Out of the Barracks: The Role of the Military in Democratic Revolutions

Why some democratic revolutions succeed while others fail? The scholarly community has sought to address this issue from various perspectives, from rational choice approaches to collective action theories. Too little attention, however, has been paid to analyzing the role of the military. By discussing the different types of interactions played by the military in five cases of successful democratic revolutions—the 1910 Portuguese Republican Revolution, the 1958 Venezuelan Revolution, the 1960 April Revolution in South Korea, the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution in Yugoslavia—and three cases of failed revolutions, the 1905 bourgeois-liberal revolution in Russia, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests in China, and the 2016 Turkey’s coup attempt, this study finds out that the key factor in determining their outcome is the army’s response and that the military backing is a necessary condition for a democratic revolution to succeed