Teaching the Military and Revolutions: Simulating Civil–Military Relations during Mass Uprisings

Abstract

During revolutions, strategic interactions among civilian policy makers, armed forces, and opposition groups shape political outcomes—most important, whether a regime stands or falls. Students from advanced industrial democracies frequently find these dynamics counterintuitive, even after completing readings and engaging in traditional instruction methods. We therefore sought to improve pedagogical outcomes by designing a simulation based on scenarios similar to those witnessed during the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution. We divided students into four teams representing the regime, the armed forces, and two distinct groups of anti-regime dissidents. Rules were designed to incorporate the best recent scholarship on each category of actors’ behavior, such as the probability of military units defecting to protesters and the ability of riot police to repress urban uprisings. By forcing student teams to make decisions under time pressure, we obliged them to wrestle with the uncertainties and fears of betrayal inherent in complex civil–military emergencies.

Dodging the autocratic bullet: Enlisting behavioural science to arrest democratic backsliding

“…Simulations-e.g., of earthquakes, investment risks, and old age-can provide tangible demonstrations of the impact of potential risks without exposing individuals to actual harm (Hertwig & Wulff, 2022). Available simulations like the Swiss Seismological Service's Earthquake Games 3 or role-playing simulations on transitions to democracy (Jiménez, 2015) or civil-military relations during mass uprisings (Harkness & DeVore, 2021) vaccination found that people exposed to an interactive risk-ratio simulation were more likely to get vaccinated and tend to have a better understanding of the benefit-to-harm ratio (Wegwarth et al, 2023) than people presented with the same information in a conventional text-based format. It is difficult to directly target elites with interventions;…”

Teaching Social Movements with a Sustained Simulation of Police–Protester Contention: The Hypothetical Case of the Contested Election of 2024

“…Mello and Stein (2021) linked two courses in which students designed multiple simulations based on historical protests. Harkness and DeVore (2021) created a fictional scenario for their two-hour simulation session on revolution, providing their students with information on roles and rules one week in advance. Jimenez (2015) limited student collaboration to emphasize the coordinating costs of rebellions.…”

“…This article describes a case study of a simulation embedded in a course titled “The Police and Social Movements in American Politics” that was taught in 2021 in the Politics Department at Brandeis University. Scholars have found that simulations can provide students with a more intense engagement with and a deeper understanding of real-world actors’ motivations and strategies (Harkness and DeVore 2021). We created a semifictional future scenario because when students simply replicate a well-known past event, they tend to “tailor their actions to reflect what actually happened or to their preconceived prejudices” (Harkness and DeVore 2021, 317).…”

“…Scholars have found that simulations can provide students with a more intense engagement with and a deeper understanding of real-world actors’ motivations and strategies (Harkness and DeVore 2021). We created a semifictional future scenario because when students simply replicate a well-known past event, they tend to “tailor their actions to reflect what actually happened or to their preconceived prejudices” (Harkness and DeVore 2021, 317). We then directed a sustained, complex simulation to encourage students to continually incorporate new information and analysis into their work in response to other groups’ “moves” (Wedig 2010).…”