Promotional Information

The strength of Defect or Defend lies in its exploration of a neglected issue: military defection from authoritarian rule during popular uprisings. -- Mark R. Thompson, City University of Hong Kong This book is an important contribution to the literature on Southeast Asian civil-military relations. Lee tackles an important problem-how the armed forces of authoritarian regimes respond to popular upheavals and why-with great competence: his research is exhaustive and he presents his case clearly and persuasively. This volume should be on the shelf of all those interested in the region and its armed forces. -- Zoltan Barany, author of The Soldier and the Changing State: Building Democratic Armies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas Why would militaries defend a dictator against popular protests? When do they defect from an autocrat and why? When the so-called Arab Spring exploded, the scholarly debate on these questions gained momentum. This book makes a tremendous contribution to this scholarly debate through a unique combination of thorough theorizing and in-depth case studies drawn from the spectrum of Asian autocracies. It is relevant for all scholars interested in the study of civil-military relations, the survival or collapse of authoritarian rule, or the dynamics and outcomes of regime contentions. -- Aurel Croissant, Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University Terence Lee convincingly demonstrates how personalistic authoritarian regimes foster splits within the officer corps that lead disaffected soldiers to align with civilian protesters. In doing so, the author restores the armed forces and civil-military affairs to their rightful place in the study of authoritarian regimes and why they fall. -- David Pion-Berlin, University of California, Riverside

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. The Military and People Power Revolts
2. Authoritarian Institutions: Power Sharing, Personalism, and Military Defection
3. Personalism in the Philippines: The Fall of Marcos (1986)
4. Personalism in Indonesia: The Fall of Suharto (1998)
5. Power-sharing Authoritarianism in China and Burma
6. Thinking Comparatively: The Military and People Power Revolts
Notes
Index

About the Author

Terence Lee is an assistant professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

Reviews

A model for case study research. Choice