Dictators' Endgames

Dictators' Endgames examines the political role of the military in “dictators' endgames”: large-scale nonviolent mass protests in autocracies that demand the regime leader's removal from office. It addresses the question why some militaries defend an embattled autocrat by violently cracking down on the protestors, whereas others side with the opposition or decide to stage a coup d'état.

The book introduces a systematic definition and operationalization of the “dictator's endgame” as a situation of non-violent mass mobilization, in which the dictator's political survival depends on the loyalty of the military leaders. The theoretical argument proposed in this book focuses on the strategic calculations of military leaders and offers a systematic explanation why the armed forces opt for repression of the demonstrators, shift their loyalty from the dictator to the opposition, or remove the autocrat in a coup during the mass protests. The theory's predictions are empirically tested in a multi-method research design that combines statistical analyses and case studies, drawing on the original Dictator's Endgame Dataset of all 40 endgames that took place between 1946 and 2014. The study identifies the conditions and processes through which militaries determine the outcome of dictators' endgames, and thus affect the survival and future political development of authoritarian regimes.

Aurel Croissant, Professor of Political Science, Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University,David Kuehn, Senior Research Fellow, GIGA Institute of Global and Area Studies,Tanja Eschenauer-Engler, Doctoral researcher, Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University

Aurel Croissant is Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at GSIS, Ewha Womans University. Before joining Heidelberg, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Democratization and a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of the German Institute for Global Affairs, the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, and the Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (ZMSBw). He was Fellow of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, Korea Foundation, East Asia Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, the East West Center (Honolulu), and the Australian National University.


David Kuehn is Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg, Germany. He is the (co-)author or (co-)editor of eight books; his articles have appeared in journals such as Democratization, the European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and Sociological Methods and Research. From 2009 to 2019, he was co-ordinator of the Working Group “Civilian Control of the Military” of the European Research Groups on Military and Society (ERGOMAS).


Tanja Eschenauer-Engler is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University. Her research interests include civil-military relations and autocracy research.