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Home > JOURNALS > IJCD > Vol. 10 (2024)

 

Courtney Kintz

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

Once a country experiences a coup, that country is likely to experience another coup within six years and, since 1950, there have been at least 240 military coups. On average, about half of all coup attempts involve fatalities, with most resulting in governmental and civilian deaths. So, once a country experiences a coup, it is statistically likely that another coup will expose citizens to more uncertainty about their safety. For a citizen whose country has experienced a recent coup, this data is alarming as an incident of one coup starts the stopwatch for another coup occurring within a few years.

This paper contributes to this underdeveloped area of constitutional design by proposing a framework for the constitutional contextualization of military provisions so that constitutions can better respond to coups. Specifically, this paper focuses on the constitutional contextualization of military provisions for countries with a history of recurring military coups. Considering the statistics, countries with recurrent coups suffer from an acute risk to the security of their citizens. More-over, these countries face the greatest democratization challenges as one coup effectively jeopardizes constitutional order. This paper proposes that a new military constitutional design frame-work may advance democratization by thwarting subsequent coups, which otherwise significantly stall progress.

This paper is organized into four sections. The first section overviews what I have termed the “common military constitution design model.” In this section, I lay out the typical model and explain how this model fits within the broader separation of powers structure. The second section analyzes the coup experiences of Thailand, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Burma; details the motivations that prompted the coup; and discusses the consequences of the first and subsequent coups. Through all four countries, I show how the legislative and judicial branches failed as constitutional avenues for the military to express its grievances against the executive. In providing these histories, I do not claim that any of the militaries’ rationales for waging coups were legitimate. Rather, the purpose of this section is to demonstrate how—legitimacy notwithstanding—military officers’ subjective perspective that they lack adequate means to air their grievances thereby justifies a coup that dismantles democratization progress.

The third section builds off the first two sections by explaining how the common military constitutional design framework perpetuates coup occurrences in democratizing countries that have already experienced a coup. Finally, the fourth section outlines my military constitutional design framework, which reorients the constitutional position of the military to provide the military an appropriate method to air its grievances against the executive. The goal is to deter the military from waging a coup by providing a constitutional avenue for military officers to air their grievances against the executive.

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