War Makes the Regime: Regional Rebellions and Political Militarization Worldwide

War can make states, but can it also make regimes? This essay brings the growing literatures on authoritarianism and coups into conversation with the older research tradition analyzing the interplay between war and state formation. We offer a global empirical test of the argument that regional rebellions are especially likely to give rise to militarized authoritarian regimes. While the argument was initially developed in the context of Southeast Asia, the article deepens the original theory by furnishing a deductively grounded framework embedded in rational actor approaches in the coup and civil-military literatures. In support of our argument, quantitative tests confirm that regional rebellions make political militarization both more likely and more enduring, not simply in a single region, but more generally.