The Anatomy of the Authoritarian Security Apparatus: How the Career Pressures of Officers Influence Coups and Repression

• Applicant: Dr. Christian Glaessel, since 1/2023
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 505141610

The brutal crackdowns on peaceful protesters in Belarus, Russia, and Venezuela as well as the recent coups (attempts) in Myanmar, Sudan, and Turkey demonstrate that officers within the state security apparatus have the power to make or break political regimes. In some instances, officers loyally serve even the most violent regimes, while in others they turn against the very government they have vowed to protect. This double-edged role makes security officers the central actors in the formation, consolidation, and termination of authoritarian regimes. With more than two thirds of the world's population now living under authoritarian rule and the third wave of autocratization under way, this project seeks to find out what motivates individual officers to engage in extreme forms of behaviour. Who are the officers that participate in coups against the government that they have pledged to protect? And which officers do loyally carry out even the most violent orders of regimes?In this project, we develop a unified theory that explains why and when which officers engage in extreme forms of regime loyalty (i.e., perpetrate genocidal violence) or disloyalty (i.e., participate in coups). By dissecting the anatomy of the state security apparatus, our theory identifies career pressures as key drivers for extreme behaviour. Our core argument is that those officers who are disadvantaged in their professional advancement have an incentive to demonstrate their unconditional loyalty towards the current regime by executing genocidal orders or to participate in a coup in order to recommend themselves to a potential successor regime.A systematic test of our theory puts high demands on case selection. Autocracies commonly prevent researchers from investigating those who serve in the security apparatus. This project studies the extreme cases of coup-prone historic Argentina and totalitarian Nazi Germany for two reasons. First, both cases offer unprecedented access to unique archival information. This allows us to compile individual-level career data for all members of the Argentine Army and the German SS officer corps. Second, the cases allow us to systematically scrutinize whether career pressures indeed motivated military and paramilitary officers to engage in extreme forms of (dis)loyalty across most different political and organizational contexts.The project makes two major contributions. First, it dissects an entire military and paramilitary organization to uncover the interests of those who serve within them. The assessment of the officers’ behavioural motives helps us understand the inner workings of the authoritarian security apparatus, which suggests new instruments to protect human rights and political liberties. Second, the project reveals how bottom-up career dynamics stabilize violent regimes and destabilize peaceful ones, which advances existing research that has focused on the top-down influence of macro-political regime characteristics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Adam Scharpf, until 12/2022