Call of Duty: Military Responses to Undemocratic Leadership

My dissertation seeks to understand the precarious nature of civil-military relations in the context of democratic erosion. The central puzzle that animates my research is this: for professional militaries bound by democratic principles of civilian control and subordination, both obeying and disobeying an elected undemocratic civilian leader carries repercussions for democracy and national security. If they obey the leader, they risk becoming complicit in democratic erosion. If they disobey, they risk becoming fractured internally into camps that support or oppose the leader. This threatens military effectiveness and endangers national security. My research question is: under what conditions do democratic militaries hasten or hinder democratic erosion? I argue that in democracies, as civilian control measures get stronger, militaries develop a sense of professionalism tied to their main functional obligation – protecting the state from external threats. This helps them resist any internal partisan uses that undermine their sense of professional ethics and democracy. However, when civilians deploy the military for domestic operations, this makes them vulnerable to political encroachment. For democracies experiencing ethnonationalism, this creates a permissive environment that legitimizes the use of violence against citizens. Under such conditions, where political leaders and the public support the use of violence against enemies, both foreign and domestic, the military institution, accustomed to internal deployments, becomes an accomplice of the undemocratic leader, obeying partisan orders that hasten democratic erosion. I examine this in the context of postcolonial India’s strong civilian control and the military’s interactions with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1970s during the authoritarian ‘Emergency’ period and their relationship with the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. My findings explain the role of civilian leaders in shaping the military’s understanding of the threat environment and the role of populist demagogues in transforming the role of the military in a democracy.