THE REVOLUTION AND THE MILITARY. AN ANALYSIS OF THE EGYPTIAN AND IRAQI REVOLUTIONS
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Authors:
• Radu-Alexandru CUCUTĂ, email: radu.cucuta@cseea.ro, Afiliation: PhD candidate with the National School For Political Studies and Administration, “Nicolae Titulescu” University, Bucharest -
Keywords: theories of revolution, military, Egyptian Revolution, Iraqi Revolution
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Abstract:
The paper tries to assess the role the military plays in revolutions. The first part of the study focuses on the manner in which the competing theories of revolutions try to explain and accommodate the military’s participation in revolutions, attempting to show that the limits of these theoretical enterprises call for a renewed research into the subject at hand. The second part of the paper tries to build a conceptual model, starting from the hypotheses of Charles Tilly, Samuel Huntington and Mehran Kamrava, tested on two particular cases – that of the 1958 Egyptian Revolution and that of the 1958 Iraqi Revolution that can better account for the military’s participation in revolutions and explain when does the military become a revolutionary force and what are the characteristics of revolutions in which the military plays a key-role.