Emboldened by a military coup in Egypt, Tunisians in the summer of 2013 took to the streets in mass explicitly calling for a “repeat of the Egyptian scenario.” Why did the Tunisian military not follow the Egyptian military’s lead in ousting the Islamist-led government? This paper disputes the three most common explanations: that the Tunisian military was too weak, too professional, or that there were insufficient calls for a coup. Rather, the long-marginalized Tunisian military had finally begun to see its institutional interests enhanced and thus had no incentive to stage a coup. Most scholars argue that the Tunisian military lacked the capacity for a coup. Yet cross-nationally, its number of soldiers per capita fell close to the median of all countries that have experienced coups. Interviews with retired Tunisian generals likewise suggest that the military had more than enough strength to suppress any anti-coup protests. Jebnoun (2014) and Brooks (2016) argue that the Tunisian military was too professional to get involved in politics. This explanation overlooks the fact that military officers plotted coups in 1962 and 1987, staged a coup in 1987, and enjoyed significant political influence after Ben Ali’s ouster, particularly armed forces chief of staff Rachid Ammar. Retired officers interviewed also considered a short political intervention and handover of power to civilian authorities a legitimate response to chaos in the streets. Finally, Masoud (2015) argues that Tunisians did not call for a coup in sufficient numbers. Yet representatives of every major opposition party called for a repeat of Egypt. The World Values Survey (WVS) also reports substantial support for military rule in 2013, above the median for countries for which WVS data is available prior to a coup. Retired officers confirmed that the military felt significant pressure from the public to intervene. This paper contends that the primary reason there was no coup in Tunisia was because the majority of the officer corps had seen their personal and institutional interests enhanced by the troika government. Democratization brought the military a larger budget, more weapons deals, greater influence over national security decisions, political appointments as governors, and an end to the privileging of officers from the Sahel. As a Sahelian complicit in the military’s historical marginalization, General Rachid Ammar lacked sufficient support within the military to organize a coup.

How does the examination of the internal and external security apparatus in Tunisia provide insight to the recent evaluation of what has happened in Tunis, Cairo, and even Algiers as a result of the Arab Spring? The “security state” built by then President Ben Ali did not survive his ouster, but the security sector—the various police forces, internal security agencies, and customs branches under the control of the ministry of interior—has resisted all subsequent attempts to restructure or reform it. To this day, the ministry of interior still needs to go through its own transition. The previous opportunity was missed, and as a result the security sector has regained its old bad habits: the police and security agencies continue to use excessive force against protestors and enter homes at gunpoint, especially in low-income and peripheral areas of the country; officers periodically besiege courthouses where colleagues are being tried for unlawful use of violence against citizens; various branches are implicated in cross-border smuggling and protection rackets in the informal economy; journalists and activists who are critical of the security sector are subjected to intimidation and arrest on charges of defamation and “indecency;” and the use of torture in police detention has not ended despite the ratification of international protocols prohibiting it after 2011 and a law subjecting police facilities to inspections by human rights monitors in 2013. The organizational segmentation that existed between the internal and external security forces in Tunisia was indicative of how the three different security apparatuses reacted once protests began. One the one end, we have the internal security forces that were closely linked and associated with the Ben Ali regime. On the other hand we have the Tunisian military, which was still closely associated with the regime but was significantly less invested with the regime than the internal security apparatus. Therefore it is easy to predict that when the tides of the protest movements began to overwhelm the regime, that it was easier for the Tunisian military, not the Tunisian internal security forces, to ultimately side with the public protests. This paper posits that the examination of the organizational construction of the security apparatus is vital in understanding the difference between Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria and can potentially be utilized in arguments that discuss the Arab Spring in general and also the overall relationship that exists between security apparatus and previous regimes during regime change.

Why do coups happen in some nascent democracies but not in others? To answer this question, I probe four interconnected variables in democratizing regimes: the military’s ethos; the military’s corporate interests; the military’s perception of the new civilian ruling elite; and the correlation of force between the military and the founding democratic government. My argument is twofold: first, I maintain that ideational variables are central to shaping the military’s political behavior; and second, I argue in favor of merging insights from cultural, corporate, and structural theories to understand the consolidation, or breakdown, of nascent democracies. My main case study for this paper will be Egypt; I will also make references to the Tunisian case for a comparative perspective.

Many scholars have sought to determine the relative weight of economic and political factors in the decision-making calculus of military leaders, particularly in the context of the Arab Spring. And although political factors such as ‘sectarian stacking’ and the solidarity of the officer corps have been opened up and treated with closer analytical scrutiny, our understanding of the military’s economic resource base still lacks nuance. How do different configurations of material resources influence elite decision-making within the military – notably their decision to intervene (or not) in the political system? The most puzzling case remains that of Egypt, where theoretical explanations of the military’s behavior before and after the uprising are often based on contradictory evaluations of the institution’s economic resource base. Some scholars claim the military suffered under Mubarak, who instead lavished state largesse on favored business elites while the army’s budget shrank and its once grand image evaporated. Others cite the significant resources the military was able to mobilize during the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and subsequently during the anti-Morsi protests to demonstrate the organization’s substantial coffers. Like many large and influential institutions, the military’s economic foundation is nebulous and its usefulness as an instrument of politics is highly situational. This paper is an effort to systematically unpack the various forms of military economic activity taking place in Egypt. These will be examined along a continuum ranging from individual activities (ie, military officers sitting on the boards of private companies, retired military officers hired as suppliers or subcontractors, etc.) to institutional ones (enterprises formally owned by military bodies, such as the Arab Organization for Industrialization). The ultimate aim of the paper will be to gauge what kind of economic resource is generated by these different types of activities and to determine whether or not this particular form of economic activity empowers the military as an institution and so should be included in our measures of the organization’s economic strength.