Mehrl, MariusEscribà-Folch, Abel2024-02-232024-02-232023Mehrl M, Escribà-Folch A. The dictator's legionnaires: foreign recruitment, coups, and uprisings. Democratization. 2023 Nov 14. DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2023.22772831351-0347http://hdl.handle.net/10230/59241Data de publicació electrònica: 14-11-2023Includes supplementary materials for the online appendix.Several countries recruit foreign nationals into their armed forces. This is despite the norm of citizen armies and the strong idea that individuals join the military to defend their home country while military service socializes them into good citizens. We argue that foreign recruits can have very specific benefits for some authoritarian governments. Because they lack strong links to society, their loyalties lie with whoever recruited and pays them, not the nation, country, or its citizens. As such, we argue, first, that their recruitment is especially attractive for personalistic rulers. Second, we propose that foreigners’ presence in the armed forces stymies these forces’ ability to carry out coup attempts and deters the occurrence of mass uprisings by signalling the security forces’ willingness to respond with violent repression. Empirical tests for the period 1946–2010 support these arguments. This research expands our understanding of legionnaire recruitment, civil–military relations, and comparative authoritarianism.application/pdfeng© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.info:eu-repo/semantics/article2024-02-23http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2023.2277283Foreign soldiersLegionnairesDictatorshipCoupsUprisingsPersonalismCoup-proofinginfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess