With collaborators Theodore McLauchlin and Ruth Dassonneville (University of Montreal) and Risa Brooks (Marquette University), De Bruin will investigate how military service members, veterans, and the American public would react to situations in which the U.S. military is sent to manage domestic protests.
In June 2020, then-President Donald Trump raised the prospect of such a deployment against Black Lives Matter protests. More recently, he stated a desire to use the military domestically in the event of election-related protests. While such statements have caused enormous controversy, we know little about what the general public or members of the military think about the military's role in protest policing.
The project will use survey experiments to investigate the conditions under which domestic deployments might be supported, as well as the extent to which both service members and ordinary citizens might countenance different forms of military dissent and disobedience in response to such orders. The results will help illuminate how a future crisis involving military use against protests might play out.
