| Summary: | <p>From Egypt to Venezuela, authoritarian regimes live and die by the sword. Amongst students of democratization, it has become axiomatic that a dictator’s fate in mass upris- ings turns largely on whether the coercive apparatus decides to defend him. Yet, despite its significance, the literature equivocates on the fundamental question of how defection hap- pens. One strand holds that defection is carried through by unhappy soldiers: the defeated, disillusioned, and dispossessed. The other views defection as a strategic coordination game, disconnected from preexisting grievances and fealty to the incumbent.</p>
<p>In this thesis, I seek to produce a more unified way of explaining why and how secu- rity force defections occur. My analytical starting point is the stretch of time before mass uprisings gather full momentum, in which security agents are optimally placed to foresee incoming contention. Anticipating the revolutionary coordination problem, I contend that potential defectors assess the feasibility of sparking seamless defection cascades by using positional factors (such as patronage and ethnic stacking) as proxies for unobservable loy- alties across the coercive apparatus. Positional factors are important not only as first-order motives but as crucial structural context for first-movers.</p>
<p>If grievances are sufficiently acute and prevalent, I argue that defectors face strong incen- tives to engage in coalition-building before the revolution begins. By leveraging their extant professional networks and crystallizing their social capital, first-movers enlist colleagues in ‘defection networks’ to stack the deck in their favour before the uprising starts in earnest. During the revolution itself, defectors and regimes promulgate strategic frames to elicit sup- port from erstwhile loyalists and those caught in indecision. The logic of coalition-building and strategic framing has been overlooked in studies of defection: fast-moving contention occludes dogged work behind the scenes to tip cascades in a particular direction.</p>
<p>To probe these arguments, I analyze the overthrow of Serbian dictator Slobodan Miloˇsevi ́c on 5th October 2000. Drawing on a range of qualitative sources, I adduce evidence of clan- destine coalition-building and strategic framing within multiple branches of the Serbian security apparatus. I also document how the Miloˇsevi ́c regime and the political opposition vied for the loyalty of the security forces. Altogether, the thesis makes three contributions. First, it evinces that positional factors and coordination logics are both germane to the de- fection process once we rethink how they exert causal force. Second, it shows that processes of social mobilization (e.g., networking and strategic framing) are useful for understanding secretive sedition within the ruling coalition. Third, it extends the literature empirically by analyzing non-military security forces and by targeting an unexplored case of defection.</p>
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