Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups by Naunihal Singh

Naunihal Singh is Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College.

"this book offers the first sustained theoretical and empirical treatment of why some coup attempts fail while others succeed.

Based on almost 300 hours of interviews with coup participants and an original dataset of all coup attempts around the world between 1950 and 2000, this analysis develops and tests a novel theory of coup dynamics and outcomes."

"Empirically speaking, coups fail only when they are defeated by another armed actor, who is almost always another faction within the armed forces.

Civilian actors have little impact on what happens between the start and end of a coup attempt; when they are able to shape events, it is only to the extent that they can influence intra-military behavior. In practice, civilians alone have no ability to defeat a coup, no matter how many demonstrate and protest. Military units are both able and willing to disperse even extremely large groups of civilians, as the Chinese Army demonstrated in Tiananmen Square.

It is easy to lose sight of the intra-military component of a coup attempt, because scholars and journalists alike commonly describe coup attempts as being committed by 'the military,' as if armed forces function as a unitary actor."

Coups as a Coordination Game

The author says that a coup is a coordination game where actions of individuals depend on what he thinks others will do. If a person thinks others will support the coup, he will support the coup. The author also explains why this is so.

"In a coordination game, each individual has an incentive to do what others are doing, and therefore each individual’s choices are based on his or her beliefs about the likely actions of others.

The outcome of the game is determined when these beliefs converge among the actors. If you change the players’ expectations, you change their behavior as well."

"In a coordination game, expectations are powerful because they can become self-fulfilling.

Consider the case of a bank run, another situation modeled by a coordination game. In a situation where the bank lacks an external guarantor, depositors leave their money in the bank (and earn interest on it) when they think others will also do so, and they will join in a bank run if they think others are withdrawing their money. When people believe a bank will fail, they will pull their money out, and the bank will fail. What is more, when they believe that other depositors believe the bank will fail, they will withdraw their deposits, leading these expectations about the behavior of other depositors to become true, whether they were accurate originally or not.

In other words, no matter what the level of deposits in the bank, it is the depositors’ beliefs and meta-beliefs about the bank’s possible failure that determine the eventual outcome."

"The coordination game model captures the key dynamics of a wide range of collective action situations, whether social, economic, or political. Fads and fashions are obvious examples of coordination games, but so are a wide range of social norms and institutions that have endured for a long time.

Rousseau famously described the emergence of society from the state of nature as a coordination game (individuals can choose to hunt hares alone or stags together), and revolutions can be understood in much the same way. In each of these cases, the stability of the system is based on expectations, and change is the result of altered beliefs."

Importance of Coordination

People do not think for themselves. They do what they think others will do. It is mix of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and Game Theory.

"The main reason for restraint and coordination during a coup attempt is to avoid escalation into fratricidal conflict."

"The leaders of both sides take the possibility of a civil war seriously and are constrained by the desire to avoid it, in part because any such conflict would make their own families direct targets of violence."

Armed forces are not taught to think independently. Conformity is drilled into them.

"This rational calculation is reinforced by organizational norms that place great value on order within the armed forces."

"From the first days of military training, both soldiers and officers are taught that strength comes from coherent coordinated action and that undisciplined behavior during conflict is dangerous. As a result, the instinct to coordinate and avoid chaos is firmly rooted in strong habitual behavior."

Role of common knowledge

The author talks about the role of common knowledge. It is knowledge tha everyone knows, and crucially, everyone knows that everyone knows. This common knowledge influences people's actions.

Common Knowledge is not organic. It can be generated. The author calls this 'Making a Fact'.

"A key way to create or change expectations is via communication. For communication to shape expectations, however, the information conveyed not only has to become known to all parties, but also has to be known to be known by all parties, known to be known to be known by all parties, and so on. That is, it has to create not just knowledge but meta-knowledge (and meta-meta-knowledge, etc.), or what game theorists call 'common knowledge'.

To understand why, consider what is called the “coordinated attack problem,” in which two generals are trying to schedule an attack on an enemy encampment from different locations. If they attack together, they can vanquish their foe, but if either attacks alone, they both will lose."

"The problem they face is that communication between the two is unreliable. It’s not enough for the first general to tell the second to attack at dawn, because he doesn’t know if the second general will actually receive his message. Even if the message is transmitted, however, the second will not attack without knowing that the first one knows he has successfully received the message. But, even if the second sends an acknowledgment of its receipt, that isn’t enough either, because the first has to know that the second knows that the first knows, and so on. In short, coordination requires common knowledge."

"Because the generation of common knowledge can lead to collective action, having control over the means of creating such knowledge is very important for those who hold power or those who hope to pry it from them (Chwe 2001, 10). Overthrowing a dictatorship is a coordination game, one in which political actors want to join the protests if others are participating and want to stay at home if others stay at home. For this reason, dictatorships prize outward shows of conformity, especially on ritualized public occasions, because such displays strengthen the expectations that keep the system working.

Conversely, they heavily regulate public gatherings and mass media because these can be used to create expectations that could undermine the regime. A single radio broadcast is likely to be far more damaging than a banned cassette tape smuggled hand to hand; one public speech to a group is more of a danger than private conversations with an equivalent number of individuals."

"They [challengers] want to convince military actors that the success of the coup has the support of almost everybody in the institution and thus is essentially a fait accompli. In addition, they want to make it clear that any possible resistance is minor, doomed to fail, and irresponsible, since it would risk an escalating spiral of violence if it persisted.

I call this process “making a fact,” and I argue that when it is successfully done, members of the armed forces will support, either actively or tacitly, the attempted overthrow of the government."

'Making a Fact' via radio and broadcasts

"Making a fact is commonly done by seizing the main radio or other broadcast facility and making a broadcast to the other players. Conversely, to foil the coup attempt, an incumbent government needs to do the opposite: either hold on to broadcasting facilities in the first place or displace the challengers from them and then make a government broadcast to create expectations of the continued survival of the government and the failure of the challengers.

Indeed, the officers interviewed were emphatic that controlling the radio station is almost always necessary for coup success and that without it the coup will usually be doomed to failure.

Significantly, the purpose of broadcasts is to enable the challengers to seize power (or the government to retain it) and not to convince members of the military to join (or oppose) the coup nor to convince the general public of the coup’s legitimacy (or lack thereof).

For that reason, what matters is not that the broadcasts reach the public at large but instead that the information in the broadcast is “public” within the military, that is, that the content of the broadcast become common knowledge for members of the armed forces."

Social media is less effective during a coup. This is because social media is not 'common knowledge' compared to radio and TV broadcasts, and newspapers. Social media is likely to be disabled during internet blackouts during a coup.

"That means gaining control over the major broadcast channel and shutting down all others or forcing them to repeat the same message. The broadcast becomes common knowledge when it gains such widespread distribution that everybody not only has heard or seen it but can assume that everybody else has, and that everybody knows that everybody else has, etc."

"even though new information technologies, the Internet, and social media have proven to be important resources for civilian political dissidents, they will not fundamentally transform the way coups are conducted."

'Making a Fact' via meeting of key members of military

"Another strategy for accomplishing the same objective is to make a fact at a meeting of the key members of the military.

This meeting might be as small as a gathering of just the key commanders in and around the capital or as large as a meeting of all the commanders of fighting units around the country.

Anything said by the coup makers in such a meeting acts like a public broadcast to this specific audience, thereby creating common knowledge and shaping expectations.

The added benefit of this approach is that not only the broadcast but also the responses of those present are made public to all actors present, making a meeting with commanders even more potent than a radio broadcast at shaping expectations. If the meeting is carefully managed, the challengers not only can assert that there is widespread support for the coup but can seemingly demonstrate it by asking for anyone with objections to speak up. Because no one in the meeting is likely to risk openly challenging the coup makers, the apparent assent of the group to the coup becomes common knowledge among all those present. Having made their consent public among their peers, officers are unlikely to reverse themselves and oppose the coup after leaving the gathering.

What’s more, the coup’s success is ensured even if everybody present is secretly opposed to it, since what matters here are their expectations, not their personal beliefs. After the meeting, there is little loyalists can do to counter the coup, since the expectations formed make it difficult for any participant to oppose the challengers afterwards.

Although meetings are a better tool for creating expectations than radio or television broadcasts, they are used less often. Only senior officers have the ability to convene such meetings..."

Restraint in use of violence

People in military coups generally do not indiscriminately kill. Both sides show restraint. The author explains why this is so.

"...while challengers use force in many coup attempts, it is fruitful only when it results (directly or indirectly) in the creation of expectations favorable to their success.

Force is typically used to take control of the radio station or to capture prominent symbolic targets in the capital so as to lend credence to the claims made in the broadcast. This use of force, however, is very different from that which would occur during wartime.

Since coordination is driven by a fear of fratricide, both sides take pains to limit violence during skirmishes, even if they incur a tactical cost in the process.

Such restraint is evident even at the end of a coup attempt. Even when actors believe they will be executed for their deeds, they almost always surrender or flee rather than make a last stand and try to destroy the opposition."

Resources determine the outcome

"All coup makers face essentially the same challenges, but the resources available to them for coup making differ depending on their position within the military.

...these differences in the organizational position of the challengers within the armed forces hierarchy and the resources flowing from them translate into correspondingly varied tactics, dynamics, and likelihood of success."

"Challengers from the top (usually generals) are the best placed to successfully mount a coup, because their organizational position gives them greater “soft power,” which best allows them to manipulate the expectations of other military actors in a favorable way."

Coups from the middle ranks are more bloody becasue they have access to more firepower. They are less likely to succeeed.

Coups from lower ranks are mutinies, and least likely to succeed.




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