[
Ozan Varol is Assistant Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.]
This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 53(2) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below.
I would like to thank David Landau, William Partlett, Brad Roth, and Joel Colón-Ríos for their kind words and insightful comments about my article,
The Democratic Coup d’Etat,
53 Harv. Int’l L.J. 291 (2012). These scholars have been instrumental in enhancing our knowledge of constitutional transitions, and I very much appreciate the time they have taken to share their thoughts on my article. In this reply, I will first provide a brief summary of the article’s central claims and then respond individually to the comments.
The article examines the typical characteristics and constitutional consequences of a largely neglected phenomenon that I call the “democratic coup d’état.” To date, the academic legal literature has analyzed all military coups under an anti-democratic framework. That conventional framework considers military coups to be entirely anti-democratic and assumes that all coups are perpetrated by power-hungry military officers seeking to depose existing regimes in order to rule their nations indefinitely. Under the prevailing view, therefore, all military coups constitute an affront to stability, legitimacy, and democracy.
This article challenges that conventional view and its underlying assumptions. The article argues that, although all military coups have anti-democratic features, some coups are distinctly more democracy-promoting than others because they respond to popular opposition against authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, overthrow those regimes, and facilitate free and fair elections.