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Violent Origins of Authoritarian Variation: Rebellion Type and Regime Type in Cold War Southeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2018

Dan Slater
Dan Slater*
Affiliation:
Dan Slater is Professor in the Department of Political Science and incoming Director of the Weiser Centre for Emerging Democracies (WCED) at the University of Michigan
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: dnsltr@umich.edu
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Abstract

Dictatorships are every bit as institutionally diverse as democracies, but where does this variation come from? This article argues that different types of internal rebellion influence the emergence of different types of authoritarian regimes. The critical question is whether rebel forces primarily seek to seize state power or to escape it. Regional rebellions seeking to escape the state raise the probability of a military-dominated authoritarian regime, since they are especially likely to unify the military while heightening friction between civilian and military elites. Leftist rebellions seeking to seize the state are more likely to give rise to civilian-dominated dictatorships by inspiring ‘joint projects’ in which military elites willingly support party-led authoritarian rule. Historical case studies of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam illustrate the theory, elaborating how different types of violent conflict helped produce different types of dictatorships across the breadth of mainland and island Southeast Asia during the Cold War era.

Keywords

authoritarianismrebellionmilitariesSoutheast Asia
Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 21 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2018. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press 

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