Military Conscription and Nonviolent Resistance

• Author: Matthew D. Cebul,Sharan Grewal
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211066209
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(13) 2217–2249

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211066209

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Military Conscription

and Nonviolent

Resistance

Matthew D. Cebul

1

and Sharan Grewal

2



Abstract

Nonviolent campaigns against repressive regimes often turn on the military’s

decision to either defend the ruler or make common cause with the ruled. Yet

surprisingly little scholarship investigates opposition expectations for the

military’s likely response to mass protest. We theorize that some deter-

minants of the military’s willingness to repress are more observable to ac-

tivists than others. In particular, we identify conscription as a highly salient

indicator that soldiers will refuse to f‌ire on protesters and hypothesize that

nonviolent campaigns are more likely to materialize against regimes with

conscripted armies than those with volunteer forces. We substantiate this

theory with two sources of evidence: (1) a survey experiment conducted

during the 2019 Algerian Revolution and (2) a cross-national analysis of the

positive association between conscription and nonviolent campaign onset

from 1945 to 2013.

Keywords

social movements, military and politics, Middle East, democratization and

regime change, conscription

1

U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, USA

2

William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA and Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Matthew D. Cebul, U.S. Institute of Peace, 301 Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC

20037, USA.

Email: mdcebul@gmail.com

“The army was not going to intervene. […] The soldiers are ordinary citizens

coming from working-class districts, whom the raff‌le chose. They are there just

for a year, it is not their job. They are not indoctrinated, [or] trained in repression.

It is not their daily life.”

Tunisian activist Yassine Ayari (2011)

From the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring uprisings to recent re-

sistance campaigns in Hong Kong, Algeria, and Sudan, the 21st century has

become an “age of global mass protests”(Brannen et al., 2020). These and

many othercontentious episodes have heavilyshaped the course of international

politics, so much so thatmass protest has surpassed the coup d’´

etat as a leading

cause of regime change (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011;Kendall-Taylor and

Frantz 2014). This surge of “people power”campaigns, a trend that only

continues to accelerate (V-D em I ns ti tut e, 2 02 0), has rejuvenated scholarly

interest in the causes and consequences of civil resistance.

Yetwhile inspirational success stories in places like Ukraine (2004) and Tunisia

(2011) are widely lauded, violent crackdowns in China (1989) and Bahrain (2011)

illustrate that rulers are hardly helpless in the face of mass uprisings. These

cautionary tales highlight the military’s paramount importance during revolu-

tionary episodes, the outcomes of which often hinge on the military’s willingness

to repress popular demands for change. For this reason, recent scholarship has

explored how the military decides whether to “defect or defend”(Barany, 2016;

Bellin, 2012;Brooks, 2013;Lee, 2014) in response to mass protests.

Surprisingly little work, however, has considered this question from the

opposition’s perspective: how do activists assess whether the military will side

with the ruler or the ruled? As violent repression can impose prohibitively

severe costs on peaceful protesters, activists’beliefs about the military’s

resolve to repress likely inf‌luence their decision to take to the streets. Yet we

know very little about how activists evaluate whether the military would

welcome or oppose popular demands for reform.

To that end, this article is one of the f‌irst attempts to directly investigate

protesters’expectations for the military’s response to mass mobilization.

Among many factors that shape the military’s loyalty (Barany, 2016;Nepstad,

2013), we identify military conscription as an especially salient signal that

increases activists’conf‌idence that the military will not repress. As exem-

plif‌ied by Tunisian activist Yassine Ayari above, activists infer that con-

scripted soldiers are less willing to defend the regime and f‌ire on

demonstrators than volunteer careerists. We therefore argue that activists

should be more likely to mobilize nonviolent campaigns against regimes with

conscripted armies than those with volunteer forces.

We test our theory with both survey experimental and cross-national data.

We f‌irst test the individual-level micro-foundations of the theory through an

2218 Comparative Political Studies 55(13)

online survey experiment f‌ielded during Algeria’s 2019 Hirak protests. We

f‌ind that priming Algerians to recall that the Algerian military is largely

conscripted reduced their expectations of military repression, and in turn

increased their stated willingness to protest. Further analysis reveals that the

conscription prime led respondents to perceive a difference between com-

manding off‌icers and low-level soldiers—while off‌icers may wish to defend

the regime, activists expected conscripted soldiers to identify with protesters

and therefore to resist orders to repress.

We thenassess the generalizability of our argument through a cross-national

analysis of conscription and mass protest. We extend existing data on con-

scription (Toronto, 2014) through 2013, to match available time-series data on

nonviolent c ampaign onset (Chenoweth & Shay, 2019). We f‌ind that con-

scriptionpositively correlates with nonviolent campaignonset, roughly doubling

the likelihood of protest onset in a given country-year even when controlling for

other factors thought to determine military re cruitment practices and mobili-

zation onset. We also demonstrate that conscription is associated with other

importantaspects of nonviolentcampaigns, including protest size,security force

defections, and success, and present evidence suggesting that activists strate-

gically employ nonviolence, not violence, when facing conscripted militaries.

Combined, the survey experiment and cross-national analyses provide strong

evidence that conscription decreases opposition expectations of repression, in

turn increasing the likelihood of mass nonviolent mobilization.

Our f‌indings advancethe study of civil resistance and civil-military relations

in at least two ways. First, they demonstrate that conscription is fraught with

trade-offs. Rulers may implement conscription in order to combat external

security threats,or in an attempt to generate nationalist sentiments at home. Yet

by binding the militarymore closely to the people, conscription leavesregimes

less able to repress—and thus more likely to face—popular uprisings. Our

f‌indings thus echoTalmadge (2015) and Greitens(2016)’s path-breaking works

on the trade-offs rulers face when structuring their coercive apparatuses.

Second, our research opens the door to further integration of the literature

on civil resistance and civil-military relations. These f‌ields are largely es-

tranged, and our work suggests that the overlap between them is fruitful

ground for new scholarship, especially regarding the “potential endogeneity

of protests to civil-military relations”(Brooks, 2017). This article focuses on

conscription, but future studies could generate and test additional hypotheses

about how protesters, regimes, and militaries strategically interact.

1

Mass Protests and the Military

In recent years, protesters have hit the streets from Hong Kong to Khartoum,

seeking to overthrow dictators or force major institutional change. In turn,

scholars have redoubled their efforts to understand the conditions that give rise

Cebul and Grewal 2219