During the 2011 Arab uprisings, why did the Syrian military largely remain loyal to Bashar al-Assad, repressing protesters on his behalf, while the Egyptian military chose to jettison Hosni Mubarak? What shapes how militaries behave in the “endgame,” the point when mass protests overwhelm the police and leave the military as the dictator’s last line of defense?

In Endgames, Hicham Bou Nassif offers a rich empirical analysis of these questions during the Arab uprisings, focusing in detail on Egypt and Syria, and briefly on Tunisia and Libya. Theoretically, Bou Nassif pushes us to disaggregate the military, particularly the officer corps, when thinking about their response to mass protests. His insight is that no matter how much the senior military officers may want to preserve the regime, the mid-ranking and junior officers on the ground need to follow through on orders to repress. Accordingly, he argues, dictators who try to buy the military’s loyalty through material perks to the top brass may find that these efforts are in vain: even handsomely paid generals may end up defecting “not because [they] have an interest in change, but because they fear mutinies within the officer corps” (p. 53). Such was the case, Bou Nassif convincingly shows, in Egypt in 2011, when the military leadership realized they “couldn’t save Mubarak, so they chose not to go down with him” (p. 160).

By contrast, Bou Nassif argues that other tactics can produce more loyal militaries during mass uprisings. Instead of material incentives, “wedding the armed forces ideologically to the regime via shared worldviews and aversions to common enemies” (p. 45) can create loyalty throughout the officer corps, making them more willing to repress. In Syria, Bou Nassif shows that Bashar al-Assad and his father before him stacked the military with members of their sectarian in-group (Alawis), thereby creating a military that “perceive[d] the uprising as an existential threat” (p. 197). Bou Nassif thus characterizes the Syrian military’s repression and Egyptian military’s defection in 2011 as the logical consequence of how each autocrat had “coup-proofed” their regimes: through material incentives (Egypt) or ethnic stacking (Syria).

Although other observers of the Arab Spring have made similar arguments, what Bou Nassif offers in Endgames is one of the most detailed and compelling accounts of not just how these coup-proofing tactics shaped military behavior in 2011 but also how they originated and operated in decades past. Based on unparalleled fieldwork—including 90 interviews with Egyptian, Tunisian, and Syrian military officers—as well as analysis of a variety of Arabic-language sources, Bou Nassif shows the “path-dependence” of these coup-proofing strategies over time. Despite leadership changes, failed coups, and battlefield defeats, he argues that Egypt’s and Syria’s coup-proofing strategies remained relatively stable since the 1950s and helped contribute to the decline in coup attempts from the 1970s on.

In addition to the arguments that Bou Nassif advances in Endgames, an equally impressive contribution is his refutation of several commonly cited alternative explanations. For instance, many have asserted that the Egyptian military defected from Mubarak in 2011 because it felt resentful of being increasingly counterbalanced by the police, or felt threatened by Gamal Mubarak and his neoliberal drive, or was swayed by the appeals of the United States. In Chapter 4, Bou Nassif expertly dismantles each hypothesis in turn, showing how material incentives and the vertical fragmentation they created outweighed these considerations.

A third contribution to the literature on civil–military relations is to expand our understanding of how a dictator “stacks” the military in ways other than recruiting members of a shared identity. Indoctrination into a shared ideology or worldview, Bou Nassif argues, should similarly produce loyal militaries in times of popular unrest (pp. 46–47). Indeed, he finds that Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat both attempted to shape their militaries ideationally, whereas Mubarak did not. Having “no great mission to entrust to the military” (p. 111), Mubarak was left more vulnerable to a popular uprising in 2011.

We might be forgiven, therefore, in wanting to know more about why Mubarak did not pursue such ideational stacking. Given that this shift from Nasser and Sadat was the main exception to the path-dependence of coup-proofing tactics and was ultimately pivotal for explaining the outcome in 2011, it is surprising that Endgames does not go further in its explanation. Bou Nassif does acknowledge in the conclusion that he brackets off the question of why each dictator pursued the coup-proofing tactics they did, leaving this critical theorization to future scholars.

A second area where readers are left wanting concerns how different coup-proofing tactics interact with one another. Bou Nassif outlines four tactics in Chapter 1: shared worldviews, material incentives, counterbalancing, and divide-and-rule tactics. Each, he argues, lends itself to different outcomes during mass uprisings: the first produces loyal militaries that repress, the middle two produce militaries that defect, and the final produces militaries that split. Less clear is what happens when dictators pursue a combination of these tactics, as Bou Nassif argues that both Egyptian and Syrian leaders did. In Syria, the loyalty engendered by ethnic stacking outweighed the defection typically associated with material incentives and counterbalancing; in Egypt, Mubarak’s material incentives, and not his counterbalancing, drove defection. But what, theoretically, motivates why some tactics dominate others in explaining outcomes? Will a shared worldview always be more important than the other coup-proofing tactics (as in Syria), and will material incentives always be more important than counterbalancing (as in Egypt), in explaining military responses to uprisings? We are thus left craving a deeper theoretical understanding of how these coup-proofing tactics interact to produce repression or defection.

Whatever the book may lack in theory, however, it more than makes up for in the richness of its case studies and sheer volume of primary sources. Bou Nassif has done what few in the field could: he was able to gain unparalleled access to multiple Arab armies, including in the repressive states of Egypt and Syria. Indeed, Endgames is a model for how research should be conducted: deeply informed and grounded in fieldwork, persuasively packaged into a compelling narrative, and with major implications for the fields of civil–military relations, popular contention, and democratization. Endgames is truly essential reading both for its substance and craft.