Elite Power Struggles and Political Violence

Behind nearly every sudden change of government – a midnight coup, a sweeping purge, a wave of riots – lies a struggle that rarely involves ordinary citizens at first. It is a contest among the powerful: politicians, generals, business magnates, and party bosses fighting over who controls the state. When these elite factions cannot resolve their differences through bargaining, the dispute frequently spills into the streets and the barracks. This is one of the oldest and most reliable engines of political violence, and understanding it explains a great deal about why some governments collapse in chaos while others endure.

What “elite disputes” actually mean in political theory 🔗

The term “elite” here does not simply mean the rich. In political science, an elite is any small group that holds disproportionate power over decisions affecting everyone else. The classical elite theorists – Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels – argued that this concentration of power is unavoidable. Mosca and Pareto were among the first to claim that elite rule is inevitable in every organized society, regardless of whether it calls itself democratic or authoritarian.

If elite dominance is permanent, then politics is not really a fight between the masses and the powerful. It is a fight among the powerful. Mosca argued that a ruling minority controls society not because its members are smarter, but because they are better organised than the scattered majority. Conflict, in this view, mostly takes the form of one elite group trying to displace another.

Pareto’s “circulation of elites” 🔗

Pareto described this process as the circulation of elites. He believed elites never last forever – famously calling history “a graveyard of aristocracies.” Over time, a ruling group grows complacent, loses its appetite for power, and is challenged by a hungrier rising faction, sometimes called a counter-elite. When the old elite absorbs these newcomers peacefully, the system stays stable. When it blocks them – through hereditary privilege, family connections, or institutional gatekeeping – the pressure builds until it erupts. Pareto suggested that a healthy mix of cunning and forceful types within the top elite produces the most enduring political structure, and that imbalance invites upheaval.

This gives us the core insight for the rest of this discussion: political violence is often not a breakdown of the elite system but a symptom of how that system renews itself. When the normal channels for swapping one elite group for another are clogged, violence becomes the alternative mechanism.

How elite quarrels escalate into violence 🔗

Elite disputes do not jump straight from disagreement to bloodshed. They tend to move through recognisable stages, each more dangerous than the last.

Street demonstrations and engineered protests 🔗

The first visible sign is usually mass mobilisation. Elite factions rarely fight in public on their own; they mobilise supporters to demonstrate the breadth of their backing. A protest is also a signal. Research on coups shows that popular protests aggregate citizens’ private information into a public signal that helps elites coordinate against a leader. In plain terms, a large demonstration tells rival elites that the government is weak and that the moment to strike has arrived. This is why factions sometimes encourage or quietly fund protests that appear spontaneous.

Riots and targeted disorder 🔗

When demonstrations turn violent, they become riots – and riots can be a deliberate tool rather than an accident. Property destruction, communal clashes, and loss of life create an atmosphere of crisis that delegitimises whoever is in charge. A faction seeking power benefits from chaos it does not have to formally claim. Comparative studies of mass political violence group riots, anti-government demonstrations, and political strikes together as a single cluster of “collective protest,” and link their frequency to the behaviour of political elites, especially repression and coups, as documented in a cross-national analysis of mass political violence covering over 100 nations.

The military coup 🔗

The most dramatic outcome of an elite dispute is the coup d’état – a planned, often sudden seizure of the state, usually carried out by or with the support of the armed forces. A coup is distinct from a spontaneous mutiny: it is meticulously organised and aimed squarely at capturing control of government. Coups are attractive to elite factions precisely because they shortcut the slow, uncertain work of winning over the public. Why mobilise millions when a few hundred soldiers and a captured radio station can change the regime overnight?

Afghanistan: when a party tore itself apart 🔗

The 1978 Saur Revolution in Afghanistan is a textbook case of elite factionalism producing violent regime change. The ruling People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had split into two bitter factions – Khalq and Parcham – that had been feuding while developing under the secular government of Mohammed Daoud Khan. These were not mass movements; they were competing networks of party intellectuals and army officers fighting over the same prize.

The trigger came in April 1978, when a prominent Parcham leader, Mir Akbar Khyber, was assassinated. His funeral became a massive anti-government protest, and Daoud responded by arresting PDPA leaders – exactly the escalation ladder described above. Believing the president planned to eliminate them, the Khalq faction used its control over army officers to storm the palace, kill Daoud, and seize power within days.

The violence did not end with the coup. The supposedly united winners immediately turned on one another. Within months the dominant Khalq leadership purged its Parcham rivals, sending some abroad as ambassadors and arresting others, which fed a spiral of repression that eventually drew in the Soviet Union in 1979. The lesson is stark: removing the common enemy did not resolve the elite dispute. It simply moved the battlefield inside the new ruling group.

Bangladesh: a cascade of coups in a single year 🔗

Few episodes illustrate elite power struggles more vividly than Bangladesh in 1975, when the country experienced a rapid sequence of coups driven by competing groups within the army and the political class.

The August assassination 🔗

On 15 August 1975, mid-ranking army officers launched a coup that assassinated the founding president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, along with most of his family. The plotters installed a new government under a former cabinet colleague, demonstrating that the violence came from within the existing political establishment rather than from an outside insurgency.

The counter-coups 🔗

The seizure of power did not settle matters; it opened a contest among the officer corps itself. By 3 November, senior officers led by Brigadier Khaled Mosharraf launched a counter-coup. The dispute had a clear institutional cause: senior officers were alarmed that junior mutineers were effectively issuing orders from the presidential palace, breaking the army’s chain of command. This was a fight over hierarchy and legitimacy among elites who all wore the same uniform.

Days later, on 7 November, yet another coup overturned that arrangement. This uprising temporarily ended the violent chaos and power struggle that had followed Mujib’s assassination and is still commemorated annually, though rival political parties remember it in sharply different ways. Three coups in under three months, each leaving dead leaders behind, capture how elite disputes can churn a state into sustained instability.

Why elites choose violence over compromise 🔗

If violence is so destructive, why do elite groups resort to it? Several incentives push in that direction.

Blocked circulation: When a ruling group monopolises power and refuses to share it, ambitious rivals have no peaceful route upward. Force becomes the only available ladder.

High and indivisible stakes: Control of the state is difficult to split. Unlike a business deal, you cannot hand a faction “40 per cent” of the presidency. This winner-takes-all quality makes compromise harder and a decisive strike more tempting.

Fear and pre-emption: In both the Afghan and Bangladeshi cases, factions struck partly because they feared being purged or killed first. Insecurity, not just ambition, drives elites to gamble on violence.

The example effect of ideology: Coups are rarely just about personnel. Researchers studying what they call the “programmatic coup” find that ideologically driven military takeovers significantly raise the chances of later political violence, including repression and political killings, because they create clear winners and losers across society, not just a reshuffle at the top.

The long shadow: instability after the takeover 🔗

A common misconception is that a successful coup restores order. The evidence points the other way. A regime born in violence often struggles to claim legitimacy and spends its energy guarding against the next plot. This produces a well-documented trap: in trying to “coup-proof” themselves, leaders frequently weaken their own institutions and may reduce the risk of a coup while raising the likelihood of civil war. Afghanistan’s descent from a single coup into purges, rural uprisings, and foreign invasion is the extreme version of this dynamic.

For students of comparative politics, the takeaway is that elite disputes are not isolated dramas. They reshape institutions, set precedents for how future disagreements get settled, and can lock a country into cycles where each transfer of power invites the next violent challenge.

Reading elite conflict in stable democracies 🔗

It would be a mistake to think this only happens in fragile states. The underlying logic – elite groups competing for dominance – operates everywhere. In consolidated democracies, that competition is channelled into elections, courts, coalition bargaining, and a free press, so the circulation of elites happens without bloodshed. Mosca’s insight survives: power still rotates among organised minorities, but strong institutions convert what could be a violent rupture into a peaceful handover. The difference between a stable democracy and a coup-prone state is often not the absence of elite conflict, but the existence of rules that everyone agrees to lose by.

What do you think? If elite competition is inevitable in every society, what makes some institutions strong enough to absorb it peacefully while others collapse into violence? And when a faction “wins” through a coup, does it ever truly gain stable power, or only inherit the same struggle it tried to escape?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/elite-theory
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elites
3. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1017/s0022381613001485
4. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/mass-political-violence-cross-national-causal-analysis
5. https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Saur_Revolution
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan_(1978%E2%80%931992)
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_August_1975_Bangladeshi_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_November_1975_Bangladesh_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_November_1975_Bangladeshi_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
10. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopres/xjaf017
11. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=polysci_etds