INTRODUCTION
The third wave of democracy that swept military authoritarian regimes out of power from Latin America to Asia in the 1970s and 1980s heralded the declining political role of the armed forces. Like militaries in the Middle East and Burma, however, Pakistan’s military bucked that trend. In fact, Pakistan has been one of the main military authoritarian exceptions to the global pattern of democratic resurgence.1 The country experienced its latest military coup in 1999, which was followed by eight years of military government, a situation that led one prominent scholar of democracy to wonder whether Pakistan was reversing the third wave.2 Since Pakistan’s birth out of the bloody partition of British India on August 14, 1947, its political history can be summed up as a story of repeated coups followed by protracted periods of military government, briefly punctuated by elected civilian rule. Until 2013, Pakistan did not experience even one democratic transfer of power from one democratically elected government that had completed its tenure to another. All its previous democratic transitions have been aborted by military coups.
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