Military Insubordination and External Coercion

How does a state’s control over its own military affect its international bargaining leverage? Does military insubordination make a state more likely to concede to external coercion? We argue that military insubordination makes a state more likely to be a target of and to concede to international coercive pressure. Two mechanisms can explain this relationship. First, military insubordination increases the state’s co- ordination costs to respond to external aggression, by affecting its war-fighting resolve and capacity, either in actual or perceived terms. Second, military insubordination—a public signal of the state’s compromised chain of command—breaks the state’s infor- national advantage, leaving the state in a position in which posturing is less likely to deter external coercion. Using time-series-cross-sectional data for the period 1945- In 2000, we show that military mutiny (i) makes conflict initiation by an enemy state more attractive under certain circumstances, but (ii) discourages escalation by disin- centivizing the target state to resist. The paper expands our understanding of the implications of civil-military relations for a state’s international relations. It also offers a more dynamic explanation of how private information affects international conflict processes.