Coup D'État

The Nature of Coups

The ideal coup d'état is swift, impeccably planned, and perfectly executed. To avoid detection at the planning stage conspiracy is essential. By virtue of the similarities between the institutions of governments, the techniques employed usually include the capturing of the telecommunications center and other key points, such as police and military headquarters and the presidential palace and, of course, the arrest of the most powerful state personnel. Given the state's monopoly of coercion, the active or passive support of at least some of the armed forces would also be sought at the planning stage. Because of the military's particularly advantageous qualifications for staging coups—being within the state apparatus and possessing the means for threatening violence—the military is normally involved. Coups can be staged entirely by the military, though the involvement of both military and civilian personnel is more usually the case and sometimes entirely civilian governments are installed.

Explaining Coups

A number of explanations have been offered for why coups occur, including some concentrating on personal or military grievances. Following the spate of coups in the new nations of Africa and Asia in the 1960s, coups came to be seen as the agents of economic and political development with the military viewed as a modernizing force intent, eventually, on handing back power to democratically elected government. This does sometimes happen, and in more recent years, coups have become less frequent and democratic institutions, such as elections, have been more commonly used. By the 1970s, however, it became clear that coups could also result in repressive dictatorships. The growing numbers of subsequent coups within new nations also undermined the view of coups as agents of modernization. These also showed that the military could be in conflict within itself, a finding in line with the longer history of coups in Latin America and coups that occurred in Greece in 1967 and 1973 and in Portugal in 1974. More compatible with repeat coups, an alternative explanation focused on the effects of colonialism in creating ethnic and social cleavages through the drawing of artificial state boundaries and establishing economies to serve capitalist world markets. In this line of argument, attention has also been drawn to the role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in assisting coups that protect capitalist markets against left-leaning governments. Class analysis, too, has been employed—with the high-ranking members of the military viewed as the sons of the middle class and the taking of political power interpreted as the means to acquire economic power.

...