Coup d'état
A coup d'état, or simply a coup, is typically an illegal and overt attempt by a military organization or other government elites to unseat an incumbent person or leadership. A self-coup is said to take place when a leader, having come to power through legal means, tries to stay in power through illegal means.
By one estimate, there were 457 coup attempts from 1950 to 2010, half of which were successful. Most coup attempts occurred in the mid-1960s, but there were also large numbers of coup attempts in the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. Coups occurring in the post-Cold War period have been more likely to result in democratic systems than Cold War coups, though coups still mostly perpetuate authoritarianism.
Many factors may lead to the occurrence of a coup, as well as determine the success or failure of a coup. Once a coup is underway, coup success is driven by coup-makers' ability to get others to believe that the coup attempt will be successful. The number of successful coups has decreased over time. Failed coups in authoritarian systems are likely to strengthen the power of the authoritarian ruler. The cumulative number of coups is a strong predictor of future coups, a phenomenon referred to as the "coup trap".
In what is referred to as "coup-proofing", regimes create structures that make it hard for any small group to seize power. These coup-proofing strategies may include the strategic placing of family, ethnic, and religious groups in the military and the fragmenting of military and security agencies. However, coup-proofing reduces military effectiveness as loyalty is prioritized over experience when filling key positions within the military.
Etymology
The term comes from French coup d'État, literally meaning a 'stroke of state' or 'blow of state'. In French, the word État is capitalized when it denotes a sovereign political entity. Although the concept of a coup d'état has featured in politics since antiquity, the phrase is of relatively recent coinage. It did not appear within an English text before the 19th century except when used in the translation of a French source, there being no simple phrase in English to convey the contextualized idea of a 'knockout blow to the existing administration within a state'.One early use within text translated from French was in 1785 in a printed translation of a letter from a French merchant, commenting on an arbitrary decree, or arrêt, issued by the French king restricting the import of British wool. What may be its first published use within a text composed in English is an editor's note in the London Morning Chronicle, 1804, reporting the arrest by Napoleon in France, of Moreau, Berthier, Masséna, and Bernadotte: "There was a report in circulation yesterday of a sort of coup d'état having taken place in France, in consequence of some formidable conspiracy against the existing government."
In the British press, the phrase came to be used to describe the various murders by Napoleon's alleged secret police, the Gens d'Armes d'Elite, who executed the Duke of Enghien: "the actors in torture, the distributors of the poisoning draughts, and the secret executioners of those unfortunate individuals or families, whom Bonaparte's measures of safety require to remove. In what revolutionary tyrants call grand coups d'état, as butchering, or poisoning, or drowning, en masse, they are exclusively employed."
Related terms
Self-coup
Soft coup
A soft coup, sometimes referred to as a silent coup or a bloodless coup, is an illegal overthrow of a government that unlike a regular coup d'état is achieved without the use of force or violence.Palace coup
A palace coup or palace revolution is a coup in which one faction within the ruling group displaces another faction within a ruling group. Along with popular protests, palace coups are a major threat to dictators. The Harem conspiracy of the 12th century BC was one of the earliest attempts. Palace coups were common in Imperial China. They have also occurred among the Habsburg dynasty in Austria, the Al-Thani dynasty in Qatar, and in Haiti in the 19th to early 20th centuries. The majority of Russian tsars between 1725 and 1801 either usurped power or were overthrown in palace coups.Putsch
The term putsch denotes the political-military actions of a minority reactionary coup. The term was initially coined for the Züriputsch of 6 September 1839 in Switzerland. It was also used for attempted coups in Weimar Germany, such as the 1920 Kapp Putsch, Küstrin Putsch, and Adolf Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.The 1934 Night of the Long Knives was Hitler's purge to eliminate opponents, particularly the paramilitary faction led by Ernst Röhm, but Nazi propaganda justified it as preventing a supposed putsch planned or attempted by Röhm. The Nazi term Röhm-Putsch is still used by Germans to describe the event, often with quotation marks as the 'so-called Röhm Putsch'.
The 1961 Algiers putsch and the 1991 August Putsch also use the term.
The 2023 Wagner Group rebellion has also been described as a putsch.
and
Pronunciamiento is a term of Spanish origin for a type of coup d'état. Specifically the pronunciamiento is the formal declaration deposing the previous government and justifying the installation of the new government by the golpe de estado. Edward Luttwak distinguishes a coup, in which a military or political faction takes power for itself, from a pronunciamiento, in which the military deposes the existing government and hands over power to a new, ostensibly civilian government.A "barracks revolt" or cuartelazo is another type of military revolt, from the Spanish term cuartel, in which the mutiny of specific military garrisons sparks a larger military revolt against the government.
Other
Other types of actual or attempted seizures of power are sometimes called "coups with adjectives". The appropriate term can be subjective and carries normative, analytical, and political implications.- Civil society coup
- Constitutional coup, consistent with the constitution, often by exploiting loopholes or ambiguities
- Counter-coup, a coup to repeal the result of a previous coup
- Democratic coup
- Dissident coup, in which the culprits are nominally protestors without backing from any military or police units
- Electoral coup
- Judicial coup, a "legal" coup, utilizing the judiciary as the main instrument.
- Market coup
- Medical coup, having a leader declared incapacitated by doctors, such as in Tunisia in 1987
- Military coup
- Parliamentary coup
- Presidential coup
- Royal coup, in which a monarch dismisses democratically elected leaders and seizes all power
- Slow-motion coup
Revolution, rebellion
Prevalence and history
According to Clayton Thyne and Jonathan Powell's coup data set, there were 457 coup attempts from 1950 to 2010, of which 227 were successful and 230 were unsuccessful. They find that coups have "been most common in Africa and the Americas. Asia and the Middle East have experienced 13.1% and 15.8% of total global coups, respectively. Europe has experienced by far the fewest coup attempts: 2.6%." Most coup attempts occurred in the mid-1960s, but there were also large numbers of coup attempts in the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. From 1950 to 2010, a majority of coups failed in the Middle East and Latin America. They had a somewhat higher chance of success in Africa and Asia. Numbers of successful coups have decreased over time.A number of political science datasets document coup attempts around the world and over time, generally starting in the post-World War II period. Major examples include the Global Instances of Coups dataset, the Coups & Political Instability dataset by the Center of Systemic Peace, the Coup d'état Project by the Cline Center, the Colpus coup dataset, and the Coups and Agency Mechanism dataset. A 2023 study argued that major coup datasets tend to over-rely on international news sources to gather their information, potentially biasing the types of events included. Its findings show that while such a strategy is sufficient for gathering information on successful and failed coups, attempts to gather data on coup plots and rumors require a greater consultation of regional and local-specific sources.
Predictors
A 2003 review of the academic literature found that the following factors influenced coups:- officers' personal grievances
- military organizational grievances
- military popularity
- military attitudinal cohesiveness
- economic decline
- domestic political crisis
- contagion from other regional coups
- external threat
- participation in war
- collusion with a foreign military power
- military's national security doctrine
- officers' political culture
- noninclusive institutions
- colonial legacy
- economic development
- undiversified exports
- officers' class composition
- military size
- strength of civil society
- regime legitimacy and past coups
Another 2016 paper finds that government crises, political stability and absence of violence, purges, the level of political terror, general strikes, population growth, legal structure and security of property rights, and the share of democratic countries in the same region, predict the occurrence of a coup.
Harkness finds find that concentration of force in a small number of units near the capital and ethnic or factional imbalance inside the army increase the likelihood of a coup.
Several papers suggest that economic crises are associated with regime upheavals. Djuve et al. report robust evidence that low income, slow or negative growth, predict a higher likelihood of regime breakdown. Moreover, they find that intermediate democracy levels clearly predict coup-induced breakdowns and incumbent-guided transitions.
Coups have been found to appear in environments that are heavily influenced by military powers. Multiple of the above factors are connected to military culture and power dynamics. These factors can be divided into multiple categories, with two of these categories being a threat to military interests and support for military interests. If interests go in either direction, the military will find itself either capitalizing off that power or attempting to gain it back.
Oftentimes, military spending is an indicator of the likelihood of a coup taking place. Nordvik found that about 75% of coups that took place in many different countries rooted from military spending and oil windfalls.
A 2024 IMF paper find that the probability of a coup d'état is immediately elevated by acute exogenous shocks. The stressors include compromised economic growth, deterioration of the external financial position, and elevated levels of generalized and food price inflation. Also, a destabilized political and internal security environment serves as a potent proximal trigger for coup attempts.
The study pinpoints that a disproportionately young population structure, weak structural fundamentals characterized by widespread poverty, high income inequality, low literacy rates, and significant ethnic fractionalization are long-term endogenous factors that predispose a state to instability, as are also low governance quality, limited democratization, a high historical incidence and recent prevalence of coups.
The paper establishes that structural fragility is not merely an additive risk factor, but an amplifier that dictates the system's responsiveness to shocks:
- Structural fragility intensifies the likelihood of a coup when stressors are present.
- Conversely, the rate at which coup probability subsides when stressors recede is also accelerated in structurally weak states.
- Weaknesses across multiple structural dimensions exhibit a synergistic effect, exponentially increasing a country's susceptibility to political system fragilization. Furthermore, the co-occurrence of multiple stressors similarly compounds the overall risk profile.