Book Project

Comrade-Soldiers: Military Politicziation and the Survival of Dictatorships

Why do some dictatorships survive internal crises, while others collapse under pressure from their own armed forces? My book project explores how dictatorships fuse political and military institutions to guard against coups and ensure regime durability. In particular, it investigates how autocrats restructure their militaries by developing political officers and party cells to build ideologically loyal coercive institutions.

The book develops a new framework for understanding military politicization as a deliberate strategy of control and co-optation. It shows how this process helps regimes like Cuba and North Korea weather economic shocks, social unrest, and elite defections without losing military loyalty. 

The project combines cross-national analysis with deep case research. To support the manuscript, I constructed an original global dataset on military politicization in autocracies from 1946 to 2015, drawing on open-source intelligence and primary documents across multiple languages. The book's case studies - Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Grenada - are based on archival work performed at Georgetown University, the Hoover Institution, and the U.S. National Archives. The Grenada case also benefitted from original interviews with former officers in the People's Revolutionary Army conducted during two field research trips in 2024 and 2025.

This project contributes to the scholarship on autocratic politics, civil-military relations, and the institutional strategies for building durable dictatorships.