Some quick thoughts on Egypt while winding down for the night...

Defenders of the July 2013 Egyptian coup will point the thousands protesting, the dozens of deaths, and President Morsi's creeping authoritarianism as justification for the maneuver.  Indeed, the situation was precarious.  Such were the conditions in the newly independent Republic of Congo when Joseph Mobutu used political chaos to justify his "neutralization" of President Kasa-Vubu and Prime Minister Lumumba.  I posted the above quote from Mobutu on my rarely used (and even more rarely visited) twitter account upon reading about the Egyptian military's ultimatum to President Morsi.  The statements just seemed so similar.

But Egypt isn't the Congo, of course.

To be fair, coups have more popular support than many might think.  We can't get much objective data since surveys are rarely conducted in countries that are prone to military coups, but the World Values Survey's efforts in Pakistan in 1997 and 2001 happen to bookend Musharraf's 1999 coup and gives us a glance at how a polity might view military intervention.  Included in the survey was a question about how respondents would feel about different entities running the government, including the military.  The results are quite revealing:

Yes, that is correct.  In 1997, over 40% of the 733 people surveyed in 1997 thought that having the army rule was a "good" idea.  Following the coup, the New York Times noted

This is in stark contrast to two years after the coup, which saw these hopes dashed and the support numbers dwindle to just above 4%.  Despite such unfilled military-led transitions, claims echoing the NYT quote above are now being echoed in Egypt.

Egypt, of course, is not Pakistan.

To be fair, history does have examples of coups promoting democratization, perhaps more than people realize.  Democracy's "third wave," for example, began following the Portuguese military's toppling of the Novo Estado regime, described as "Europe's oldest dictatorship."  More recently, Niger saw its polity score (a common resource for measuring democracy for quantitative scholars which ranges from -10=least democratic to +10=most democratic) decline from +6 to -3 under Mamadou Tandja.  His continued authoritarian entrenchment drew the ire of the Economic Community of West African States and got the west African nation suspended.  After his ouster the new government undid the increase in presidential powers, Niger returned to its previous +6, and international relations were normalized.  A would-be strongman was ousted, democracy strengthened.

But Egypt isn't Niger.

The Egyptian military is not simply ousting a leader that may have been overstepping his mandate as Tandja did.  They have targeted an entire political movement in the Muslim Brotherhood.  This might remind some of the Algerian crackdown on the Islamic Salvation Front.  For those that don't recall, the FIS dominated the first multi-party election in Algerian history, only to see the military step in and veto the results "to preserve the security of the nation and its citizens" (New York Times).  The following months witnessed thousands (perhaps even tens of thousands) of FIS supporters imprisoned and a full transition from electoral politics to guerrilla warfare.  As many as 150,000 were killed and massacres were too common to count. 

Let's hope Egypt isn't Algeria.

Over the last week I received a number of emails asking my opinion on the events in Egypt.  Inevitably, some asked me about how I liked working Nazarbayev University and/or living in Kazakhstan.  Then I have this forwarded to me (yet again): http://truth-out.org/news/item/15691.

While going through the merit (or lack of) of this offering simply isn’t worth the time, I will make a quick note on an important topic the authors bring up: academic freedom.  The authors write:

To get directly to the point: I have never had any reason to fear speaking beyond any “confines” either in my research or my teaching and I know of no one at Nazarbayev University that has.  This is an important subject to me since I study a potentially sensitive topic: military coups.

To illustrate, I have (with a colleague) recently had a paper accepted for publication that investigates how coups can actually promote democratization in authoritarian regimes and even presented an expanded version of the analysis in an on-campus talk that was open to the public.  Not only did I not fear or experience any repercussions of broaching a potentially sensitive political topic, I was and continue to be perfectly willing to acknowledge the implications of the analysis for Kazakhstan.  Below I report our results for the influence of coups on the probability of democratization, conditioned on polity score and leader tenure. 

You know what? Cue the KNB…at first glance coup doesn’t look so bad: Kazakhstan's likelihood of democratization is expected to more than double following a coup.  But shouldn't the "or else" scenario should have deterred me from making such a proclamation?  Perhaps...if it existed.

To be clear, I do not advocate a coup attempt against President Nazarbayev.  This is not because of fears of the NU administration or the Kazakh government, rather it is because of other practical implications of a coup.  Aside from my own conclusion that such efforts in places like Kazakhstan are extremely unlikely to play out and are extremely likely to fail, fallout surrounding coups can be disastrous and is simply not worth the consequences.

I have also experienced no constraints in the classroom.  The authors use Kazakhstan's Freedom House rating to level criticisms against the government, my university, and--perhaps most unfairly--against the University of Wisconsin.  The use of this presumably damning piece of evidence caught my eye since I actually use Freedom House as a learning tool in my research methods class.  I walk the students through its survey questions, discussing validity of the questionnaire and methodology, amongst other things.  Question by question, the students are willing to actively offer criticisms of the government when merited.  If I am limited in my own critique it is more to do with ignorance of local politics than a fear of it. 

All of this is to say in my experience the "or else" suggestion is complete fiction.  It is a fanciful idea that the authors of this piece fabricated to make their story seem more provocative.  I could ramble on about other (probably deliberate) misrepresentations and factual inaccuracies, but it is not worth my time and would likely bore readers even more than this post.

If the authors are legitimately interested in promoting democratization in Kazakhstan they should realize that places like NU are an important part of this process.  Democracy is not spread by isolating authoritarian regimes.  To the contrary, the West should make an effort to increase economic, political, organizational, social, and communication ties with places like Kazakhstan.  The authors of the truthout piece don't see what goes on inside of NU.  They do not see students tell the faculty after a lecture or a semester that we changed their worldview.  They do not see our students tell us that they have never been pushed to think as critically and independently.  They have never seen our students tell us that we changed their attitude toward the West, what democracy really is, and even the importance of striving for better gender equality, human rights, etc.  My guess is the authors do not care.  They certainly didn't ask us.

To repeat the note on the coup data page: the Egyptian military's removal of President Morsi is unquestionably a coup attempt.  There will inevitably be an ongoing debate over the justification of the effort and what the long term consequences may be, but the reality is that Morsi's ouster is a coup by just about any objective definition of the phenomenon.  Simply put, coups concern the removal of a leader.  They need not bring wider institutional change, they need not target democratic leaders, they need not be followed by the military maintaining power, and they need not lack popular support.

In defining coups we should not be interested in the character of the targeted leader (democratically elected, dictator, etc.), the military's post-coup actions (walk away, lead a transitional regime, praetorianism, etc), or the circumstances surrounding a coup (massive protests, peaceful, etc).  How the international community should respond to such coups is a different story.  But an objective definition focuses on the details of the event itself, and in this case we have seen a leader forcefully removed from office by the state's military.

Different scholars might be interested in different research questions, and those questions might cause definitions to slightly vary.  What we see as a general trend is that an executive is removed (or an attempt is made to remove them) through unconstitutional means by other members of the state apparatus (government, military, security services, etc).  Politicians might attempt to frame events as coups or non-coups to meet political ends, as we will undoubtedly see with the Egyptian case.

For those interested, Clayton Thyne and I explored a number of definitions of coups for our 2011 offering in the Journal of Peace Research.  Below I provide a draft version of a table summarizing these definitions.

To the above definitions I would also point to...

Milan Svolik's (in The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, Cambridge University Press) characterization of coups as "forced removal of an authoritarian leader by any regime insider, not necessarily the military." (original emphasis).
*Note that this project was specifically interested in authoritarian politics.

Goemans, Gleditsch, and Chiozza's Archigos Data Set on Leaders
Specifically, I would point to leader exits coded as 5-8 on their EXITCODE variable (page 3 here), which includes:
"Leader removed by domestic military actors" (with or without foreign support)" and "Leader removed by other domestic government actors" (with or without foreign support.