A growing number of analysts have engaged with the role of militaries in the context of populism, often explaining it through the lens of civil-military relations or authoritarianism. However, this study posits the question: To what extent do militaries, as bureaucratic institutions, themselves employ populist rhetoric in their political discourse, especially in contexts where they wield extensive political power? The paper cautiously engages with this question by empirically examining how militaries in Egypt, Pakistan, and Thailand construct their respective political discourses to claim political legitimacy and define the ‘people’. The empirical analysis is approached by employing a computational discourse analysis of fifteen official speeches, communiqués, and press releases, five from each country, in the period 2014–2023. Six lexical categories, namely, people, elite, guardian, sacral, unity/identity, and others/threat, were quantified per 1 000 words and visualised in bar charts. The results show that all three militaries use populist language, though in divergent ways. Egypt (populism intensity = 7.63) blends sacral and guardian vocabularies to articulate a discourse of sacralised populist guardianship; Thailand (7.20) professes loyalist-unity populism that fuses guardianship with loyalty to the monarchy and cultural unity; Pakistan (4.57) articulates a bureaucratic moral populism rooted in discipline, professionalism, and faith. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that militaries can reproduce populist logics without leaders or elections, moralising authority through bureaucratic discourse. The paper thus contributes to populism studies by locating populist discourse within the institutional voice of the state itself and showcasing the need for extant scholarship to make room for empirical insights that capture populist articulations in (often militarised) non-Western settings, which may not always align with liberal-democratic assumptions.
