apparatus. The argument is tested through data on PGM linkage formation and threats to political survival. Results show that leaders under coup threat are more likely to form PGM linkages, while threats from foreign actors make leaders particularly more likely to form linkages with ethnic or religious PGMs. The findings strongly suggest that PGM linkage formation is driven by leader-level desire for political survival, rather than a host of state-level explanations.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil-military relations
• militias
• political survival

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Meredith Blank, Christina Bodea, Christian Davenport, R. Blake McMahon, Will Moore, Shweta Moorthy, Brian Phillips, Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, Joseph Wright, other participants of the Conflict Consortium Virtual Workshop (CCVW) and the UCSD International Relations Workshop, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ It should be noted that the “pro-government” distinction isolates these groups from the general presence of militias in a country, which can range from pro- to neutral to anti-government armed groups (Staniland 2015).

² Known as weak state capacity. Also defined as deficiency in either universal authority or undisputed regulatory control within their borders (Krasner 2004) and the failure to provide basic public goods to a state’s citizens (Rotberg 2004).

³ Although it is not clear which militias are included in the paramilitary data available from Belkin and Schofer (2003).

⁴ Institutionalized coup-proofing often comes at the cost of military performance (Pilster and Böhmelt 2011).

⁵ The case for many in the Shabiha (Alexander and Sherlock 2012).

⁶ Hussein came to power in Iraq in 1979 and faced rebellions in the Kurdish North and Shia South in early 1991, following an invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that turned into a disastrous military defeat at the hands of a US-led multilateral coalition. While the military’s elite Revolutionary Guard put down the uprising in the South, multinational forces established no-fly zones in the North and South of the country, allowing Kurdish rebels to establish a quasi-state in the North. Moreover, in the years after the invasion, defections led to several aborted coup attempts, most notably by CIA-backed Wafiq Samarrai in 1994 (Smith and Ottaway 1996).

⁷ While the motivations for foreign-imposed regime change (Werner 1996) and the consequences of FIRCs (Downes and Monten 2013) have been widely explored, the measures taken by target governments are largely undertheorized (with the possible exception of Goemans 2000).

⁸ The outbreak or even presence of a civil conflict in a country need not represent a direct risk to leaders’ positions. Many civil conflicts are secessionist in nature and do not seek to overthrow the central government. Others may not be an apparent threat to the leader in power due to a lack of capability (that is, the Communist Party–Maoist (Naxalites) in India).

⁹ This is underscored by work on civil-military relations that highlight militaries’ agency from even democratically elected leaders and tendency toward self-preservation (Feaver 2005).

¹⁰ Each threat originating from the other leader: Sassou-Nguesso against Lissouba before 1997 and Lissouba against Sassou-Nguesso after 1997.

¹¹ Obtained from LexisNexis searches of news sources around the world, including major English-language newspapers, Xinhua, Agence Presse France, and transcripts translated into English by the BBC World News Service. Search terms included “government militia,” “paramilitary,” “government death squads,” “government irregular forces,” and “vigilante.”

¹² This may not necessarily be the year that the linkage was formed or a particular group was organized.

¹³ The assumption of this study is that interstate conflict alone is not sufficient to produce an explicit existential threat to leaders, given the prevalence of secessionist conflicts or other internal conflicts against constitutionally legitimate leaders that do not come close to threatening the ruling coalition.