Dictators' Endgames

Aurel Croissant is Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at GSIS, Ewha Womans University. Before joining Heidelberg, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Democratization and a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of the German Institute for Global Affairs, the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, and the Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (ZMSBw). He was Fellow of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, Korea Foundation, East Asia Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, the East West Center (Honolulu), and the Australian National University.David Kuehn is Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg, Germany. He is the (co-)author or (co-)editor of eight books; his articles have appeared in journals such as Democratization, the European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and Sociological Methods and Research. From 2009 to 2019, he was co-ordinator of the Working Group “Civilian Control of the Military” of the European Research Groups on Military and Society (ERGOMAS).Tanja Eschenauer-Engler is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University. Her research interests include civil-military relations and autocracy research.

• 1: Introduction 2: The Dictator's Endgame: Concept and Theory 3: Descriptives and Statistical Analyses 4: Dictators' Endgames before the Third Wave, 1946-1973 5: Dictators' Endgames during the Third Wave of Democratization 6: Endgames in the New Millennium 7: Conclusion

Dictators' Endgames is an analytically rigorous and empirically well-researched book. It impresses with its clear theoretical framework, consistently operationalized concept, and newly collected data set that enables systematic comparisons. The language and structure are both precise and accessible. This makes the book a recommended read for students, researchers, and policymakers alike. Anyone who wants to understand how dictatorships end must examine the behavior of their armed forces, and this book offers a compelling attempt to systematically explain this behavior in exceptional political situations.