The question of why militaries seize power has preoccupied scholars since the wave of coups that swept through post-colonial states in the 1960s. Yet the analytical frameworks developed during that era remain surprisingly relevant today. From Myanmar's 2021 coup to the recurring interventions in West African states, the patterns that drive armies from barracks to presidential palaces persist with remarkable consistency.

Understanding military intervention requires moving beyond simplistic explanations centered on individual ambition or national culture. The comparative institutional approach reveals that coups emerge from the intersection of three analytically distinct factors: the grievances that motivate military actors, the structural conditions that make intervention feasible, and the broader political context that shapes whether military rule becomes entrenched or temporary.

This framework draws on decades of cross-national research, from Samuel Huntington's foundational analysis of civil-military relations to more recent quantitative studies of coup risk. What emerges is not a predictive model—political contingency always matters—but rather a systematic way of assessing the institutional vulnerabilities that make some polities chronically susceptible to praetorianism while others maintain stable civilian supremacy.

Military organizations, like all bureaucratic institutions, possess distinct corporate interests that they seek to protect and advance. These interests center on institutional autonomy, resource allocation, organizational cohesion, and professional status. When civilian governments threaten these core concerns, the motivation for intervention crystallizes regardless of the broader regime type.

The most potent trigger involves threats to military autonomy—civilian attempts to restructure command hierarchies, politicize promotions, or create parallel security forces. Turkish interventions historically responded to perceived threats to the military's self-appointed role as guardian of Kemalist secularism. Indonesian officers moved against Sukarno partly because his cultivation of communist-aligned militias threatened their institutional monopoly on organized violence.

Budget cuts and resource competition generate intervention pressure, though rarely sufficient motivation alone. More dangerous is the combination of material grievances with status threats. When officers perceive that civilian politicians treat the military with contempt or that their professional standing is being deliberately undermined, corporate solidarity intensifies dramatically.

The timing of intervention often correlates with specific policy decisions rather than generalized discontent. A proposed reduction in force, an external security humiliation blamed on civilian leadership, or the prosecution of senior officers for past abuses can serve as crystallizing events. These triggers matter because they transform diffuse institutional anxiety into specific organizational consensus favoring action.

Comparative analysis reveals that successful civilian control requires attending to legitimate military corporate interests while establishing firm boundaries on political involvement. Governments that combine institutional respect with clear subordination mechanisms prove more durable than those pursuing either accommodation without limits or confrontation without leverage.

Takeaway

Militaries intervene not primarily from ideological conviction or personal ambition, but when their institutional interests as organizations face existential threats from civilian authority.

Grievance alone cannot produce intervention; feasibility matters equally. The structural balance between military and civilian institutional capacity determines whether discontented officers can successfully seize and hold power. This balance encompasses organizational coherence, informational advantages, legitimacy resources, and the broader constellation of social forces.

Military organizations possess inherent advantages in coordinated action. Their command hierarchies, communication systems, and monopoly on organized violence provide intervention capacity that civilian institutions often cannot match. However, these advantages prove decisive only when civilian institutions lack countervailing strengths—mass party organizations, robust bureaucracies, independent judiciaries, or mobilized civil society.

The concept of political institutionalization, developed by Huntington, captures this dynamic. In polities where civilian institutions remain weakly developed—where parties are personalistic vehicles, bureaucracies are patrimonial, and civil society is fragmented—the military often represents the most coherent national institution. Intervention in such contexts reflects not military strength alone but relative civilian weakness.

Colonial legacies profoundly shape these balances. States inheriting professional militaries but lacking mass nationalist movements or developed administrative capacity proved especially vulnerable to early intervention. The contrast between India's stable civil-military relations and Pakistan's repeated coups illustrates how different independence experiences created divergent institutional equilibria.

Democratic transitions present particular vulnerability windows. Incoming civilian governments often inherit military establishments with extensive political experience and economic interests while lacking consolidated party systems or bureaucratic loyalty. The sequencing of institutional development—whether civilian capacity-building precedes or follows military professionalization—shapes long-term stability prospects.

Takeaway

Coups succeed not because militaries are strong, but because civilian institutions are weak; the relative balance of institutional capacity determines intervention feasibility.

Military withdrawal from direct rule rarely produces stable civilian supremacy. The pattern across Latin America, Africa, and Asia reveals recurring cycles: intervention, military governance, transition to civilian rule, renewed intervention. Understanding why some states escape these cycles while others remain trapped requires analyzing the conditions for permanent military subordination.

Initial military governments typically justify intervention as temporary—corrective action to address specific civilian failures. Yet military rule generates its own institutional interests. Officers acquire economic stakes through state enterprises, develop governance experience that inflates political confidence, and create factional divisions that make coordinated withdrawal difficult.

The transition dynamics matter enormously. Negotiated transitions that guarantee military autonomy, amnesty for past abuses, and institutional prerogatives often secure withdrawal but embed conditions for future intervention. Alternatively, transitions forced by regime collapse may produce civilian governments too weak to establish effective control, inviting renewed praetorianism.

Permanent subordination requires what scholars term 'subjective' as well as 'objective' civilian control. Objective control establishes clear jurisdictional boundaries confining military authority to external defense. Subjective control cultivates military acceptance of civilian supremacy as professionally appropriate, not merely politically expedient.

The cases of successful demilitarization—Spain after Franco, Chile's gradual civilianization, Indonesia's post-Suharto trajectory—share common elements. These include patient institution-building over electoral cycles, gradual reduction of military economic privileges, accountability processes that avoid destabilizing prosecutions, and external anchoring through international institutional commitments that raise intervention costs.

Takeaway

Breaking praetorianism cycles requires not just removing militaries from power, but fundamentally restructuring civil-military relations so that officers internalize subordination as professionally legitimate.

The analytical framework presented here—corporate grievances, civil-military balance, and praetorianism cycles—provides systematic tools for assessing coup risk without deterministic prediction. Each factor operates probabilistically, and political contingency ensures that structurally similar cases sometimes produce divergent outcomes.

Contemporary relevance extends beyond the developing world. Democratic backsliding in established democracies raises questions about civil-military relations previously considered settled. When civilian institutions lose legitimacy or coherence, the structural conditions that enable intervention can emerge even in polities with long histories of military subordination.

Institutional design choices matter. Constitutional provisions, oversight mechanisms, promotion systems, and military education all shape the equilibrium between civilian supremacy and praetorian vulnerability. Understanding the comparative patterns of military intervention informs not just analysis but the practical work of building durable civilian control.