With the shadow of authoritarianism reaching so many corners of the world, it can be startling to recall the burst of optimism that followed popular uprisings against long-time autocrats in North Africa and the Middle East just fifteen years ago. 

Several of those uprisings, which Western observers came to describe collectively as the Arab Spring, sparked authoritarian backlash and ultimately realized few of the participants’ aspirations. They did, however, provide an opportunity to learn about dynamics that can lead popular democratic movements to succeed in the near term against authoritarian leaders.  

With funding from The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a 2018 HFG Emerging Scholar, researched a key milestone of that era: the unexpected fall of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben-Ali in January 2011. Drawing upon media accounts, interviews with key figures, and a leaked 1,200-page judicial investigation of the event, Gallopin—then a PhD student in sociology at Yale University—hypothesized a radically new understanding of the circumstances that prompt military personnel to move against autocratic leaders they have sworn to protect.

“A lot of research on this topic is done by political scientists working in the field of civil-military relations,” Gallopin says. Their typically retrospective approach, he explains, has tended to focus on how a regime’s institutional makeup influences the interests of officers, motivating some to rebel when the opportunity arises. In contrast, Gallopin’s analysis views the question of whether to remain loyal as akin to a game of strategy in which the best outcome for all players—here soldiers—is achieved if they all make the same choice. “Individuals and groups have to come together to a [shared] position in a moment of deep uncertainty and threats to their internal cohesion and individual safety.”  

[I]n Tunisia, a single leader of an elite security force deployed to protect the Interior Ministry was far more influential than long-standing resentments and conflicting interests within the ranks.

Building upon the earlier work of scholars like Ivan Ermakoff, who wrote about the dynamics that have led legislators to transfer power to authoritarians like Adolf Hitler, and Naunihal Singh, who traced the success of military coups to their ability to project success as a fait accompli, Gallopin identifies two dominant considerations that arise in the moment when members of armed forces must decide to either commit violence in defense of a besieged leader or allow the regime to fall. One of these considerations is a shared desire to avoid bloodshed—both the large-scale killing of citizens and also potentially bloody conflict within the ranks if some officers remain loyal to the regime while others side with the antiregime uprising. The other consideration, which plays out on the individual level, is the imperative to ensure that one’s ultimate choice aligns with one’s peers’, as being an outlier could be personally disastrous.

The sequence of events that takes place under these circumstances includes three elements. First, the possibility of regime collapse must appear to be imminent. Typically, this vulnerability is instigated by large and persistent public demonstrations. Next, amid the resulting uncertainty about the regime’s future, individual actors will look for clues about the inclinations and intentions of their peers. Absent clear communication, this second element can hinge on inferences based on scant, sometimes false information. The final element, at the tipping point when security forces are overrun by demonstrators and lethal force seems imminent, is the sequential alignment of soldiers and officers as they fall into line—either with or against the leader. 

The meticulous, hour-by-hour record assembled in Gallopin’s research shows that, in Tunisia, a single leader of an elite security force deployed to protect the Interior Ministry was far more influential than long-standing resentments and conflicting interests within the ranks. This leader’s communications to the heads of similar battalions—alternately enigmatic, emphatic, and dissembling—triggered the serial decision-making among military staff that saw the president’s security evaporate at the crucial moment, leading him to flee the country along with his family. 

Gallopin’s findings from the Tunisian Revolution square with the events of other, similar historic transitions. For example, some historians have attributed the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution to resistance to the ongoing slaughter of civilians within the elite Volynsky Life-Guards Regiment of the Russian Imperial Army, opposition that rapidly spread when nearby regiments proved unwilling to turn their weapons upon their mutinous comrades. 

In a situation that ultimately came to a different end, the Chinese Communist Party’s initial military deployment to repress the Tiananmen Square protests failed in the face of widespread confusion, shirking, and insubordination among soldiers. After troops withdrew from Beijing, the center of the protests, Deng Xiaoping issued a decisive signal to crush the demonstrations. This required the intense indoctrination of troops from remote regions and their deployment to Beijing to create a common expectation that the activists’ efforts were doomed to fail.

The military is unlikely to abandon an established leader unless demonstrators have committed to peaceful actions that are large and persistent enough to create genuine doubt about a regime’s future.

One lesson to be gleaned from Gallopin’s research is that the military is unlikely to abandon an established leader unless demonstrators have committed to peaceful actions that are large and persistent enough to create genuine doubt about a regime’s future.

Another lesson, Gallopin explains, is that because the decision to defect depends on mutual expectations and signals within the military, “it would be a mistake … to read these dynamics [of defection] primarily as symptoms of widespread, long-standing grievances within the armed and security forces.”

The flight of a dictator in the face of mutiny by his armed forces is a momentous event, and hindsight may tempt us to attribute it to simmering discontent or large political or structural fault lines. Gallopin invites us to consider, instead, that the crucial trigger may actually lie in the fast-paced dynamics of the uprising itself. Because soldiers and officers seek to preserve themselves and avoid a fratricidal bloodbath, they make the stance of the military as a whole sensitive to the calculations of a relatively small number of actors—those who know how to act decisively to shape expectations and trigger snowballing processes of defection or repression. At a terrifying moment of indecision, the course of history may be determined by individual soldiers, fearful of making the wrong choice and gambling for their own survival.  

This article is based on research by Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a senior researcher in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch and a 2018 HFG Emerging Scholar. In 2019, Gallopin earned his PhD in sociology from Yale University. His dissertation, supported in part by HFG, is titled Conditional Choice and Collective Dynamics of Historical Change in the Tunisian Revolution (2010–2014).

This article was written by Robin Campbell, a writer and communications strategist based in Baltimore, Maryland. For more information about Campbell and his work, visit Catalyze LLC.