Anger and aggression in organizations: Antecedents, behavioral components, and consequences.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the link between civil-military relations and international conflict. In particular, I ask whether strategies that leaders invoke to protect themselves from their own militaries might under some conditions increase the risk of war. Even though civil-military relations is fundamental to state-building, and despite the sizable literature on domestic causes of international conflict, there is very little work on the international implications of regimes' efforts to protect themselves from their own militaries. My argument is that when coups are possible, usually leaders divide their armed forces into rival organizations that they intend to check and balance each other and protect the regime as a by-product of mutual suspicion. (I label this strategy counterbalancing). Counterbalancing depends on leaders' ability to keep their own armed forces apart by promoting conflict among them. But military elites may rebel if they come to understand how leaders profit from inter-organizational hostility. Hence, counterbalancing requires leaders to conceal control benefits they accrue when they induce their own forces to compete. Because international conflict conceals these benefits, leaders may invent enemies, prepare for war, and engage in low-level international disputes when their foundational objective is to use counterbalancing to subordinate their own militaries. Contrary to the sizable literature on scapegoating, my argument is that in the realm of civil-military relations regimes may use provocative foreign policy to reinforce institutional divisions rather than to achieve cohesion. The argument is tested via a multi-method strategy that includes a pooled, time-series analysis of almost every country in the world over the last two decades of the Cold War as well as historical case studies of civil-military relations in Syria in the early 1970's and Georgia in the mid-1990's.