Military coups: a very short introduction

Submission StatementGiven recent events, the dynamics underpinning military coups are understandably in vogue at the moment. This article focuses specifically on military coups and the factors which determine their success: the capacity to perform a coup, the motivation to do so, the lack of opposition, and the amount of popular support.

While I did find this article to be illuminating, I do have some reservations. The factors listed seem to be descriptive rather than predictive–that is, they are good for describing why a coup was successful or a failure, but they are bad at predicting the course of coups in progress, or before they occur. An attempt to apply these factors to the recent move by Wagner, for instance, will quickly run into frustration. Wagner certainly has the motivation, but what about capacity? Certainly not in theory, but watching them march to Moscow unopposed it’s hard not to imagine that Russia’s actual capacity to resist Wagner is significantly less than it ought to be. Similarly, opposition. Putin should be capable of mounting a serious challenge to Wagner’s attack, but it’s easy to imagine a situation where he flees and the current government collapses in his wake. If anybody knows of any literature that attempts to predict the progress of a coup, I would appreciate it if you could share it.

Florence Gaub is a Franco-German researcher, security expert, and futurist who focuses on foresight-based policy formation for international relations and security policy. She is the director of the research division at the NATO Defense College.

Until three years ago, it was widely perceived in Europe that the era of military intervention in politics was over: strongmen like Idi Amin and Hafez al-Assad were long dead, and the world had seen the likes of Mubarak toppled and Pinochet voted out of power. The armed forces appeared to have returned to the barracks for good. Although the coups in Egypt and Thailand, in 2013 and 2014, respectively, were a reminder that the military can still play a political role, it was the recent failed coup attempt in Turkey which drove this point home. As the military’s raison d’être is clearly the defence of a state, any venture by it into politics is generally seen as an anomaly – yet this repeatedly occurs. So why (and when) do coups happen? Mainly for four reasons: the armed forces have the capacity, the interest, no legitimate opponent and a degree of popular support. If all four elements are not present, however, a coup will fail – as was, arguably, the case in Turkey.