BOOK REVIEW : Emajuddln Abamcd, Military Rule and the Myth of Democracy

This review assesses the author’s central thesis that military rule often cloaks itself in procedural facsimiles of democracy while hollowing out substantive accountability. It summarizes the book’s periodization, source base, and comparative gestures, and evaluates how convincingly the evidence links institutional design to outcomes on civil liberties, party competition, and policy responsiveness. Strengths include textured archival use and attention to bureaucratic incentives; weaknesses involve occasional overgeneralization and limited engagement with subnational variation. The review situates the work within broader literatures on authoritarianism and controlled liberalization, and reflects on implications for countries navigating transitions. It argues the book succeeds in foregrounding mechanisms that convert emergency rationales into semi-permanent rule, while inviting further research on how civic coalitions reopen stalled liberalization.

The body elaborates three contributions. First, it details the book’s account of legalism as a strategic resource—how emergency decrees, tribunals, and regulatory bodies normalize exceptionalism. Second, it interrogates the interplay between patronage and coercion in maintaining elite coalitions, noting how resource distribution substitutes for ideological cohesion. Third, it reviews the author’s treatment of external actors—aid donors, security partners, and diaspora groups—whose conditionality and advocacy can both constrain and unintentionally stabilize military governments. The review then weighs methodological choices, including case selection and counterfactuals, and suggests alternative readings of episodes where civil society extracted concessions. It closes by arguing that the book’s core warning remains timely: that procedural veneers can exhaust opposition bandwidth unless watchdog institutions and public-interest lawyering expand the costs of authoritarian drift.