Chapter 8

Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival
Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746997.001.0001
Published: 2015 Online ISBN: 9780191809262 Print ISBN: 9780198746997
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CHAPTER
8 Military Intervention and Regime Change 

Abel Escribà-Folch, Joseph Wright
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746997.003.0008 Pages 211–249

Published: September 2015
Abstract
This chapter examines how hostile military interventions by both democracies and autocracies
in uence autocratic stability. The chapter begins by providing historical evidence on military
interventions in dictatorships, and introduces the debate surrounding the legal and moral dimensions
of military interventions. Three channels through which military interventions can destabilize
autocracies are identi ed: i) direct overthrow of a regime; ii) military weakening of the target regime
that contributes to a victory of domestic rebel forces; and iii) the fostering of dissent among elites and
citizens after a defeat or costly con ict. The evidence reveals that hostile military interventions are
associated with an increased risk of transition to new dictatorship in personalist regimes but
intervention raises the likelihood of democratic transition in military regimes. The chapter then uses a
series of case studies to delineate the causal mechanism in each positive case, linking military
intervention to regime change.
Keywords: military intervention, democracy restoration, rebellion, accountability, defeat

Subject: Comparative Politics
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Thus far we have analyzed four instruments of non-violent pressure: aid conditionality, economic
sanctions, shaming campaigns, and human rights prosecutions. In this chapter we compare these strategies
to violent foreign coercion in the form of hostile military interventions. One justi cation for pursuing
military intervention against autocratic regimes begins with the premise that other tools of foreign
1
pressure, in particular economic sanctions, are ine ective. Evidence from Chapter 5 casts some doubt on
this premise. More importantly, however, the starting point for assessing whether democratic countries
should pursue military action against dictatorships needs to be grounded in a careful understanding of the
likely outcomes such action will produce. This is the task of the present chapter. Once we pinpoint the cases
where intervention may yield democratic regime change or other positive outcomes, we can better assess
the relative merits of military intervention and other forms of foreign pressure.
In the post-Second World War period, both dictatorships and democracies have not been shy about
pursuing military intervention. While the incidence of hostile interventions has trended downwards from a
peak in the 1960s (see Figure 1.1), the recent revolts in the Middle East and North Africa have brought
renewed attention to the issue. In March 2011, the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of force against
Libyan troops for humanitarian purposes, ostensibly to prevent further attacks by the Gadda regime
against the civilian population. Toppling the regime was not the stated goal of the U.N. resolution, but many
2
proponents undoubtedly favored regime change.
After NATO military intervention tipped the scales against the Gadda regime in August 2011, policymakers
were not done debating the merits of such action. Hawkish politicians, such as Israeli Prime Minister

p. 212 Binyamin Netanyahu, argued that military strikes would be necessary to counter possible nuclear
3
weapons development in Iran. Academics debated the e ectiveness of such action in the pages of Foreign
A airs, some even suggesting that military intervention should only take place if the primary goal is regime
4
change. Further, some policymakers and politicians suggested that the U.S. should intervene to topple the
5
Ba’thist regime in Syria.
Many scholars compare military intervention to economic sanctions because both are coercive tools that
attempt to impose costs on the target regime (Betts, 1994; Reisman, 1994; Baldwin, 1999/2000;
Huntington, 1999; Walzer, 2006). However, there is little consensus about whether military interventions
can successfully pressure dictatorships to change their behavior and even less over whether military
intervention to overthrow a dictator can bring democratic regime change. Critics of military intervention,
such as Walzer (2006), argue that while intervention and regime change may be legitimate responses to
aggression and massacre, dictatorships that are merely capable of such repression should be contained
using other strategies short of war, such as sanctions. Proponents of military interventions, however, stress
that sanctions are not e ective in targeting repressive leaders because they fail to discriminate between the
regime leadership and innocent citizens; indeed they may simply serve to “punish the victims while
enriching the villains” (Reisman, 1994, 803).
The evidence in Chapter 5 suggests that sanctions have costly humanitarian consequences, as Reisman
argues. But sanctions also destabilize some dictatorships. In fact, our evidence suggests that these two
consequences of sanctions are likely to occur in the same type of dictatorship: personalist regimes. If the
indiscriminate human costs of sanctions and their destabilizing in uence are linked, then there is little
room for the debate over the relative merits of sanctions or military intervention to move forward without
rst assessing whether and how intervention in uences autocratic survival.
We begin by providing historical evidence on military interventions in dictatorships, and introduce the
debate surrounding the legal and moral dimensions of humanitarian interventions and forced
p. 213 democratization. The second section proposes how mechanisms linking military intervention to regime
collapse t into our model of regime change. The next section describes the data and empirical approach.
The fourth section reports the cross-national empirical results and then discusses the speci c causal
mechanisms linking intervention to regime change in positive cases identi ed in the data set. The nal
section discusses the implications of our ndings for the use of hostile military interventions against
autocratic regimes.
Military Interventions in The Post-War World
Foreign military interventions are still widely used (see Figure 1.1). Pickering and Kisangani (2009) report
that there were 690 interventions during the Cold War and over 400 from 1990 to 2005. Apart from the
higher incidence per year in the latter period, interventions against dictatorships since 1990 are also more
likely to involve international organizations and less likely to be either supportive or hostile towards the
incumbent regime in the target country. Rather, many recent interventions are neutral towards the target
regime and instead focus on non-state actors in the target country, such as Russian troops chasing Chechen
rebels in Georgia or Israeli bombers targeting Syrian-backed forces in Lebanon.

In this chapter, we focus on hostile military interventions that target the incumbent dictatorship to
understand how this form of foreign pressure in uences autocratic survival and the prospects of
democratization. Since the end of the Second World War, autocracies have been more likely than
democracies to use military force against dictatorships. But, as Figure 8.1 shows, this number is skewed by
the high number of interventions by autocracies in the 1970s and 1980s when the overall number of
autocracies in the world was at its highest (see Figure 2.1). Since the end of the Cold War, the pattern of
hostile interventions is similar for democratic and non-democratic interveners. The highest number of
military interventions by democratic countries took place in the 1950s and 1960s during de-colonization in
Africa and Asia. Figure 8.1 shows that while the number of hostile military interventions targeting
dictatorships is lower in the post-Cold War period, this form of foreign pressure is still widely used.
Figure 8.1.
Hostile military interventions in autocracies, by sender regime type. Three-year moving average.
Sources: Pickering and Kisangani (2009); Geddes et al. (2014a).
Not all military interventions are aimed at democracy-promotion or regime change though. According to
the Pickering and Kisangani (2009) data, only about half of military interventions (48 percent) are
undertaken with the goal of changing the target regime. This gure is similar for the three most frequent
democratic interveners (U.S., U.K., and France—43 percent) and for international organizations (49
percent). The left panel of Figure 8.2 shows that the share of regime change interventions has decreased
p. 214 substantially in the post-Cold War period after Western rivalry with Soviet-bloc countries subsided. In
the past two decades interventions are thus less likely to be aimed at regime change. This decline is re ected
in the decrease in the number of regime change interventions since the mid-1980s, shown in the right panel
of Figure 8.2. However, this trend obscures the fact that the three main democratic interveners and
international organizations still pursue regime change interventions, and constitute the bulk of these
military incursions since 1989. Indeed, the Pickering and Kisangani data indicate that interventions by
international organizations are rare prior to 1990. Thus, while regime change interventions have declined
over time, democratic powers and international organizations are now the most common interveners in
dictatorships. Of the seventy-three regime change interventions since 1989, over half were led by
international organizations, with another twenty percent led by at least one of the three major democratic
powers.

Figure 8.2.
Regime change military interventions. Le panel depicts the share of all military interventions in autocracies that are aimed at
regime change. Right panel shows the five-year moving average.
Sources: Pickering and Kisangani (2009); Geddes et al. (2014a).
The modern history of democratization by military intervention started with some notable successes in
Japan, Germany, and Austria at the close of the Second World War (Montgomery, 1957). Despite these early
p. 215 successes, forced regime change has not always ended in democratic transitions. The U.S., the U.K., and
France have been the most likely countries to pursue military intervention in the past sixty years, and their
record of success is (at best) mixed.
The U.S. used military force to depose autocratic regimes in Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
The rst two cases are generally viewed as successes, but the latter three countries have yet to experience
6
sustained democracy since U.S. intervention (Diamond, 2008). In October 1983, the U.S. invaded Grenada to
topple the leftist party regime and return the country to civilian rule under the parliamentary system in
7
place prior to the 1979 revolution. U.S. forces were aided by Jamaica and backed by a resolution from the
Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). However, U.S. allies such as the U.K. and Canada
8
p. 216 condemned the operation, as did the U.N. General Assembly. Similarly, in December 1989 American
forces invaded Panama after the military dictator, President Manuel Noriega, annulled the presidential
election in which his opponent, Guillermo Endara, defeated the pro-government coalition. U.S. forces
arrested Noriega on drug-tra cking charges, and his electoral opponent was sworn in as president after
the occupation. The U.N. General Assembly condemned the invasion as a violation of international law, as
9
did the Organization of American States (OAS).
Skepticism about the usefulness of foreign interventions increased after the failed U.S. intervention in
10
Somalia in 1993, putting an end to U.S. interventions in con icts abroad for humanitarian reasons. Two
recent cases of U.S. military intervention aimed at regime change helped mobilize public opinion against
interventions. Forced regime changes in Iraq (2003) and Afghanistan (2001) triggered a wave of political
instability, factional violence, and further terrorist attacks. The immediate objectives of invading
Afghanistan were to destroy al-Qaeda headquarters, capture its leaders, and rid the country of the Taliban.
Yet, 2010 and 2011 were the deadliest years for U.S. troops; and Afghan government forces lost over two
11
thousand soldiers in ghting the Taliban in 2014. More than a decade after the U.S.-led invasion, the
Taliban remains strong and far from being a stable state, Afghanistan still ranks seventh in the 2014 Fragile
States Index, with the worst ranking for security in the world because the government lacks a monopoly on
12
the legitimate use of force.
The situation in Iraq over a decade after the fall of President Hussein’s regime is perhaps worse. Restoration

of Iraq’s sovereignty is still limited despite elections in 2005 and 2010 and the alternation of presidential
power in 2014. The sectarian violence unleashed in the post-invasion period reached such a high level in the
13
mid-2000s that a U.S. Intelligence assessment referred to it as “civil war.” And by 2014, Shia dominance of
the Iraqi state’s patronage networks and security apparatus fueled jihadist insurgencies that had captured a
large share of Iraqi territory, resulting in renewed U.S. air strikes in the region.
French interventions have largely targeted post-colonial regimes in francophone Africa, with more than
p. 217 thirty operations since the early 1960s (Gregory, 2000). During the post-colonial period, France signed
several defense agreements with ex-colonies committing themselves to intervention to protect their allies
from domestic and international threats (Lellouche and Moisi, 1979; Gregory, 2000). For instance, French
forces invaded Gabon in 1964 after a military coup ousted President Léon M’ba. In less than forty-eight
hours, M’ba was freed and put back in power with the help of French paratroopers (Yates, 1996, 112). The
mission to restore M’ba and protect French oil interests was not the rst time foreign forces had come to his
aid. French troops intervened at least twice prior to the coup against M’ba, ostensibly to suppress anti-
regime protests (Luckham, 1982, 61). French interventions have also successfully changed autocratic
regimes, though this has rarely entailed a transition to democracy. After having initially supported Jean-
Bedel Bokassa’s rule in the Central African Republic, French forces deposed him in 1979 when the self-
styled Emperor started accepting military aid from Libya (Luckham, 1982, 61, 70).
While formal French guarantee commitments in Africa ended in the mid-1990s after criticism for
involvement in the Rwandan con ict and the fall of Mobutu in Zaire (Gregory, 2000), French troops still
intervene. In April 2011, for example, French forces intervened in Côte d’Ivoire after the apparent loser of
the 2010 presidential elections, Laurent Gbagbo, refused to step down. With the backing of a U.N. resolution,
French and U.N. soldiers intervened to put an end to the ensuing civil con ict, defeating Gbagbo’s forces in
Abidjan. Two years later, in 2013, French troops invaded northern Mali to prevent radical Islamist armed
groups from taking over the region after the Tuaregs declared independence of Azawad.
British military incursions have also been aimed at protecting their interests in former colonies (Van
Wingen and Tillema, 1980). Some interventions were condemned by allies, such as the bombing of Cairo
during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the brief war with Argentina over the Malvinas Islands. British
interventions are not simply a Cold War relic, however, as British forces supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq
in 2003 and intervened during civil war in Sierra Leone in 2000 to stop the advance of the Revolutionary
United Front (RUF). British Special Forces captured the RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, and the president prior to
the civil war, Ahmad Kabbah, was re-elected in 2002.
Prior Research
The study of military interventions has received considerable attention. However, the empirical evidence
thus far is inconclusive and has only recently begun to examine the consequences of non-U.S. military
p. 218 interventions. While early studies suggested that U.S. interventions aided democratization (Meernik,
1996; Hermann and Kegley, 1998), later research found weak support for this proposition, indicating
instead that the democratization from military incursions was the result of liberalizing policies adopted
during U.S. occupation (Peceny, 1999a, 1999b). Even this evidence has come under question (Walker and
Pearson, 2007), and once U.S. covert operations are included, on balance U.S. intervention appears to have
hurt the long-term prospects of democracy (Easterly et al., 2008).

Turning to interventions from all sending countries, Pickering and Kisangani (2006) nd that hostile
interventions may further democracy, at least as measured by movements along the Polity scale—a nding
replicated by Teorell (2010). Further evidence from the three main democratic interveners casts some doubt
14
on those results though (Pickering and Peceny, 2006). The limited evidence on interventions by
international organizations, such as the U.N., suggests a positive e ect, particularly after civil war (Doyle
and Sambanis, 2000; Pickering and Peceny, 2006). After correcting for selection, Downes and Monten
(2013) conclude that foreign-imposed leader changes have no e ect on democratization.
None of this literature examines how hostile military interventions in uence autocratic regime stability. By
focusing largely on the question of whether interventions can force democracy on the target country, it
provides little insight into what comes next when these “democratic regime change” missions fail. Thus, we
do not yet know whether and under what conditions interventions lead to “adverse regime change.” This
literature relies predominantly on the Polity scale to measure the level of “democraticness” in the target
country. But, as we have pointed out in previous chapters, many autocratic regime changes are not captured
by movements along this scale, and in some cases of transition between distinct autocratic regimes—such
as the 1979 Iranian Revolution—the level of democraticness increases, according to the Polity scale.
U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq provide a cautionary tale about the prospects for democratic
regime change. If these types of military missions simply replace long-standing autocratic regimes with
unstable dictatorships or failed states, then policymakers will want to understand these risks when
considering such action. While liberating Libya from Gadda likely prevented the mass slaughter of civilian
opponents to his regime, skeptics were wary that the subsequent regime in Libya would not only be
p. 219 autocratic but worse—unstable and unpredictable (Serwer, 2011). As Richard N. Hass, President of the
Council on Foreign Relations, stressed, “[i]t is one thing to oust a regime; it is something fundamentally
15
di erent to install a viable entity in its place.” Any discussion of possible military strikes against Iran
must assess the consequences of intervention for regime stability, with a clear acknowledgement of the
possibility that if the current regime were to fall, a politically unstable dictatorship with potential nuclear
power may simply take its place. This chapter is a rst step to understanding the question of “what comes
next?” when democracies use their military might to force regime change in dictatorships.
The Legal and Moral Dimensions
Military intervention—whether to serve humanitarian purposes or to change targeted regimes—entails
coercive violence, the risk of death for citizens of the targeted country as well as the intervening country,
and the violation of national sovereignty. Thus hostile interventions bear moral and legal considerations.
Wars of aggression are illegal under international law. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and Article 2 (4) of
the U.N. Charter ended prior customary doctrine and explicitly forbade the use of military force except in
two circumstances: in self-defense against an aggressor state or with U.N. Security Council authorization
under the intent to preserve international peace and security. These limits are di cult to enforce given the
variety of situations in which intervening countries pursue “humanitarian interventions” (Murphy, 1996;

Chesterman, 2001; Holzgrefe and Keohane, 2003). Technically, humanitarian intervention consists of the
use of military force against a country with the goal of ending large-scale human rights abuses in the target
country (Seybolt, 2007; Carey et al., 2010; Weiss, 2012). Regime change is not a part of this goal.
To provide legal cover for multilateral humanitarian missions and those aimed at regime change,
democratic states and international organizations often seek approval from the U.N. Security Council to
deem the con ict in a country a “threat to international peace and security.” The interpretation of these
threats has changed since the early 1990s, expanding the scope for humanitarian interventions under the
auspices of the U.N., as was the case for interventions in Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda (Murphy, 1996;
Chesterman, 2001; Holzgrefe and Keohane, 2003). In two of these instances, Haiti (1994) and Sierra Leone
p. 220 (1997), the U.N. Security Council determined that military intervention to overthrow an autocracy and
restore a previously elected leader constituted appropriate action. In Haiti, U.N.S.C. Resolution 940
authorized a U.S.-led multilateral operation to use all necessary means to restore to power former President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been deposed in a 1991 military coup.
The U.N. Security Council has not always provided license for military interventions, particularly during the
1970s and 1980s when many resolutions were blocked in the context of Cold War politics (Nowrot and
Schabacker, 1998, 374–5). Further, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, unilateral intervention carried
the risk of igniting a large-scale international con ict. Since then, however, room for military intervention
outside the auspices of the U.N. has expanded. For example, NATO led a bombing campaign against
Yugoslavia in 1999 during the Kosovo War, despite not receiving o cial support from the U.N. (Schraeder
and Redissi, 1999).
The failure to prevent mass atrocities in Rwanda and Bosnia led the former U.N. Secretary-General Ko
Annan to challenge the priority given to non-intervention in the U.N. Charter. In his 2000 report to the U.N.
Millennium Summit, he asked “if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on
sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of
16
human rights that a ect every precept of our common humanity?”
This challenge had an immediate e ect. Later that year, the Canadian government established the
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which issued a report outlining the
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2001 (Bellamy, 2009). This document links state sovereignty to the
responsibility of a state to protect its own population from genocide and war crimes. If a state fails to do
this, the international community has the obligation to intervene to stop gross violations of human rights.
This principle has since been endorsed by in uential international organizations, such as the U.N.S.C., the
member states of the 2005 World Summit, and the African Union (Bellamy 2009, 77–81; Carey et al. 2010,
186).
More recently, the U.N.S.C. authorized military operations to enforce a no- y zone over Libya in March 2011.
Supporters of this intervention, especially liberal internationalists in the Obama administration, hailed it as
a successful application of the new R2P doctrine (Bellamy and Williams, 2011). The scope of U.N. Resolution
1973 entailed using all necessary means to protect civilians, but did not authorize an occupation force. The
p. 221 resolution’s stated aim was to stop the murder of Libyan citizens; it remained silent about the prospect of
regime change. Though the NATO bombing campaign led to the ouster of Gadda ’s regime, this
17
intervention did not technically entail forcible democratization, the legal scope of which is now very
limited. Military interventions with the explicit goal of regime change are deemed legal only if authorized as
such by the U.N.S.C. or conducted with the consent of the target state (Wippman, 2000).
Moral and ethical theories have long provided justi cation for humanitarian intervention in some
circumstances, but they generally do not take up the question of forced regime change (Merkel, 2008). The
principle of self-defense, for example, justi es intervention in response to prior aggression (Walzer, 1977).

While military intervention against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan resulted in regime change, the
justi cation for such action drew on the principle of self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. This
standard has been expanded to include aiding another state that is the victim of aggression. Some argued
that the U.S. invasion of Kuwait in 1991 met this criterion because Iraqi aggression prompted the
intervention (Walzer, 2006). Walzer’s (1977) development of just war theory outlines three additional
situations of justi ed intervention: assisting secessionist movements of communities or nations within
states; supporting one party in a civil con ict if their opponent also receives external support; and
humanitarian intervention aimed at ending state-led mass killing. Thus according to standard criteria for
just war, democratic regime change is never a justi cation for military intervention, even though it may be a
by-product of action taken to meet other immediate objectives (Walzer, 2006). For example, if the just goal
of military intervention is to end mass violations of human rights, e ectively doing so may require regime
change.
Recently, advocates of an international right to democratic governance have urged an even greater scope for
unilateral action, especially given the failure of the U.N. in securing these rights (Byers and Chesterman,
2000). Reisman (1994, 804), for example, argues that “democracy is a right guaranteed by international law
and the condition sine qua non for the realization of many other internationally prescribed human rights.”
According to this logic, popular sovereignty should replace traditional state sovereignty, the former being
vested in citizens (Reisman, 1990). Undemocratic rule is therefore devoid of true sovereignty (Doppelt,
1978; Beitz, 1979; D’Amato, 1990). A similar argument for “democratization through force” notes that
dictators forcibly prevent people from creating a democracy, and so, violate their right of self-
p. 222 determination (Buchanan, 2006). Extending this logic, Applbaum (2007) argues that governments only
have the right to non-intervention if they secure the human rights of its citizens and represent their will.
The right to intervene has also found its way into international agreements, such as the Copenhagen
Document adopted by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (jointly with the U.S., Canada,
and Eastern European countries).
Attempts to develop a set of policy principles to allow pro-democratic interventions were initiated with the
Reagan Doctrine, which pointed out that state legitimacy is conditional on having the consent of citizens
(Chesterman, 2001). The articulation of the “Bush-Doctrine” in the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy
argued that expanding democracy is both moral (in ideal terms) and instrumental, and helped to lay the
intellectual framework for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Sharansky and Dermer, 2004).
The merits of these arguments hinge, in part, on establishing how their implementation works in practice.
Reisman (1994, 803), for example, argues that a universal norm to unilaterally intervene in defense of
democracy would deter coups. Collier (2007) makes a similar point in suggesting that the credible threat of
intervention to overturn obviously fraudulent elections may create an incentive for establishing accountable
government. He cites the example of Senegalese President Abdou Diouf stepping down after the 2000
18
elections out of fear that the Senegalese military would oust him if he had stayed. This pro-intervention
position has not gone uncontested, as detractors point out that such pro-democratic incursions may not
only be di cult in practice but that the presence of intervening militaries may breed further violence
19
(Franck, 1992).
While we cannot provide a full investigation of the many di cult questions posed in this debate, we believe
that our evidence sheds light on the prospects for democratic regime change as well as the risk that
intervention may simply be followed by an even more unstable or undemocratic government.
Military Intervention in Autocratic Regimes

To explain how hostile military interventions in uence political instability in autocratic regimes, we rst
discuss three issues that help us understand the mechanisms through which autocratic regime type may
p. 223 condition the prospects of intervention success. First, we examine hostile interventions from both
democratic and autocratic states. By distinguishing the regime type of the intervening country we can better
assess whether military incursions by democratic states further the prospects of democratization or
whether they are simply destabilizing. Second, we discuss factors that in uence the likelihood of being
targeted for military intervention: con ict behavior, military capacity, and prior democracy. These factors
not only help determine the risk of becoming a target, but they are also likely to in uence the prospects of
regime change. Finally, we detail the speci c mechanisms that link intervention to regime change: direct
removal of an autocratic leader by foreign military forces or destabilizing pressure that increases the
chances that a domestic actor intervenes to end the regime.
Who Intervenes?
Much of the empirical literature focuses on the intentions of the intervening state or organization
(Pickering and Peceny, 2006; Pickering and Kisangani, 2006; Gleditsch et al., 2007). The core intuition from
these studies presumes that democratic countries are more likely to promote democracy through their
interventions. This may be particularly true of U.S. military interventions, where the explicit foreign policy
goal is the promotion of democracy, and less true of other democratic intervening countries such as France
and the U.K. (Van Wingen and Tillema, 1980; Pickering and Peceny, 2006). Successful U.S. interventions, for
example, are more likely when the president makes public commitments to promoting democracy and when
occupying forces pursue liberalizing reforms such as sponsoring fair elections (Meernik, 1996; Hermann
and Kegley, 1998; Peceny, 1999a, 1999b).
Bueno de Mesquita and Downs (2006) propose an alternative logic, arguing that while the intervening
country may support democracy in the target state, it also expects that the policies of the new government
will bene t its own domestic constituencies. However, a new democratic government in the target country
will be constrained by its own electorate in designing policies and thus less willing to make concessions to
the foreign intervener. This instrumental logic helps explain why a democratic intervener may be more
interested in supporting an autocratic regime that can more reliably concede to the preferences of the
intervener. These motivations may have been particularly relevant during the Cold War when purely
strategic considerations drove the superpower states to unilateral interventions that damaged the long-
term prospects for democracy (Easterly et al., 2008).
To explain why hostile military interventions by democratic states and international organizations can
p. 224 possibly further democratization, we examine interventions by both democratic and autocratic states. If
hostile interventions destabilize autocratic governments but have little in uence on democratization per se,
then we should nd evidence that the e ect of interventions by democratic states di ers little from the
e ect of autocratic incursions. If this is the case, then any observed democratic e ect may simply be the
result of domestic conditions in the target country that have little to do with the intentions of the
intervening state. If, however, interventions by democracies are markedly di erent than hostile
interventions by autocratic countries then this could be interpreted as evidence that military interventions
by the former have the intended e ect.
By comparing democratic and autocratic interventions, we can assess whether military incursions by
democratic countries improve the prospects of democratization or whether they simply destabilize
autocracies. To our knowledge, this distinction has gone unexamined in studies of military interventions,
perhaps because they largely neglect the question of whether interventions by democracies increase the risk
of adverse regime change.

Targeting Autocratic Regimes
Three factors are likely to in uence both whether an autocracy is targeted by a hostile military intervention
and the prospects for regime change: con ict behavior, military capacity, and prior democracy. Some
autocracies, for example, are more prone to con ict and have less military capacity than others, and are
thus more likely to be targeted by interventions. Further, dictatorships that displace prior democracies may
not only be better placed to transition to a new democracy given their democratic history but may also be
more likely targets for that same reason.
Each of these factors also maps onto the regime type classi cation we have used throughout the book.
Studies of international relations in autocracies have relied heavily on these categories of dictatorship to
help answer questions about con ict and democratization. Thus these factors indicate that regime type not
only will be an important variable to include in an analysis of military interventions but can also provide
theoretical guidance for the empirical expectations for intervention success.
Conflict behavior in dictatorships

Dictatorships display a wide variety of con ict behavior. Personalist dictatorships, for example, are more
likely to initiate con ict with democracies, but party-based regimes are less likely to be involved in military
p. 225 disputes (Peceny et al., 2002; Reiter and Stam, 2003). Building on audience cost theories, Weeks (2008)
shows that personalist dictatorships are also more likely to face resistance from the targets of their
militarized threats because, during inter-state disputes, these threats are less credible. Hence, crises
initiated by them are more likely to escalate (Frantz, 2010; Frantz and Ezrow, 2011). In contrast, threats
issued by party-based and military regimes are generally more credible because elites in these regimes are
bound by an institution that eases coordination and thus makes it easier to punish a leader for backing
down. Further, party-based civilian regimes, or what Weeks (2012) calls “machine” dictatorships, are no
more likely to initiate con icts than democracies. The most con ict prone, on the other hand, are regimes
led by unconstrained military o cers seeking to further rivalries within the armed forces.
Numerous explanations may account for this variation in con ict behavior. Audience cost theories and
those that highlight the propensity of personalist dictators to initiate con ict stress the role of (absent)
institutional constraints on the leader (Reiter and Stam, 2003; Weeks, 2008). Others point to the leadership
selection process that may produce erratic leaders in personalist dictatorships with poor information about
their own military capabilities and a high psychological need for status vis-à-vis peers (Kinne, 2005; Ezrow
and Frantz, 2011a; Weeks, 2012, 2014). Further, Belkin and Schofer (2005, 151) claim that “leaders of
counterbalanced militaries have strong incentives to engage in such international con ict,” since engaging
20
in con ict furthers divisions and rivalries that reduce the risks of coups. Diversionary war theory and the
logic of “gambling for resurrection” link con ict behavior with domestic political instability to suggest that
leaders facing a high risk of losing power may be more likely to engage in risky international behavior
(Richards et al., 1993; Downs and Rocke, 1994; Chiozza and Goemans, 2003; Goemans, 2008; Debs and
Goemans, 2010; Chiozza and Goemans, 2011). To the extent that personalist dictators are the most likely to
face a nasty post-exit fate (see Figure 3.2), they may be particularly prone to risky or diversionary con ict
behavior.
With the exception of studies that highlight the martial instincts of military leaders, the bulk of the growing
literature on con ict in autocratic regimes points to the possibility that relatively unconstrained personalist
dictatorships with counterbalanced militaries may be the main culprits of aggressive international behavior.
This has implications for the study of hostile military interventions. If personalist regimes are prone to
p. 226 con ict, they may be the most likely targets of military intervention, particularly by democratic states
and international organizations. Further, if these regimes are the least likely to democratize should they fail

(see Figure 2.3), then combining these two stylized facts suggests military interventions should not be
particularly helpful for promoting democracy in personalist dictatorships.
Military capacity in dictatorships

Some regimes may be targeted because they have relatively weak military. A democratic state, for instance,
may be more likely to target a weak dictatorship to ensure that a battle eld victory leads to a regime ouster.
Indeed, choosing winnable con icts may be one reason democracies are frequent victors (Filson and
Werner, 2004). This may have been the case of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent
removal of Hussein’s regime. Other noteworthy—and “successful”—U.S. interventions have targeted small
population countries with weak militaries, such as the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama.
Personalist regimes again stand out for having relatively weak military capacity (Peceny et al., 2002). A
de ning feature of these dictatorships is the leader’s personal control over the security apparatus to deter
internal threats from the military. The collective action capacity of the armed forces and their control over
weaponry make them perhaps the greatest threat to a personal ruler’s power. As explained in Chapters 2 and
3, to counter this destabilizing force, personal rulers often undermine the capacity of the military to ensure
its loyalty through “coup-proo ng” strategies (Quinlivan, 1999; Frantz and Ezrow, 2011). To this end,
dictators control promotion and recruitment processes, purge and reshu eo cers to weaken potential
rivals, keep their armies poorly equipped, and create divisions between military and security organizations
to thwart coordination against the dictator. Central to this strategy is the creation of multiple security
services directly dependent on the leader to reduce his reliance on the armed forces for internal security and
personal protection. Further, personalist dictators often appoint family members and co-ethnics to top
positions in the security forces.
Finally, Frantz (2009) points out that personalist dictators often receive low-quality information from their
military intelligence. To prevent the emergence of rivals from within their clique, these leaders surround
themselves with mediocre and incompetent o cials. The quality of the advice they may obtain when facing
foreign policy crises is therefore likely to be poor, which may lead them to make ill-informed military
decisions.
Personalization of the military and related coup-proo ng strategies weaken the ghting capacity of the
p. 227 armed forces. Recent research, for instance, shows that “coup-proo ng harms military e ectiveness and
therefore makes leaders more vulnerable to external threats” (Pilster and Böhmelt, 2011, 345). Examples of
short, decisive military victories over personalist dictators abound. It took only six months for Tanzanian
troops to repel Amin’s invasion in 1978, invade Uganda, and overthrow Amin’s regime (Brett, 1995). In Iraq,
the U.S.-led invasion against Hussein’s regime lasted less than six weeks (Bennett and Stam, 2006). In
1979, French troops deposed Jean-Bedel Bokassa’s regime in the Central African Republic in just a few hours
(Titley, 1997). Kabila’s rebels and their Rwandan and Ugandan allies marched across the entire country to
oust Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime in less than eight months. Though the Forces Armées Zaïroises (FAZ)
fought the rebels at the start of the con ict, much of the campaign entailed rebel announcements of an
attack target so Mobutu’s troops could loot and ee the location before they encountered rebel forces
21
(Reyntjens, 2009, 100). Weak militaries in personalist dictatorships may thus make them more susceptible
to military intervention and to be defeated.
Recent debate over U.S. intervention in Libya and Syria re ects similar assessments of the relative risks of
intervening against a weak military in a personalist dictatorship and a relatively strong force in a more
party-based regime. In addition to the failure to secure full support from the U.N.S.C. to pursue military
options against the Ba’thist regime in Syria, U.S. military o cials noted that attacking the Syrian military
would require a lengthy and potentially costly air campaign that would likely result in a large number of
22
casualties. In contrast, there were few fears that attacking Gadda ’s military in Libya would entail such

23
risks.
Democratic restoration
The nal factor that may explain both the risk of being targeted by intervention as well as the prospects for
regime change, especially democratic transitions, is prior democracy. Restoring overthrown democracies is
p. 228 a primary goal of promoting democracy through force (Grimm, 2008). Indeed there have been a number
of cases in the Caribbean and Central America, an area the U.S. considers of primary strategic interest:
Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and Haiti (1994) (Grimm and Merkel, 2008).
Military dictatorships may be the most likely target of democratic interventions aimed at restoring
democracies because they are the most likely to follow democracies upended by coups. Svolik (2014), for
example, nds that coups account for over two-thirds of democratic failures. Military regimes replaced
24
democracies after coups throughout Latin America; and in the past decade they upended democracy in the
Central African Republic (2003), Madagascar (2009), Mali (2012), Mauritania (2008), and Thailand (2006).
If military regimes are the most likely autocracies to replace democracies, they should also be the most
likely to be targeted by foreign interventions with the aim of restoring democratic government. Haiti is a
clear example. In 1991, a military coup deposed President Jean Bertrand Aristide, and a military junta led by
Raoul Cédras took power. Under the authorization of U.N.S.C. Resolution 940, U.S. forces led a multinational
operation that lasted from September 1994 to March 1996. More than 20,000 American soldiers plus
roughly 5000 troops from other countries were deployed. With the invasion forces approaching the island,
Cédras ed to Panama to avoid an overt military con ict. Foreign troops entered the country peacefully and
restored President Aristide.
Regional treaties and international organizations increasingly contain provisions that encourage democracy
and, in some cases, the forceful imposition of democracy. In the Santiago Commitment to Democracy and
the Renewal of the Inter-American System, both adopted in June 1991, OAS members adopted “e cacious,
timely, and expeditious procedures to ensure the promotion and defense of representative democracy.” This
understanding provided explicit support for military interventions to restore democracy in the region. In
Africa, ECOWAS intervened to restore democracy in Sierra Leone. When the Revolutionary United Front
(RUF) ousted the elected president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, in May 1997, the international community
quickly condemned the coup and the U.N.S.C. imposed sanctions, including arms and oil embargoes as well
as travel restrictions against junta members. ECOWAS authorized a multilateral military force, comprising
mostly Nigerian soldiers, to intervene. After the failure of the Conakry Peace Plan, foreign troops chased the
RUF from Freetown, and less than a year after his ouster President Kabbah returned as president.
p. 229 Destabilizing Mechanisms
The two main mechanisms through which military intervention can destabilize a dictatorship are by directly
removing the targeted regime from power or by changing the relative domestic power of the targeted
regime such that domestic actors can remove it. Direct removal by a foreign military may entail the physical
capture of the targeted leader by foreign troops, as was the case with President Noriega in Panama.
Alternatively, the threat of military con ict or direct removal may convince the targeted leader to ee the
country, perhaps to some agreed destination upon exile. Idi Amin ed to Libya as Tanzania troops and
Ugandan rebels approached Kampala in 1979 and Raoul Cédras left for Panama in 1994 just hours before U.S.
forces landed in Haiti. The interpretation of these events is relatively straightforward: without the presence

of a foreign military force, the dictator would not have left power, at least not at that time. Further, while
domestic actors may have helped convince the targeted leader it was time to give up, the timing of exit in
these cases was directly linked to the presence of foreign troops.
At rst glance, defeat in war by the intervening forces may have consequences for the prospects of
democratization. In Germany and Japan after the Second World War, military defeat and the dismantling of
the old system led directly to installation of new democracies. These cases suggest that total defeat after war
might make it easier for the intervening forces to create a new regime (Grimm, 2008, 545). However, the
U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) have not resulted in consolidated democratic regimes
(to date) despite the initial defeat of the targeted regime’s military and substantial investment in “external
incentives for democratization” (Enterline and Greig, 2008).
The second class of destabilizing mechanism entails removal by a domestic actor either during or shortly
after foreign military intervention. These events might be termed “indirect” consequences of military
intervention because the observed removal of the targeted regime requires the direct action of a domestic
actor. In cases where military intervention coincides with regime change, we nd at least three forms of
indirect removal: elite accountability, popular protest, and defeat by a rebel group or insurgency. Elite
accountability entails high-ranking regime supporters removing the incumbent leader from power. This
most often occurs when a military regime replaces its titular head and decides to return power to civilians.
Popular protest occurs when fallout from military intervention (most often military defeat) prompts anti-
regime protests or electoral defeat. Hence, according to our model in Chapter 3, a military defeat may cause
discontent among elite members or citizens and so reduce support (↓ S) for the regime, which may lead,
then, to elite accountability and protests.
p. 230 Elite and popular accountability can be di cult to distinguish because anti-regime protest and dissent
following an unpopular military con ict may in uence the behavior of key regime supporters, perhaps most
importantly, the military. Indeed, the Serbian case we discuss below (‘How Does Military Intervention
In uence Regime Stability?’) contains elements of both: anti-regime protests after Milošević annulled an
election prompted the military to decide that it would not intervene on his behalf, forcing him to step down.
When we discuss particular cases below, we do not distinguish between the top-down and bottom-up
nature of domestic accountability because we cannot always directly observe how popular dissent interacts
with military decision-making.
The accountability mechanism may be most prevalent in military dictatorships. Professionalized militaries
may value the corporate interests of the armed forces more highly than holding the reins of power
(Nordlinger, 1977; Geddes, 1999). Combined with the credible threat to re-intervene in civilian politics, this
preference for corporate unity may mean that their willingness to cede power is more sensitive to military
defeat and the associated loss of support (Agüero, 1992). For example, the Argentine military leader
Leopoldo Galtieri was removed from power by the junta in 1982 just a few days after the British had retaken
the Falkland Islands from Argentine forces, marking the rst step towards handing power back to civilians.
Likewise, the Greek junta left power soon after being defeated by Turkey in Cyprus, which caused o cers to
defect. Both military regimes were followed by democracies.
The third domestic mechanism entails weakening the regime economically or militarily. In terms of our
model, this weakening consists of a decrease in the repressive capacity of the regime (↓ R), which renders it
more vulnerable to a forcible removal by domestic armed groups. If foreign intervention directly hurts the
incumbent regime by weakening its military power, destroying physical assets, or deterring investments in
capital and labor, the resulting loss of power for the target regime may tip the balance in favor of a domestic
rival, particularly a rebel group or insurgency. While the causal factors behind the “weakening” mechanism
and the accountability mechanism may at times be similar, we distinguish the former by the realized threat

of an armed anti-regime group with su cient military capacity to drive the incumbent regime from power
in the capital city. Thus while rebels controlled Benghazi in eastern Libya for only a few months before they
drove Gadda from Tripoli, and Kabila’s insurgency against Mobutu’s regime in South Kivu had been
festering for decades, they both succeeded in ousting the autocratic regime only with the aid of foreign
25
militaries.
p. 231 These domestic mechanisms re ect the logic that military defeat can jeopardize the tenure of leaders
(Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson, 1995; Chiozza and Goemans, 2004; Debs and Goemans, 2010). While we
have outlined the types of observable events that mark the removal of autocratic regimes in the face of
foreign military intervention, these mechanisms may also re ect the causal role of an unobservable factor:
signaling. Weeks (2009, 16), for example, notes that “defeat, in turn, could make the overthrow of the
regime more likely by providing a focal point for domestic discontent.” Whether this coordinating signal
bolsters the resolve of insurgents, increases the chances that citizens protest a rigged election, or prods
military o cers back to the barracks, it is di cult to separate the unobservable e ects of signaling from the
observable political events (such as defeat at the hands of rebels or military acquiescence) with which we
mark regime failure.
Do Military Interventions Destabilize Dictatorships?
To test the in uence of interventions in target autocracies, we use a data set on interventions developed by
Pickering and Kisangani (2009), which contains data from 1946 to 2005. They de ne military interventions
as “the movement of regular troops or forces (airborne, seaborne, shelling, etc.) of one country inside
another, in the context of some political issue or dispute” (Pickering and Kisangani, 2009, 593). We create
indicator variables for the direction of the interventions (hostile or supportive of the target government)
26
and the type of intervening country (autocratic or democratic). We focus on hostile interventions and thus
have two main explanatory variables: hostile democratic interventions and hostile autocratic interventions.
We lag these variables one year to ensure intervention precedes regime change. We also code interventions
in the observation year when the intervention occurs prior to the regime change event. This last procedure
is necessary because some military interventions that threaten or topple dictatorships only occur in the days
p. 232 or weeks prior to the failure event, such as the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1994 (Kretchik et al., 1998). If we
simply used a one-year lag on the interventions variable, we would miss these cases.
The reported speci cation employs controls for: GDP per capita, population, civil war, regime duration (and
interactions with regime type), as well as year- xed e ects. We test both conditional logit and linear
probability models with country- xed e ects to account for time-invariant factors, such as geographic
position and neighborhood e ects, that in uence both the likelihood of intervention and regime stability.
In robustness tests, we control for other factors: military size, sanctions, and neighbor democratization.
International con ict studies typically control for the “national capabilities” of the military because
countries with stronger militaries may be less likely to be attacked. One component of a commonly used
variable, the Composite Index of National Capability (CINC), is the number of military personnel (Singer,
1987). Further, this variable serves as a proxy for the domestic coercive capacity of the regime (Albertus and
Menaldo, 2012). Several scholars argue that the coercive apparatus of an autocratic regime—in particular a
large military—may be instrumental in suppressing pro-democracy pressure (Stepan, 1971; Bellin, 2004;
27
Svolik, 2011; Albertus and Menaldo, 2012). Second, we include an indicator of sanctions used in Chapter 5
because many interventions follow the imposition of (failed) sanctions. Finally, neighbor democratization is
a time-varying feature of geographic position and captures both democratic di usion processes that
in uence the likelihood of hostile intervention and regime stability.
There are relatively few cases where hostile military intervention coincides with regime change. While

roughly 5 percent of the sample is targeted with military intervention, there are only six democratic and six
autocratic regime transitions that coincide with hostile intervention by democratic states or
28
organizations. Unlike in previous chapters, the results we present for interventions should be interpreted
with substantial caution. That said, we believe that examining the cross-country data is still important
because restricting the analysis to the positive cases leaves no leverage to compare cases of regime failure
with cases of regime survival. The paucity of positive cases, however, allows us to look at each one in more
detail to better understand the causal in uence of military intervention during regime transitions—a task
we take up later in the chapter.
p. 233 Results
As in the previous chapters, we report the main results in the Appendix (E) and interpret the ndings in
graphs. The rst model examines how hostile military interventions by democracies (DHI) and autocracies
(AHI) in uence all regime collapse events. The results indicate that across all dictatorships DHIs are
correlated with an increased risk of regime collapse. In the model with interaction terms, we nd the e ect
for DHIs in both personalist and non-personalist regimes. While this would suggest that military
intervention destabilizes a range of autocracies, the outcome variable in these tests groups democratic
transitions with autocratic transitions.
Turning to democratic transitions, we nd that both DHIs and AHIs increase the likelihood of democratic
transition in non-personalist dictatorships, but neither in uences democratization in personalist regimes.
We nd, however, that DHIs increase the risk of autocratic transition in personalist regimes. These ndings
remain in logit and linear models. Figure 8.3 displays the main ndings from the linear probability models.
The left panel shows that interventions by both democracies (7 percent) and other autocracies (3 percent)
increase the prospects of a democratic transition—but only in non-personalist regimes. The right panel
shows that intervention by democracies targeting personalist regimes raises the estimated likelihood of
autocratic transition by 7.5 percent. Although not statistically di erent from zero, the estimate for
democratic interventions shows that in non-personalist regimes the risk of autocratic transition increases
by 3 percent.
Figure 8.3.

Military interventions and regime change. The predicted risk of democratic and autocratic transition, by autocratic regime type
and category of intervening country. DHI = hostile military intervention by democracy; AHI = hostile military intervention by
autocracy. Years: 1947–2005.
Thus, the empirical evidence for military intervention and democratization during the post-Second World
War period suggests that forced regime change is unlikely to yield new democracy in personalist
dictatorships. Further, the positive result for DHIs in non-personalist regimes is driven by cases of military
rule in Pakistan—two regimes that both ended in democratic transition (1971 and 1988). Democracy did not
survive in either case, as the military would take back power in each. Further, as we show below (‘How Does
Military Intervention In uence Regime Stability?’), one of these cases appears to be a false positive. Other
positive cases involved direct removal of a dictator by U.S. military forces in Panama (1989) and Haiti (1994)
—two small ethnically homogenous Caribbean countries with prior experience with democratic rule.
Putting the information from both panels of Figure 8.3 together, the evidence suggests that intervention can
be destabilizing. While military incursions by democracies may destabilize personalist dictatorships, this is
unlikely to be followed by a transition to democracy, but is associated with an increased risk of autocratic
transition. Like economic sanctions, military interventions in these regimes are unlikely to promote
p. 234 democracy. In non-personalist dictatorships, hostile interventions by both democracies and other
autocracies are associated with an increased risk of democratic transition. This last piece of evidence is
consistent with previous studies showing that military intervention is correlated with democratic regime
change (Meernik, 1996; Pickering and Peceny, 2006).
Robustness Tests
In replication les, we show the two main ndings—that DHIs increase the likelihood of democratic
transition in non-personalist regimes but increase the risk of autocratic transition in personalist ones—are
robust to a number of changes to the speci cation: with additional control variables (sanctions, neighbor
democracy, military size); without control variables; with period- xed e ects instead of year- xed e ects;
and with random e ects instead of unit- xed e ects.
Bearing in mind the caveats associated with drawing inferences from a limited number of positive cases, the
evidence can be summarized as follows. First, hostile democratic military interventions targeting
p. 235 personalist regimes are unlikely to be followed by democracy, but rather are associated with an increased
risk of adverse regime change. This nding therefore predicts that military incursions against regimes such
as those in Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011) are not likely to secure democratic regime change and may only
replace a stable dictatorship with an unstable one. A full accounting of the costs involved in targeting
personalist dictatorships should therefore consider the risk of adverse regime change. That said, if hostile
military intervention raises the risk of regime transition then, like sanctions, they may be useful for
extracting policy concessions short of regime change. Again, such action should be taken with the full
knowledge of the associated risk of adverse regime change. Second, hostile interventions by both
democracies and autocracies are associated with a higher risk of democratic transition in other
dictatorships; however this nding rests on just two cases of military rule in Pakistan.
How Does Military Intervention Influence Regime Stability?

In this section, we examine the cases where hostile military intervention by a democratic state or
29
international organization coincided with regime change during the sample period. This exercise helps us
pinpoint the domestic mechanisms that link intervention to political instability. Selecting on the dependent
variable allows us to explore common mechanisms across cases and rule out pathways absent in the
30
relevant cases. Further, examining these cases can aid measurement validity by establishing whether the
historical record indicates military intervention in uenced the speci c domestic actors who, in the end,
ousted the regime. In some cases, military intervention was largely peripheral to domestic political
struggles; thus although intervention and regime transition coincide temporally in these instances, the
historical evidence indicates that the empirical correspondence in the data is simply a “false positive.”
The regime transitions that end in democracy are: Azerbaijan 1992, Dominican Republic 1962, Haiti 1994,
Panama 1989, Pakistan 1971, Pakistan 1988, and Serbia 2000; and the regime transitions that result in a
p. 236 subsequent dictatorship are: Afghanistan 1992, Congo/Zaire 1997, Iraq 1968, Syria 1951, Syria 1963, and
31
Yemen 1967. To assess the in uence of democratic interventions we examine the potential mechanism
linking intervention to regime change in each case. Table 8.1 summarizes the results.
The rst case is the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1961. U.S. naval forces docked in the
harbor of Santo Domingo after the assassination of the long-time dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The U.S.
threatened his family with further intervention if they succeeded in ousting Trujillo’s designated successor,
Joaquín Balaguer, who assumed the presidency after Trujillo’s death. Thus at rst glance, the intervention
actually strengthened Balaguer’s position against elite rivals within the regime (i.e. Trujillo’s brothers). U.S.
32
intervention, however, also forced Balaguer to rely on General Rodríguez Echevarría, and continued U.S.
p. 237 naval presence in Dominican waters kept pressure on Balaguer to democratize by forcing him to rule with
33
a Council of State. The data we use code the regime failure event as the coup by General Rodríguez in
January 1962 which ousted Balaguer, ending the rule of Trujillo’s designated successor. With the support of
the U.S., a counter-coup two days later reinstated the authority of the Council of State, this time with
Balaguer in exile in New York City (Wiarda and Kryzanek, 1982, 40). The Council conducted democratic
elections in December 20 1962, which the opposition won.
U.S. military and economic pressure thus not only helped ensure that Trujillo’s family would not take power
in his stead, but they also strengthened the hand of the coup leader that deposed Balaguer. In this case,
forces from the intervening democracy did not physically remove the autocratic leader, but instead
weakened elite members of the incumbent personalist regime who attempted to retain power, including at
various points both Trujillo’s family and Balaguer. Further, the intervening power in this case had a prior
expectation that pressure to ensure a democratic election would lead to a moderate left-wing president
taking power (Wiarda and Kryzanek, 1982, 41). The new democracy, however, did not last more than seven
months.
Two other cases of military intervention precipitating democratic transitions in the Caribbean Basin,
Panama 1989 and Haiti 1994, have a straightforward interpretation. The U.S. sent military forces to each
country and directly removed the autocratic leader from power. In both cases, the incumbent regime was a
military dictatorship. In Haiti, the U.S. restored a previously elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, but
34
the new democracy did not last. In Panama, U.S. forces invaded and arrested the military dictator, Manuel
Noriega, after he annulled the results of an election he lost. Noriega’s electoral opponent assumed o ce
after the invasion, and Panama has been a democracy since 1989. Thus, of the three cases in which U.S.
military intervention paved the way for a democratic transition, only one resulted in a consolidated
35
democracy.
There are two further cases of democratic military interventions targeting a military regime, both in
Pakistan. The rst occurred in the wake of Pakistan’s defeat in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. India

p. 238 intervened when their forces invaded East Pakistan during the Bangladeshi liberation war to support the
Bengali rebels, forcing the Pakistani army to surrender in December 1971. This military intervention
critically in uenced regime change via a second-order consequence: leader accountability resulting from a
humiliating and costly military defeat. Angry demonstrations and pressure from fellow o cers in the wake
of Pakistan’s military defeat forced President General Yahya Khan to resign, restoring the previously elected
Prime Minister Zul kar Ali Bhutto to power (LaPorte, 1972, 104).
The second military intervention that coincided with democratic transition in Pakistan occurred in 1988
following the death of President Zia al-Huq in a plane crash. After Zia’s death, Pakistani military
commanders appointed a civilian, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, as president, and democratic elections were
conducted under his watch later that year. The democratic military intervention coinciding with this episode
was the con ict between India and Pakistan over the Siachen Glacier between 1984 and 1987. India gained
control of the area after launching an o ensive in April 1984. While we cannot know if Pakistan would have
democratized in the late 1980s had Zia survived, the main international factor that contributed to his
personal popularity within the military was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent U.S.
support for Pakistani military (Noman, 1989; Ho man, 2011). Further, Ho man (2011, 76) argues that
military extrication in 1988 was the result of a strategic calculation that the military would have an
opportunity to return to power after handing leadership to a weak civilian government. The generals
determined that quick elections would lead to rule by poorly organized and weak civilian parties—a
situation they could manipulate to retain power (Ho man, 2011, 89). Further, there was little indication at
the time that U.S. support for the Pakistani military was likely to decline. Thus there is little evidence to
indicate that the con ict with India contributed to the military’s decision to withdraw in 1988.
The Azerbaijani regime collapse in 1992 occurred during a secessionist con ict in the Nagorno-Karabakh
region, where Armenian forces backed ethnic Armenian residents ghting the Azerbaijani government. In
36
February 1992, foreign forces massacred hundreds of Azerbaijanis in the town of Khojaly. Azerbaijan’s
leader Ayaz Mutalibov was accused of being unable to prevent and respond to the Armenian advance and the
37
p. 239 killings. Cornell (1999, 53) notes that “the pro-Soviet Mutalibov regime had pursued a pro-Russian
policy very much to the dismay of the people—public opinion having turned increasingly anti-Russian after
the January 1990 military intervention—and was deposed in the aftermath of the Khojaly massacre of
February 1992. Mutalibov was blamed for the military setbacks.” Anti-government demonstrations, fueled
38
by the events in Nagorno-Karabakh, forced him to resign the next month. After Mutalibov stepped down,
power passed to a National Assembly, which scheduled a multiparty election in June. The opposition Popular
Front of Azerbaijan (PFA) won the contest, marking a democratic transition. The new democracy lasted just
one year. This case, therefore, falls in the category of domestic accountability for defeat.
The nal case of democratic military intervention and democratic transition occurred in Serbia in 2000 after
the resignation of President Slobodan Milošević. NATO forces intervened in Yugoslavia in 1999 during the
Kosovo war and launched several air attacks directed at Serbian forces in Kosovo. The bombing campaign
forced Serbian troops to withdraw from Kosovo and the U.N. established a protectorate in the province.
Milošević stepped down from power on October 5, 2000 amidst anti-regime protests that followed his
refusal to accept the results of a September election. After military forces refused to shoot demonstrators
and key o cers signaled their unwillingness to see the regime violently removed, Milošević resigned
(Binnendijk and Marovic, 2006, 426). He handed power to the electoral victor, Vojislav Koštunica.
Anti-regime mobilization and the loss of popular support for Milošević were a direct consequence of
military intervention and defeat by NATO forces. McFaul (2005, 8), for example, notes that “several military
defeats, culminating with capitulation to the 1999 NATO air campaign, and years of economic decline
severely undermined his support.” Thompson and Kuntz (2004, 165) concur, adding that “when the Kosovo
war ended in June 1999 with Belgrade’s de facto loss of control over Serbia’s ‘sacred places,’ Milošević’s
image as a savior of Serbia was irrevocably shattered.” This case can thus be classi ed as one in which

domestic actors held the targeted regime accountable for military defeat.
Next we consider the six autocratic transitions that coincided with hostile interventions by democratic
p. 240 states or international organizations. The autocratic transitions in Syria (1951 and 1963) are false
39
positives. The Shishakli coup in November of 1951 was precipitated by a con ict over the military budget
and the repeated failure of the civilian president to nd a prime minister who could staple together a ruling
40
coalition that did not threaten the military’s position (Torrey, 1964, 200). The hostile military
intervention occurred in April 1951 when Israeli forces retaliated against Syrian sniper activity in Israeli-
held territory. Instead of prompting a coup, however, the Israeli attack actually temporarily solidi ed
parliamentary support for the civilian regime in early 1951 by helping the Prime Minister Khalid al-Azm win
a con dence vote (Torrey, 1964, 192). He drew the support of would-be opponents such as members of the
Ba’th party and the Islamic Socialist Front who only voted for Azm in a show of unity against foreign
aggression (Torrey, 1964, 192).
The democratic hostile military intervention that coincided with the Syrian Ba’thist Revolution in 1963 is
also a false positive. The hostile intervention in this case occurred in the spring of 1962, when Israeli forces
killed Syrian soldiers in the village of Nuqayb in a dispute over shing rights on Lake Tiberias (Ne , 1994,
36). And while the alliance between the Ba’th party and the military was many years in the making, the
timing of the March 1963 coup that brought the Ba’thist faction of the military to power came on the heels
41
of the Ba’thist coup in Iraq a month earlier (Perlmutter, 1969, 838).
The military intervention by a democracy in the Yemeni case plausibly had an indirect e ect on regime
stability. The military incursion took place in 1966 during the Yemeni civil war between the al-Sallal regime
p. 241 and the Saudi-backed remnants of the Zaydi imamate (Van Wingen and Tillema, 1980). During this
con ict, the British supported the royalist forces. Nasser’s government in Egypt sided with al-Sallal’s
regime until 1967 when losses in the con ict with Israel forced Nasser to withdraw his troops from the
Arabian Peninsula, quickly leading to the fall of al-Sallal’s regime in early November 1967 (Burrowes, 1991;
Haddad, 1971b). Egyptian involvement in the Yemeni con ict undoubtedly contributed to Egypt’s military
defeat in the 1967 war with Israel (Burrowes, 1982, 23). Thus British military action in Yemen the prior year
might plausibly have contributed to weakening the Egyptian military and led indirectly to the withdrawal of
Egyptian troops in the wake of the 1967 Israeli–Arab con ict.
Hostile military intervention by a democracy also likely contributed to the 1968 Ba’thist coup in Iraq. In this
case, the Aref government’s involvement in the 1967 Arab–Israeli con ict led to his ouster by nationalist
42
military o cers allied with the Ba’thist party. While the 1968 coup drew support from Ba’thist o cers,
such as al-Bakr and al-Takriti, who had been pushed from senior positions by Aref in 1964, the coup leaders
also included two key non-Ba’thist o cers, Colonel ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Nayif and Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Rahman
al-Da’ud, who feared retaliation from the discredited Nasserist faction of the military upon which Aref’s
brother had increasingly relied (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, 1987, 111–12). Directly implicating the
military defeat in 1967, Alam (2004, 89) argues that “[t]he Baathist Revolution of July 1968 was one of the
consequences of the defeat of Arab forces in June 1967 war. The radical nationalist forces in Iraq were much
43
disgusted with the government’s handling of the situation of the Arab-Israeli con ict in June 1967 war.”
In the two most recent cases of autocratic transition that occurred after a hostile military intervention by a
democracy, the intervening country aided rebels in a civil con ict with the incumbent regime. Najibullah’s
regime in Afghanistan fought the mujahedeen, who were funded and trained by the Pakistani military, in a
con ict that led directly to the fall of Kabul in April 1992 (Rais, 1993; Halliday and Tanin, 1998). In this case,
p. 242 hostile intervention by a democracy arguably weakened the military position of the incumbent regime. In
the second case, however, the role of the democratic military intervention in weakening the incumbent’s
military was marginal. While Burundi aided Tutsi rebels opposed to Mobutu’s regime, the involvement of

the Burundian military in Eastern Congo in 1996 was relatively limited compared with intervention by
other, mostly autocratic, neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda (Reyntjens, 2009, 61). Further,
in both the Afghan and Zairian cases, the ongoing civil con ict took its toll on the incumbent regime only
once large-scale foreign support for the regime diminished—Soviet aid in the case of Afghanistan and
Western assistance to Mobutu’s regime in Zaire.
Examining each positive case in the sample yielded three (possibly four) false positives: instances in which
democratic hostile military intervention was not plausibly related to regime change. Further, this exercise
con rmed the mechanisms linking intervention to regime change: (1) direct removal of an autocratic leader
by military forces; (2) weakening the incumbent militarily such that rebel opponents are better able to oust
the regime; and (3) accountability for military defeat.
Setting aside the false positive cases and summarizing the results by target regime type yields two main
results. First, the tally for the type of transition that occurs when intervention successfully dislodges an
incumbent regime follows a now familiar pattern: conditional on regime collapse, personalist dictatorships
are more likely to transition to subsequent autocracies, while military regimes are more likely to
democratize. Half of the personalist cases end in democratic transition, while three-quarters of military
cases end in democratic episodes. Neither of the cases where intervention led to consolidated democracies,
however, were personalist dictatorships. In the Dominican case, the new democracy was ousted in less than
44
a year and was followed by a civil war. The new “democracy” in Azerbaijan lasted fteen months. Second,
the mechanism through which the regime falls as a result of military intervention di ers by target regime
type. In half of the cases, personalist regimes are rendered su ciently weak by military intervention that
domestic opponents seize the advantage and violently force the target leader from power. We could only
identify one of four military cases (Yemen 1967) where military intervention potentially weakened the
target regime during a civil con ict. Even here, though, it was probably military defeat in an allied
p. 243 dictatorship (Egypt) and the subsequent withdraw of external support that weakened the target regime
such that their domestic opponents could oust the regime.
Finally, the accountability mechanism takes a di erent shape in each targeted regime type. In the
personalist case (Iraq 1968), accountability entailed a military coup against a civilian regime. In Azerbaijan,
the disgraced Mutalibov attempted to return to power shortly after his resignation but was rebu ed by a
45
further round of popular protest. In the military case (Pakistan 1971), accountability meant the military
returned to the barracks after anti-regime protests indicated the military had lost popular support. And in
the party case (Serbia 2000), accountability worked through an electoral process and ultimately through
(non-violent) mass demonstrations. While it would be futile to generalize from so few cases, these
characterizations are consistent with patterns that we have seen throughout the book. For example,
violence is more likely to accompany regime failure in personalist dictatorships, while relatively peaceful
regime change is more likely to occur in military regimes. Likewise, the selection of a new leader is more
likely to occur violently in personalist dictatorships but more likely to entail elections in party-based
regimes.
The Long-Term Influence of Military Intervention
The analysis thus far examines the short-term in uence of military interventions. However, regime change
does not always occur immediately, even if the military objective of the intervention succeeds quickly. Some
mechanisms linking intervention to regime change, such as the punishment of the incumbent leader or
increased domestic dissent after a military defeat, may take more time to unfold. Prior research, for
example, examines the e ect of interventions over a ten-year period (Bueno de Mesquita and Downs, 2006;
Grimm, 2008).
To address this long-term possibility, we investigate cases where hostile military intervention by a

democracy coincides with regime change in later years. The analysis in the previous sections examined the
in uence of interventions on regime change in the current or subsequent year (t + 1). We now expand this in
Table 8.2 to add cases where regime change occurred in years t + 2 to t + 6. The rst two columns list the
target country and the intervention year, while the third column lists the year of regime change. This
p. 244 identi es four more cases where intervention coincides with regime change at a later date: four
46
democratic transitions and two autocratic transitions. Of the four democratic transitions, only one entails
a likely case where intervention proved in uential in the regime transition; in the other three there is little
evidence linking intervention and transition.
Table 8.2. Longer-term influence of hostile military interventions
Target Intervention Transition Democratic Incumbent Transition Destabilizing

country year year intervener regime type type influence
Nicaragua 1988 t + 2 (1990) Honduras Party Democratic Yes
Peru 1998 t + 2 (2000) Ecuador Personalist Democratic No
Peru 1995 t + 5 (2000) Ecuador Personalist Democratic No
Pakistan 1966 t + 5 (1971) India Military Democratic No
The Honduran intervention against Nicaragua in the 1980s was part of the U.S. military strategy to use
Central American proxies against the Sandinista government. The emerging military stalemate and e orts
by other Central American countries to end the ghting led to the political agreement that was followed by
multiparty elections in 1990 (Roberts, 1990, 100). Thus while Honduran intervention did not help produce
decisive victory for the contras (Williams, 1994, 179), the use of force in this case pushed the Sandinista
regime towards elections that resulted in a transition to democracy.
The con ict between Ecuador and Peru entailed multiple clashes over a disputed border area dating back to
the nineteenth century. The 1995 and 1998 military interventions comprise the start and end points for the
latest are-up. Fujimori faced domestic backlash stemming from the ill-preparedness of the military
during the 1995 battle over the Cenepa River, but he controlled the media and was able to mute the criticism
(Herz and Nogueira, 2002, 80). In 1998, Fujimori challenged the two consecutive term-limit rule in the
constitution to allow himself a third term. He understood that ending the con ict with Ecuador would help
p. 245 his position in that constitutional battle (Herz and Nogueira, 2002, 81). Thus if anything, the conclusion
of the con ict strengthened Fujimori. He ed Peru amid a corruption scandal in 2000 that had little to do
with the Ecuadorian con ict.
Finally, the Indian intervention targeting Pakistan in 1966 was the culmination of the 1965 con ict with
India over Kashmir. The peace agreement signed in Tashkent in January 1966 stipulated that all foreign
military personnel be removed from the disputed region by 25 February 1966, and returned territory
occupied during the con ict to the status quo ante. Pakistan’s military leader, General Ayub Khan, faced
domestic criticism both from his chief civilian opponent as well as from within the military (LaPorte, 1969,
854), which played a role in the internal military coup that replaced Ayub Khan with Yahya Khan in 1969
(Ganguly, 1990, 61). The leadership change in 1969 did not end the military regime, which only handed
power back to a civilian government two years later following the 1971 con ict with India. Therefore, the
democratic transition in Pakistan is better explained by military defeat during the Bengal con ict in 1971
than by the 1965 con ict and domestic fallout from the 1966 Tashkent settlement.
Setting aside what appear to be false positives (Peru and Pakistan), the Nicaraguan case underscores

another key point about autocratic regime collapse. Intervention against the Sandinista government
contributed to a military stalemate and pushed both sides towards a negotiated settlement that entailed
multiparty elections which the opposition won. Thus the failure event in a party regime entailed an election
where the incumbent lost. Consistent with the pattern we illustrated in Chapter 4 (Table 4.1), the
Sandinistas not only contested future elections as a viable opposition party, they won a plurality of the
legislative seats in the 2006 and 2011 elections. And a former autocratic leader, Daniel Ortega, won the
presidency in a multiparty contest in 2006.
Discussion
The United Nation’s Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine contains six principles to guide military
intervention. Evans and Sahnoun (2002, 101) group these provisions into “the ‘just cause’ threshold, four
precautionary principles, and the requirement of ‘right authority’.” The analysis in this chapter speaks
directly to the precautionary principle concerning the consequences of military intervention: “there must
be a reasonable chance of success in halting or averting the su ering which has justi ed the intervention,
p. 246 with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction” (Evans and
Sahnoun, 2002, 105). A key factor in evaluating the latter clause in the “consequences” principle must
address the question of “what comes next?” when foreign forces topple an autocratic regime. This chapter
attempts to answer this question.
Our approach to assessing the consequences of military intervention entails three innovations: we examine
all hostile military interventions targeting dictatorships, not just interventions by the U.S. or democratic
countries; we investigate how interventions in uence the risk of both democratic and autocratic
transitions; and we focus the theoretical analysis on the autocratic regime type of the target country and the
mechanisms that may lead to its collapse.
We expand the analysis beyond U.S. interventions for two reasons. First, other democracies, such as the U.K.
and France, have historically intervened militarily in their former colonies, and increasingly international
organizations pursue military interventions against dictatorships. Discussion of how military intervention
in uences regime change needs to account for the fact that, going forward, military interventions may
increasingly be initiated under the auspices of international organizations and not go-it-alone operations
by single states. Focusing exclusively on U.S. interventions would miss many of these cases.
Second, we assess whether the in uence of military interventions by democratic countries di ers from that
of autocratic countries. As Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2005) point out, intervening states may have di culty
forcing democracy because they prefer pliant regimes in foreign countries—and the relative lack of
domestic constraints in dictatorships should make them more pliant. One way to assess this possibility is to
compare democratic interventions to those by non-democratic countries. If we assume that democracies
not only prefer democratic regime change to autocratic regime change but can credibly stand by that
preference, then we would expect the regime type of the intervening country to matter. Therefore, it is not
enough to show that military intervention by democracies can increase the chances of democratic regime
change. Instead, to understand whether military intervention “works,” we compare the in uence of
democratic and non-democratic interventions to see whether the former are more likely to induce
democratic regime change in the target dictatorship.
Central to understanding the in uence of military intervention is assessing the risk of adverse regime that
may result. If military intervention destabilizes a dictatorship, policymakers should understand that not all
regime change is democratic. Some are simply replaced by new ones; some end in state failure. Thus,
p. 247 answering the question of “what comes next?” starts by assessing the changes in the relative risk of
democratic and autocratic regime change when a democracy targets a dictatorship with violent force.

Finally, while some scholars have searched for the domestic conditions of success, few examine how the
vast di erences among di erent types of autocracies shape how they respond to military intervention and
how incursions in uence post-intervention outcomes such as democratic transition and adverse regime
change. By underscoring the unique di culties many countries ruled by personalist dictatorships face when
the regime falls, we provide theoretical leverage to help answer the question of when and where hostile
military interventions are most (and least) likely to result in democratic regime change.
An important part of research is making the case for how a quantity of interest, such as the chances that a
hostile military intervention targeting a dictatorship will lead to a new democracy, should be interpreted.
Essential to this task is stating the relevant comparison. If the analysis in this chapter simply asked whether
hostile military interventions by democratic states increase the risk of democratic regime change in target
dictatorships, the answer would be a rmative. However, when we compare military interventions by
democracies with those initiated by autocracies, we nd that interventions by both are associated with an
increased risk of democratic transition. The nding is stronger for democratic interventions, but some
autocratic interventions result in democratic transition in the target country as well.
This comparison is important because to believe military intervention initiated by democracies can further
democratic regime change in target countries, we need evidence that democratic intervention is more
successful in this endeavor than autocratic intervention. If hostile incursions by both democracies and
autocracies improve the chances of democratic transition in some types of target regimes, then it is likely
that some underlying condition (perhaps unobserved) in the target regime is responsible for the observed
democratization, rather than the unique “powers” of military intervention by democracies. Thus although
we nd a correlation between democratic military incursions and democratic transition in non-personalist
regimes, this cannot necessarily be interpreted as evidence in favor of hostile military adventures in the
name of democratic regime change because autocratic military interventions are also associated with
democratic transitions in the same group of targeted dictatorships.
Further, interventions by democratic states and international organizations are correlated with a higher
risk of autocratic regime change. That is, some hostile interventions by democracies are not likely to bring
p. 248 about democratic regime change, even if they destabilize the target regime by increasing the risk that a
new dictatorship rises to take its place. This point is too often glossed over in debates about the merits of
military intervention. “Unintended” consequences are real and we show that they often mean substituting
47
one dictatorship for another, probably, weaker one.
Finally, we assess the in uence of military interventions in di erent autocratic contexts. By estimating the
e ect of military interventions in personalist and non-personalist dictatorships, we nd that hostile
incursions by democracies are correlated with an increased risk of democratic transition in non-personalist
(mostly military) regimes, while these interventions are associated with an increased risk of autocratic
transition in personalist dictatorships. This nding not only parallels the results in Chapter 5 for economic
sanctions, it also provides some guidance on the likely outcome of military interventions in distinct
autocratic settings. If military intervention destabilizes a personalist dictatorship, our ndings suggest that
a new autocratic regime is more likely to replace it than a new democracy. The opposite appears to be true of
other dictatorships, though this result is driven by cases of hostile intervention by India targeting military
regimes in Pakistan.
Throughout the chapter, we underscore the point that broad conclusions from cross-national statistical
work on military interventions should be treated with extreme caution. Unlike in previous chapters, the
empirical results depend on a handful of positive cases. Further, examination of the cases where hostile
military intervention coincides with regime failure pinpoints some instances in which intervention is
peripheral to the main causes of autocratic collapse, which further reduces the number of positive cases.

There are numerous ways to assess hostile foreign military interventions, such as respect for human rights,
civil rights, and political freedoms (Walker and Pearson, 2007; Peksen, 2012). Policymakers also want to
know whether foreign intervention, particularly peace-keeping missions, can reduce violence in post-
48
con ict countries. We do not take up this broad range of issues and goals. Rather, we focus on a narrowly
de ned concept of regime change in autocratic countries: when the elites who hold power over policy and
personnel choices lose that power. Importantly, regime failure can end with a democratic transition or a
subsequent dictatorship.
We close by noting that the main empirical nding underscores a point we have made throughout: the
p. 249 institutional setting of the incumbent autocratic regime is likely to in uence the end result of a particular
foreign policy tool. As in the case of economic sanctions and human rights prosecutions, personalist
regimes stand apart because regime collapse more often than not leads to a subsequent dictatorship. If we
employ our empirical model with data through 2000, it predicts that hostile foreign military interventions
targeting regimes such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hussein’s in Iraq, and Gadda ’s in Libya—if
militarily successful—would be more likely to lead to a new dictatorship than to democracy.
Given the paucity of positive cases, we urge caution in interpreting the cross-national correlations for
military interventions. But we encourage future research to think about how the nature of the existing
regime—and particularly the extent to which the targeted leader has consolidated power over the military
and the support party—is likely to in uence the chances that, should the targeted dictatorship fall, it will
simply be replaced by a new dictatorship or a failed state.
Notes
1 See Baldwin (1999/2000) for a discussion.

2 Anne Penketh, “Obamaʼs military coalition for regime change in Libya,” The Hill, 18 March 2011.
3 Barak Ravid, Amos Harel, Zvi Zrahiya, and Jonathan Lis, “Netanyahu trying to persuade cabinet to support attack on Iran,”
Haaretz, 2 November 2011.
4 Jamie M. Fly and Gary Schmitt, “The Case For Regime Change in Iran,” Foreign A airs, 17 January 2012. Colin H. Kahl, “Not
Time to Attack Iran,” Foreign A airs, 17 January 2012. Matthew Kroenig, “Time to Attack Iran,” Foreign A airs, 17 January
2012. Alexandre Debs and Nuno Monteiro, “The Flawed Logic of Striking Iran,” Foreign A airs, 17 January 2012.
5 Daniel Byman, “Finish Him,” Foreign Policy, 2 February 2012. Scott Wong, “John McCain: U.S. should bomb Syria,” Politico,
5 March 2012.
6 NATO intervention in the Kosovo conflict in 1999 might also be regarded as a success. Yet Kosovo declared independence
much later, on 17 February 2008, and was under U.N. supervision for over a decade.
7 The empirical analysis in this chapter does not contain this case because Grenadaʼs population is less than the threshold
Geddes et al. (2014a) use in identifying autocratic regimes.
8 The United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council vote to condemn the invasion, but the General Assembly adopted the
resolution to denounce the invasion as a violation of international law.
9 The U.S., France, and the U.K. vetoed a dra resolution at the U.N.S.C. requesting the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
10 The U.S. military engaged in humanitarian e orts in the wake of natural disasters, but these are not humanitarian
interventions during an ongoing conflict.
11 See <http://icasualties.org/oef/> and Jason Lyall, “A (fighting) season to remember in Afghanistan,” The Monkey Cage, 20
October 2014.
12 See <http://library.fundforpeace.org/cfsir1423>.
13 See “Elements of Civil War in Iraq,” BBC News, 2 February 2007.
14 They report only one case of successful and consolidated democratization a er U.S. intervention: Panama 1989.
15 Richard N. Hass, Ray Takeyh, and Ed Husain. “A er Qaddafi, Libyaʼs Daunting Path,” The Council on Foreign Relations, 20
October 2011.
16 Kofi Annan. 2000. “We the Peoples, The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century,” p. 48.
17 See the U.N.S.C. Resolution 1973 (2011).

18 Paul Collier, “Development in Dangerous Places,” Boston Review, 9 July 2009.
19 See also William Easterly, “The burden of proof should be on interventionists—doubt is a superb reason for inaction,”
Boston Review, 10 July 2009.
20 In contrast, Powell (2014) claims that by reducing coup risk, coup-proofing actually reduces the use of diversionary
international conflict.
21 Reyntjens (2009, 108) describes the ZAF as “undermined by politicisation, nepotism, corruption, and embezzlement” and
lead by “unpaid, untrained, and unequipped o icers and soldiers.”
22 Elisabeth Bumiller, “Military Points to Risks of a Syrian Intervention,” The New York Times, 11 March 2012.
23 David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, “Gates Warns of Risks of a No-Flight Zone,” The New York Times, 2 March 2011. Barbara
Starr, “O icial: U.S. military options for Libya being planned,” CNN, 24 February 2011.
24 These include: Argentina (1955, 1962, 1966, and 1976); Bolivia (1980); Brazil (1964); Chile (1973); Guatemala (1954, 1963,
and 1982); Honduras (1963 and 1972); Panama (1951 and 1968); and Uruguay (1973).
25 Indeed, one could argue that leaders in Rwanda and Uganda picked Kabila as the Congolese face of their military
campaign against Mobutuʼs regime (Mampilly, 2011, 181).
26 We use Cheibub et al. (2010) to distinguish between democratic and autocratic sending countries. We code international
organizations that intervene as autocratic if the majority of their member states are autocratic. For example, the Arab
League and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) are two organizations coded as autocratic, while the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and NATO are coded as democratic. The U.N. and the OAS are
coded as democratic. Interventions are coded as hostile to the target government if Pickering and Kisanganiʼs (2009) data
set marks the intent as either “oppose government” or “support rebel or opposition groups.”
27 Following Albertus and Menaldo (2012), we take the natural log of the number of military personnel per hundred citizens
from an updated version of Singer (1987).
28 The regime transitions that coincide with hostile military interventions by democracies are listed in Table 8.1.
Table 8.1. Hostile military interventions and autocratic regime failure
Target Year Democratic Incumbent regime Regime Role of military

country intervener type transition intervention
Dominican 1962 U.S. Personalist Democratic Weaken

Rep.
Pakistan 1971 India Military Democratic Accountability
Pakistan 1988 India Military Democratic None
Panama 1989 U.S. Military Democratic Leader removal
Azerbaijan 1992 Armenia Personalist Democratic Accountability
Haiti 1994 U.S. Military Democratic Leader removal
Serbia 2000 NATO Party Democratic Accountability
Syria 1951 Israel Military Autocratic None
Syria 1963 Israel Military Autocratic None

Yemen 1967 Israel Military Autocratic Weaken
Iraq 1968 Israel Personalist Autocratic Accountability
Afghanistan 1992 Pakistan Party–personalist Autocratic Weaken
Congo/Zaire 1997 Burundi Personalist Autocratic Weaken (limited)
29 Regime failure events that resulted in foreign occupation (e.g. Afghanistan 2001) are coded according to the regime that
immediately followed the end of the occupation. We do not include them in the following analysis.

30 This approach is similar in spirit to Millʼs method of agreement and can help disprove a hypothesis but cannot confirm one
because it cannot establish correlation.
31 As already mentioned, there is one case of successful military intervention leading to democracy not included in our
sample: Grenada in 1983. The U.S. launched Operation Urgent Fury aimed at ending the le ist single-party regime and
restoring the parliamentary government in place prior to the 1979 revolution. As in Panama (1989) and Haiti (1994), the
regime in Grenada was directly removed by the foreign forces.
32 U.S. military forces were in direct contact with Rodríguez Echevarría when the latter bombed the San Isidro Air Base,
driving the Trujillo brothers from the island (Blechman and Kaplan, 1978, 297).
33 The main opposition leader, Juan Bosch, praised U.S. intervention, viewing it as an implicit backing of his attempts to gain
the presidency via an election (Blechman and Kaplan, 1978, 300). Three years later, the U.S. would intervene again a er
forces loyal to Bosch ousted a military government. This time the U.S. intervention restored an undemocratic government
to power.
34 Geddes et al. (2014a) code the end of that democratic episode in Haiti in January 1999 when the incumbent President
René Préval dismissed the legislature and started ruling by decree (Ta -Morales, 2001).
35 The number of successes is two—out of four—if Grenada is also considered.
36 Human Rights Watch (1994, 6) reports that both Armenian forces as well as renegade Russian military units—366th
Regiment of the Russian army—participated in the massacre of Azeri residents at Khojaly. The Russian government
generally supported the Mutalibov regime and opposed the anti-Russian PFA.
37 Abulfaz Aliyev, chairman of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, for example said that “Mutalibov could not defend his
homeland and his people.” See Carey Goldberg, “Azerbaijani Leader Resigns Amid Protests, New Battles: Nagorno-
Karabakh: He is blamed for the deaths of scores of citizens at the hands of Armenian militants,” Los Angeles Times, 7 March
1992.
38 Francis X. Clines, “Angry Azerbaijanis Impel Chief to Quit,” The New York Times, 7 March 1992. Another, larger uprising
prevented Mutalibov from taking power a er being reinstated by the parliament in May 1992 (Kamrava, 2001, 221).
39 If any coups in Syria could be attributed to fallout from foreign military intervention, they would be the 1949 coups: one
ending civilian rule in March of that year and another deposing President Zaʼim six months later (Torrey, 1964, 114, 137). In
both cases, territorial losses in the 1948 war with Israel and attempts at restructuring the military in its a ermath
contributed to coups. For example, Torrey (1964, 137) argues that “the antagonism of the army to civilian government
leaders stemmed from the o icersʼ belief that the military was being made the scapegoat for the Palestine fiasco.”
40 The 1951 coup was Shishakliʼs second successful attempt to remove the leader. In December 1949, Colonel Shishakli
helped a group of o icers oust the Chief of Sta , Sami Hinnawi. However, the civilian government under Prime Minister
Hashem al-Atassi continued to rule the country (Haddad, 1971a, 205). Haddad (1971a, 211) also argues that Shishakliʼs
motivation for the 1951 coup stemmed from the civilian cabinetʼs attempt to remove him from the military and to move
internal security from the defense portfolio to the interior ministry.
41 Conflict with Israel only played a minor role in the 1963 Baʼthist coup: in the wake of the Iraqi Baʼthist coup in February
1963, the civilian Syrian government under Prime Minister Khalid Azem ordered “suspected o icers to the front thinking
that their duties near the Israeli border would detract them from attempting a rebellion” (Haddad, 1971a, 195). Just the
opposite occurred, and these o icers successfully ousted Azem.
42 Jordan gave Iraqi forces permission “to enter Jordan to complete defensive deployment of all available troops in their
confrontation with Israel” in May 1967 and supplied them with military equipment (Alam, 1994, 86). Israeli forces
retaliated by attacking an Iraqi air force target (Oren, 2002, 187–8).
43 Haddad (1971a, 156) makes a similar point: “The year that followed the Six Day War of June 1967 was one of unrest and
discontent in Iraq. There were criticisms of Iraqi handling of the forces that were sent to fight against Israel, and protests
and demonstrations against Iraqi interaction in the Arab national e orts.”
44 The military conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh also led to the defeat of the PFA government and to a new personalist regime
that remains in power.
45 Mutalibovʼs successor, Abulfaz Elchibey, gained the presidency by winning an election in June 1992, making this an
anomalous outcome for a personalist dictator. Yet, the new democratic regime did only last one year to be replaced by a
new personalist regime. Seeking foreign protection, Mutalibov went into exile in Russia, a quite normal outcome for
personalist leaders.
46 This list does not include Cambodia 1975 (t + 4) and Syria 1951 (t + 3) because the targeted regime was not the same as the
one that collapsed in the subsequent year. Nor does this list include two monarchies ousted a er hostile intervention by a
democracy: Egypt 1952 (Israel intervention in 1949) and Yemen 1962 (British intervention in 1959). In both cases, foreign
military intervention plausibly led to regime ouster; and the subsequent regime in both cases was a dictatorship.
47 This may be the point if the new dictatorship is likely to accede to policy that the intervening state prefers (Bueno de
Mesquita et al., 2005).

48 See Paul Collier and and Bjørn Lomborg, “Does Military Intervention Work?,” Project Syndicate, 30 April 2008.

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Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival

Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright

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8 Military Intervention and Regime Change 

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746997.003.0008 Pages 211–249

Keywords: military intervention, democracy restoration, rebellion, accountability, defeat

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Sources: Pickering and Kisangani (2009); Geddes et al. (2014a).

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Sources: Pickering and Kisangani (2009); Geddes et al. (2014a).

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Military Intervention in Autocratic Regimes

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Conflict behavior in dictatorships

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Military capacity in dictatorships

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Do Military Interventions Destabilize Dictatorships?

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How Does Military Intervention Influence Regime Stability?

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Table 8.2. Longer-term influence of hostile military interventions

Target Intervention Transition Democratic Incumbent Transition Destabilizing

Nicaragua 1988 t + 2 (1990) Honduras Party Democratic Yes

Peru 1998 t + 2 (2000) Ecuador Personalist Democratic No

Peru 1995 t + 5 (2000) Ecuador Personalist Democratic No

Pakistan 1966 t + 5 (1971) India Military Democratic No

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1 See Baldwin (1999/2000) for a discussion.

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Table 8.1. Hostile military interventions and autocratic regime failure

Target Year Democratic Incumbent regime Regime Role of military

Dominican 1962 U.S. Personalist Democratic Weaken

Pakistan 1971 India Military Democratic Accountability

Pakistan 1988 India Military Democratic None

Panama 1989 U.S. Military Democratic Leader removal

Azerbaijan 1992 Armenia Personalist Democratic Accountability

Haiti 1994 U.S. Military Democratic Leader removal

Serbia 2000 NATO Party Democratic Accountability

Syria 1951 Israel Military Autocratic None

Syria 1963 Israel Military Autocratic None

Iraq 1968 Israel Personalist Autocratic Accountability

Afghanistan 1992 Pakistan Party–personalist Autocratic Weaken

Congo/Zaire 1997 Burundi Personalist Autocratic Weaken (limited)

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