The histories of China, Iran, and Russia illustrate the perils of the Eastern Eurasian exposed zone. Steppe attacks were persistent until about the eighteenth century CE. In the case of China, the attacks started to become salient very early on, and, subsequently, steppe warriors raided and conquered after the fall of the Han dynasty, during the Northern Song dynasty, the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and the Manchu or Qing dynasty. Iran’s experience was similar in respect to periodic waves of steppe invasions. Compared to the Chinese experience, though, nomadic influences on the identity of Iran’s ruling elite were even more persistent up to the twentieth century. The rise of Muscovy was highly dependent on it becoming the chief Rus tax collector for the Mongols, who preferred indirect rule of a north that was inhospitable for horses. Moscow exploited its position within the Mongol Empire to defeat its Rus rivals and eventually replace the Golden Horde after its decline. The nomadic threat eventually declined. The political culture and institutions developed to deal with external threat have persisted.

Before we elaborate our own argument on the reinforcement of autocratization, we need to consider some of the alternatives to our own claims. While there are some problems that we will touch on, some of the alternatives are compelling and quite possibly non-rivals in the sense that there should be room for multiple drivers of autocracy. In other words, our choice in elaborating one explanatory path need not lead to a zero-sum outlook. Actually, there are a variety of historical approaches to accounting for autocracy. Some we accept (agricultural surplus and bureaucratization) without much protest. Some we are less sure about either because they are tied to agrarian arguments and need to be sorted out further or because they are based on debatable assumptions. More specifically, we consider six arguments that have been advanced as encouraging autocratization: diversity of population DNA related to migration out of Africa, irrigation, early statehood, early forms of democracy, roving versus stationary bandits, and the evolution of values.

The synthesized model to account fot the reinforcement of autocracy in Afro-Eurasia has 10-12 components: geographical/political-economic context, exposed/protected zones, imperiogenesis, hybridization, imperial legacies, autocratization persistence/ reinforcement, autocratic-democratic conflict, and continental-maritime conflict. Mixed geography contributed to the generation of two different types of economic specialization: sedentary farming where soil was appropriate and nomadic herding in more arid zones. Sedentary-nomad exchanges turned into nomadic raiding, especially after nomads developed a military edge with fast-firing compound bows from horseback- an advantage that persisted through much of the first millennium BCE to about three-quarters of the way through the first millennium CE. Nearly two millennia of raiding from the arid zones encouraged centralized political responses in the zones exposed to raiding and eventually conquests. Less centralized political systems eventually emerged in parts of the protected zones, as did gunpowder weapons that enabled sedentary states to defeat nomads after some 500 years of experimentation.

Where steppes were moderately distant from sedentary communities, as in eastern Eurasia, there was space for both nomads and sedentaries to scale up their offensive and defensive capabilities, allowing both groups to engage in conquest. Where steppes are located in and around sedentary development, as in the Middle East and North Africa, there was less scaling up and more localized conquests in which the nomadic/sedentary distinction is less critical. However, if sedentary communities are both poor and relatively weak, as in sub-Saharan Africa, slave raiding became a particularly pronounced motivating factor for raiding and conquests and was not necessarily restricted to nomads. In Africa, locals, Arabs, and Europeans ultimately competed as slave raiders.

The Middle East/North African variant of the raiding/conquest argument consists of five components: First and second, Anatolia and Persia/Iran participated directly in the Eurasian steppe effect dynamic, but the region had already experienced nomadic-sedentary conflicts and imperial conquest many centuries before the emergence of the phenomenon in central Eurasia, Third and fourth, the Islamic expansion generated a separate type of nomadic-sedentary conflict that further united the Middle East with Central Eurasia that also put forward the slave soldier dependence that became characteristic of the Middle East. Overlapping with the slave soldier phenomenon was the movement of Turks from Central Asia towards the Middle East from the tenth century on. First, the Seljuk Turks moved in and were followed later by groups fleeing Mongol pressures. Fifth, the Ottoman Empire, founded by some of the Central Asian Turks who had moved into Anatolia earlier, provided an extension of Eurasian-style imperialism that lasted into the early twentieth century.

Where steppes were moderately distant from sedentary communities, as in eastern Eurasia, there was space for both nomads and sedentaries to scale up their offensive and defensive capabilities, allowing both groups to engage in conquest. Where steppes are located in and around sedentary development, as in the Middle East and North Africa, there was less scaling up and more localized conquests in which the nomadic/sedentary distinction is less critical. However, if sedentary communities are both poor and relatively weak, as in sub-Saharan Africa, slave raiding became a particularly pronounced motivating factor for raiding and conquests and was not necessarily restricted to nomads. In Africa, locals, Arabs, and Europeans ultimately competed as slave raiders.

The tour de force of the Chronographia takes place in the rebel Isaak’s skene, surrounded by an army whose war-cry is an acclamation, filled internally with an army ranked concentrically like a council chamber, with Isaak on a throne, controlling everything by his sheer presence. Psellos heads an embassy to persuade him to institutionalize his power by due process, bringing the complementary resources of the Byzantine State: as a rhetor and philosopher he represents its law, traditions, and cultural capital. Together he and Isaak mount a theatre of ideal rule. It is a magnificent double performance culminating in Isaak’s secret assent. Before being formalized, however, news comes of a coup. Psellos had argued for praxis first, then theory, but Keroularios, who led the coup, has seized praxis and, by an embracing irony, the embassy in the protected space was futile. Isaak is emperor already. Though he promises to rule philosophically with Psellos’ advice, he rules alone. The reign is a bitter disappointment and, from that point, the work loses authenticity. Psellos disguises his loss of influence as success and succumbs to the pressures of imperial oversight.

Chapter 8 examines political systems with the highest values of T, or time since the last successful coup. It explains how and why dictatorships as different as the PRIs in Mexico (1929–2000) and the Somoza family’s in Nicaragua (1936–79) effected an autocratic exit out of the coup trap. And it analyzes how the republics of Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay escaped from golpismo by constructing constitutional democracy. Successful transitions away from the Coup Trap, I find, occur if they survive what I call “trial by fire” – assaults on their authority – that allow them to purge the armed forces of sedition. Escapes from the Coup Trap are also a function of convincing the political opposition to desist from joining coup coalitions, which dictatorships and democracies accomplish in slightly different ways.

Chapter 6 examines five of the nine modal cases of political instability in the region (the seventh chapter examines the other four). These are the ones where T is neither below nor above one standard deviation of its mean. My model anticipates 77 percent of the years with successful military coups in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, Panama, Brazil, and Venezuela. Unlike the highly unstable cases I analyze in Chapter 5, each of the modal cases stumbled into more liberalized political orders. Chapter 6 also explores why military coups ended democratic experiments or reformist interludes in Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, and Brazil.

The conclusions distill the key findings of this book’s encounter with theory, cross-national statistical models, and case studies. A prediction-centered multi-method approach demonstrates how case studies fill in the causal gaps of cross-national statistical models to explain the rise and fall of the Coup Trap. And the conclusions identify the mechanisms that kept most political systems submerged in chronic instability – and allowed half a dozen to consolidate stable democratic or authoritarian political orders.

Chapter 7 examines how a handful of incumbents managed to establish long-lasting dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, and Venezuela, the four other political systems with modal levels of instability (Chapter 6 examines the five other such systems). This chapter also explains why, of the nine modal cases, only the Venezuelan political system managed to leave the Coup Trap by building a constitutional democracy. It is the ability to continue organizing coup coalitions, I argue, that ends democratic experiments; it takes time for a large enough coalition of interests to impose civilian solutions on acute political conflicts, that is, to punish and therefore prevent defection from its ranks.

Chapter 3 statistically tests implications of my theory of the coup trap. I try to disconfirm my hypotheses by using event history or duration models of instability on a database of military coups, economic variables, political system characteristics, and levels of instability for eighteen countries between 1900 and 2014. While controlling for economic and political variables, statistical models show that autocracies are more unstable than democracies and that instability breeds coups. The likelihood of a successful military coup, in other words, remains high in the wake of the overthrow of a president, especially in non-democratic political orders and during election years. Logit models comparing golpes that manage and do not manage to overthrow governments also confirm a key implication of my theory of the coup trap: that military conspiracies are much more likely to prosper if they count upon the support of the opposition. These findings cement my argument that the overthrow of governments is a function of military as well as civil coalitions that reflect the unstable nature of political competition in less institutionalized political systems.