Don’t turn around, der Kommissar’s in town: Political officers and coups d’état in authoritarian regimes
| Author | Austin S Matthews |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433211067061 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Don’t turn around, der Kommissar’s
in town: Political officers and coups
d’e
´tat in authoritarian regimes
Austin S Matthews
Frederick S Pardee Center for International Futures, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University
of Denver
Abstract
How do dictators coup-proof their armed forces from within the barracks? Coup-proofing is an important aspect of
autocratic survival, but execution can be challenging due to the secrecy of plots and the vast size of the armed forces.
Counterbalanced state security forces are more effective at resisting coups, but less effective at noticing signs of plots
before they can be launched. If dictators wish to prevent coup attempts from occurring in the first place, they may
decide to recruit and commission cadres of loyalists directly into the armed forces as political officers, tasked with
monitoring for and reporting signs of disloyalty within the ranks. This article explores the development and use of
these political officers within dictatorships, arguing that they are especially effective at preventing coup attempts. It
also makes the case that their institutional design, while effective at detecting coup plots, makes them less useful at
resisting coups that have reached the execution phase. I test these arguments on a cross-national sample of dictator-
ships from 1950 to 2010, finding strong evidence that political officers are incredibly effective coup detectors, but
not coup resisters. These findings have important implications, particularly as several resilient modern dictatorships
continue to rule with well-developed political officer systems.
Keywords
commissars, coup d’e
´tat, coup-proofing, dictatorship
Introduction
Military coups continue to plague regions across the globe,
particularly the continent of Africa, where many states have
suffered both coup attempts and successes during their
post-independence histories. However, there have been
autocratic regimes in Africa notably resilient to coup
attempts, such as Mozambique. Although it fended off a
failed attempt the year it gained independence from Por-
tugal, it has since had a coup-free spell of over 40 years
under the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO)
(Pachter, 1982; Luckham, 1994; Harkness, 2016). This
feat is particularly remarkable when considering the intense
civil war that engulfed Mozambique for much of its post-
independence history, as state failures like these generally
intensify the conditions that lead to military coups (Kaplan
et al., 1977; Morier-Genoud, Cahen & Do Rosa
´rio, 2018).
FRELIMO’s survival under coup-prone conditions begs
the question of how this resilience was achieved; how have
they been so successful at coup- proofing their country’s
armed forces whereas other African regimes have not?
Previous research often attributes low coup risk to
powerful ruling institutions, such as ruling parties, and
their capacity to help to soothe domestic grievances that
can otherwise fester into military uprisings (Gandhi,
2008). The use of a ruling party may reduce social fric-
tions by co-opting sections of the civilian population
into supporting the regime, offering jobs and pay-offs
that reduce unemployment and poverty (Gehlbach &
Keefer, 2011; Ang, 2016). Stronger institutionalization
may also alleviate tensions inherent in power-sharing
between dictators and elites, formalizing rules and
Corresponding author:
austin.matthews@du.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2022, Vol. 59(5) 663–678
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433211067061
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procedures that lower the stakes of conflicts and ease
transitions between leaders (Frantz & Stein, 2017;
Meng, 2020). Despite the depth of literature on auto-
cratic survival, few have examined methods developed to
control the armed forces from within.
This article focuses attention on the development and
use of a particular type of coup-proofing agents within
autocratic militaries, loyalists commissioned into the armed
forces and tasked with monitoring for disloyalty, known
broadly as political officers.
1
After being recruited from
specific groups to ensure regime loyalty, political officers
are trained to monitor within their assigned units of the
armed forces for suspicious behaviors, deploying a range of
intelligence-gathering techniques developed to prevent
coups. If threats are identified by the political officers, these
agents will report back to the regime (often through party
channels), who will then orchestrate pre-emptive action
against the alleged plotters (Herspring, 1996; Chen,
2008). In doing so, political officers provide autocrats with
powerful coup-proofing mechanisms, embedding the bar-
racks with eyes and ears that also serve as deterrent forces.
Mozambique’s decision to implement political officers in
the army in 1978, three years after the failed coup, could
point toward the strategic use of these forces (Malache,
Macaringue & Borges Coelho, 2005: 169).
However, the institutional design of political officer
systems by its nature requires its agents to be scattered
across military units and to communicate through ver-
tical reporting channels. This makes them effective at
preventing coups, but also leaves political officers vulner-
able and isolated if a conspiracy escapes their attention
and reaches the execution phase of a coup attempt.
Unlike counterbalanced state security forces (Quinlivan,
1999; De Bruin, 2018), which are armed and can mobi-
lize to counter coup agents, political officers are not
designed with the strengths and capacities that allow
them to resist coups as an organized force. Although they
may be extremely effective at stopping coups before they
begin, the institutional design of political officers may
also leave them largely helpless if plotters are able to
attack with the element of surprise.
This article explores the design and use of political
officers as coup-proofing agents in autocratic militaries.
I begin by explaining the survival concerns that motivate
dictators seeking to coup-proof their militaries, focusing
on those that draw upon loyalist groups to recruit and
commissionpoliticalofficersasagentsoftheregime.
Development of the political officer system is outlined
in a step-by-step process, with attention given to design
elements that make them effective at countering military
disloyalty, before discussing how they are deployed to
the armed forces. I then use these descriptions to moti-
vate a series of hypotheses on how political officer sys-
tems may affect coup likelihood and outcome, probing
their strengths and weaknesses across two phases of coup
events: planning and execution.
A sample of dictatorships from 1950 to 2010 is tested,
exploring the effects of political officers on coups, fol-
lowed by a presentation of the results. The findings pres-
ent strong evidence that political officers are very
powerful tools for coup-proofing autocratic militaries,
but that they are not especially effective at resisting coups
in progress. I conclude by discussing the implications of
these findings, especially for the survival of modern
regimes that continue to rely on political officers as
regime agents.
Coup-proofing in authoritarian regimes
Civil-military relations is a critical field of study in mod-
ern political science, growing in strength from powerful
foundations (Feaver, 1996; Nordlinger, 1977; Perlmut-
ter, 1977). Recently, studies have better explored this
dynamic within the often-violent world of authoritarian
regimes (Frantz & Stein, 2017; Hellmeier & Weid-
mann, 2020; Lachapelle et al., 2020). Previous works
have explained how militaries in autocracies function
somewhat differently than their democratic counter-
parts, not only engaging in warfighting, but also some-
timesturningtheirbarrelsinwardtowardtheirown
populations to serve as tools of domestic repression
(Escriba
`-Folch,2013;Talmadge,2015).Thisusein
principle makes autocratic militaries an extension of the
repressive apparatus, operating at times in similar ways as
paramilitaries, pro-government militias, and state secu-
rity forces (Carey, Colaresi & Mitchell, 2016; Bo
¨hmelt
& Clayton, 2017).
Although militaries may be effective tools for dictators
to quell domestic uprisings, such use may motivate dis-
pleasure among soldiers and officers, who lament being
turned into repressive agents against their own popula-
tion (Thompson, 1973; Svolik, 2012). These grievances
1
Political officers are often referred to as ‘commissars’, due to their
historicalassociation with communist states.However, political officers
were not exclusive to the Eastern Bloc or communist regimes more
broadly. To not inferthis connection through nomenclature, I elect to
use the term ‘political officer’ throughout this work unlessreferring to
specific instanceswhere commissar was the historicalterm in use. The
title quote references After the Fire’s(1982) English-language cover of
Der Kommissar (Falco & Ponger, 1981).
664 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 59(5)
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