| Pretty much every single one that fell through internal unrest. For a dictatorship to fall, it's security apparatus needs to stop performing its function of suppressing dissent and revolt. Humans aren't machines. The police of a dictatorship, at some point, will have to confront an order to gun down protesters and the like to preserve the regime. Even if they're ideologically committed, they might recoil the order to kill and let the regime fall. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/02/protests-how-d... > And the use of violence by the regime under challenge, argue both Petersen and Sadiki, acts as a further crucial trigger for escalation by protesters against the regime. It is not simply because the state use of violence - whether in Bahrain or Romania, Egypt or Libya - acts as reminder of its brutal nature at a time when it is more vulnerable than it realises. It is also because the use of state violence confronts those still part of the state with a moral and strategic question: whether to tolerate the use of force and hope the regime survives, or peel away and join the opposition. > "It is the other side of the story to that of those rebelling," says Petersen. "There are different considerations for those in the military, police or special forces, defined by their role. They are required to make a choice: whether they can switch sides and hope the people accept their new narrative in the new world after the regime, or stick by it to the end. > "Whether you defect to the opposition depends on these differential kinds of moral calculus. Ordinary soldiers, for instance, have their own calculus. And if they decide not to fire on protesters that sends a signal to the higher-ups in the military. Then pretty soon you might see the interest of the military changing." > Petersen, however, has one caveat. That this kind of negotiation in an organisation like the military does not necessarily hold true if there is the early and "crushing" use of violence. |