The Myth of the Coup Contagion

Naunihal Singh

Journal of Democracy, Volume 33, Number 4, October 2022, pp. 74-88

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2022.0048

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/866643

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 THE MYTH OF
THE COUP CONTAGION
Naunihal Singh

Naunihal Singh is associate professor in the Department of National

Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and the author of Seiz-
ing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups (2014). The views ex-
pressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the official policy or position of the Naval War College, Depart-
ment of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

In the early hours of 23 January 2022, shots rang out in military bar-
racks across Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, and in two other
cities, signaling a coup attempt. Over the course of the day, young pro-
testers fed up with the government’s failure to stop jihadist attacks in
the country poured into the streets and clashed with security forces as
the gunfire drew ever closer to the home of President Roch Marc Chris-
tian Kaboré, who had been reelected to a second term in 2020. The next
day, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba announced that
the military was deposing Kaboré and taking over. The French-trained
Damiba had served in an elite guard under autocrat Blaise Compaoré,
Burkina Faso’s longtime leader who had himself come to power via
coup in 1987 and lost power via coup in 2014.
This was just one of five successful military coups d’état in Africa be-
tween February 2021 and February 2022—in Chad, Mali, Guinea, Sudan,
and Burkina Faso—plus one in Burma. During the same period, there were
also failed putsches in Niger, Sudan, and Guinea-Bissau. These six suc-
cessful coups marked a sizeable jump in military interventions over the
average of two successful coups a year between 2015 and 2020.1 Here, I
define a coup attempt as an explicit action involving some portion of the
state military, police, or security forces that is undertaken with the intent
to overthrow the government. This encompasses not only the obvious coup
attempts but also situations where there were mass protests against the
incumbent, as long as the state-security apparatus was part of the removal
of the government—for example, by threatening to remove the president if

Journal of Democracy Volume 33, Number 4 October 2022

© 2022 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Naunihal Singh 75

he does not agree to step down. The revolutions in Egypt (2011) and Sudan
(2019) are therefore classified both as coups and as popular revolutions.
In a September 2021 address to the UN General Assembly, Secretary-
General Antonio Guterres stated that “military coups are back.” A month
later, just after the October 25 coup in Sudan, he warned of an “epidemic
of coups d’état.” And at a summit of the Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS) days after the January coup in Burkina Faso,
Ghanaian president and ECOWAS chair Nana Akufo-Addo lamented
that a “contagion” of coups could potentially “devastate” the region. But
Guterres and Akufo-Addo are wrong. The recent spate of coups d’état is
not the product of a contagion; nor is it, as some contend, an outgrowth
of insurgent violence or the insidious effect of Western military training.2
Diagnosing them as such misses the real root causes and, therefore, the
opportunity to better prevent coups in the future.
There is no contagion of coups. With so many coups happening in
such a short span of time—often in neighboring or nearby countries—it
is easy to imagine the dominoes falling. Yet what has been happening
over the past several years is not a shocking outbreak of putsches in
stable countries, with each attempted overthrow informing and inspiring
the next. All these countries had long and often recent histories of coups
d’état and military rule or meddling in politics. The eight states that saw
coup attempts between February 2021 and 2022 are among the countries
with the most attempts since 1950. Potential coupmakers therefore had
no need to look beyond their borders for proof that coups could be suc-
cessful or for guidance on how to pull them off.
These cases also show little evidence of the mechanisms of con-
tagion, such as emulation and learning, although it is difficult to tell
from the outside. The lack of contagion in these cases is consistent
with what I was told in interviews with officers who had plotted and
attempted coups in West Africa. While they were aware of coup at-
tempts in other countries, they did not consider such events relevant
to their own calculations, which were focused squarely on domestic
factors, with a heavy emphasis on military concerns. Statistical anal-
ysis also supports the claim that coups do not spread by contagion.
The most extensive study of the topic to date used a technique called
extreme-bounds analysis that examined nearly 1.2 million models in
an attempt to avoid spurious inferences. This study found no evidence
that coups spread by contagion, although more mass-driven political
events, such as protests and strikes, do.3
Coups are not the product of insurgent violence. The countries of
the Sahel—but also elsewhere in the world—have for years been facing
steadily rising insurgent violence. Terrorist incidents in the Sahel soared
in 2021, rising from 1,180 to 2,005 violent events; the number of fatali-
ties doubled from 2020; and there are currently some 2.4 million people
displaced in the region.4 National militaries have struggled to deal with
76 Journal of Democracy

FIGURE—GLOBAL INSTANCES OF COUP ATTEMPTS (1951–2022)

20

18

16

14

12

10

Successful Coups Failed Coups

Note: Data through January 2022.

Source: Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups from 1950
to 2010: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 48 (March 2011): 249–59.

the challenges posed by insurgent groups operating in their countries

and have often found themselves outmatched. In Burkina Faso, griev-
ances over insufficient training and resources for counterinsurgency ef-
forts were at the center of the January 2022 coup. A similar dynamic was
at play a decade ago in Mali, when junior officers, angry over insuffi-
cient support for fighting the civil war, ended two decades of democracy
in that country.
Yet, of the 2021–22 coups, only Burkina Faso’s clearly fits the bill
of soldiers overthrowing their government because of grievances related
to counterinsurgency efforts. Neither Guinea nor Guinea-Bissau is con-
tending with insurgencies or terrorism. And although there are serious
internal conflicts in Burma, Chad, Mali, and Sudan, the military men
who mounted those coups were already part of the power structure—a
structure they aimed to preserve, not to overturn, with their power grabs.
If insurgent violence were truly driving the coups, then there would
have been numerous attempts in the Sahel in 2015, when insurgent vio-
lence was at its highest—claiming at least ten-thousand lives, more than
twice as many as during the recent peak in 2020.5 Yet, between 2015
and 2020, there was just a single attempted coup in the region: a failed
putsch in Burkina Faso, which had nothing to do with insurgent violence
and everything to do with military infighting. Although the stresses of
Naunihal Singh 77

insurgency may degrade the quality of democracy and decrease popular

support for the incumbent, harm civil-military relations, and increase
frustration between military officers and those in power, these factors
explain neither the timing nor the number of countries recently experi-
encing coups.6 
Western military training is not causing coups—despite how it
looks. Most recent coup attempts have either been carried out by mili-
tary men who were trained or educated in the United States or have
taken place in countries where the U.S. military had a significant pres-
ence. The most striking example is the coup in Guinea. On 5 Septem-
ber 2021, a group of officers from Guinea’s elite special forces, led by
their commander, the 41-year-old former French legionnaire Colonel
Mamady Doumbouya, left in the middle of a months-long Green Beret
training in the town of Forécariah. The coupmakers drove four hours to
the capital, Conakry, where they battled their way into the presidential
palace, took 83-year-old President Alpha Condé captive, and overthrew
his government.7
Mali’s interim president, Colonel Assimi Go¦ta, who seized power in
2020 and again in 2021, had extensive U.S. military training in both Af-
rica and the United States, including during U.S. Africa Command’s an-
nual special-operations exercise on the continent (known as Flintlock).
The leader of Mali’s 2012 coup, Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, learned
English in a U.S. military program in Texas and completed infantry and
intelligence training in Georgia and Arizona, respectively.8 Damiba, the
most recent Burkinabé coup leader, had participated in multiple U.S.-led
exercises and trainings in Burkina Faso and Senegal, while Lieutenant-
Colonel Yacouba Isaac Zida, leader of the 2014 coup in Burkina Faso,
had attended counterterrorism and military-intelligence training courses
conducted by the U.S. military in both the United States and Botswana.9
The U.S. military has close institutional relationships with the mili-
taries of Niger and Chad, but does not appear to have trained the leaders
of the coups there. Niger hosts the largest U.S. military contingent in
the region. At the time of the failed coup in March 2021, days before the
president-elect was to take office, roughly eight-hundred U.S. military
personnel were stationed there.10 Chad’s army, meanwhile, is the lynch-
pin in Western counterterror operations in the Sahel and works closely
with both the U.S. and French militaries. The coup in Chad followed
the April 2021 death of President Idriss Déby (in power since 1990)
from battlefield injuries. Chad’s constitution called for the head of the
National Assembly to become interim president, but the Transitional
Military Council assumed power and installed Déby’s son, General Ma-
hamat Déby, instead.
Despite all this, studies that have examined the entire range of U.S.
military training of foreign militaries have found no statistical linkage
between the amount of training given and the increased likelihood of
78 Journal of Democracy

a coup attempt.11 U.S. Africa Command does not track how often offi-
cers whom it has trained try to overthrow their governments. But given
that between 1999 and 2016, thirty-four U.S. military training programs
taught 2.4 million soldiers abroad, it is hardly surprising that some of
the recent putschists had participated in them.12
In addition, foreign military training varies considerably in subject,
duration, location, and purpose. There are brief trainings lasting only
days that are focused on a single technical subject and longer courses
that last weeks, months, or even almost an entire year. Some are con-
ducted in a soldier’s home country by visiting instructors, others take
place in third countries in the region, and sometimes foreign military
personnel study in the United States. High-ranking officers, in particu-
lar, often attend programs run by foreign militaries or go abroad for
military training—not just in the United States, but also in other coun-
tries including China, Canada, England, France, and Russia.

The Real Roots of Coup Activity

If neither contagion, nor insurgent violence, nor international train-
ing is to blame for the recent wave of coups, then what is? Three key
structural factors made these countries particularly vulnerable to coup at-
tempts: a recent history of successful coups, low economic development,
and regimes that are neither highly democratic nor highly authoritarian.13
The coup trap. Past successful coups in a country increase its risk of
suffering future coup attempts. As noted above, the eight countries that
experienced coup attempts between February 2021 and 2022 were no
strangers to the coup d’état. To name just three examples, elected gov-
ernments in Mali fell to coups in 2012, 2021, and 2022; the transitional
government in Sudan that was overthrown in 2021 had come to power
after popular uprisings and military intervention toppled the previous
autocratic regime in 2019; and the 2022 coup in Burkina Faso followed
the 2014 coup that ousted a dictator already weakened by his own politi-
cal miscalculations and massive popular protests.
Moreover, all but Chad and Burma had seen at least one other coup
attempt in the ten years prior. Sudan has experienced three coup attempts
since 2019 alone, for a total of sixteen since independence (1956)—the
third-highest number of any country in the world since 1950. Including
the most recent events, Burkina Faso and Guinea-Bissau each have seen
nine coup attempts and Mali, eight.
Low economic development. Coup attempts are most common in
countries with low levels of economic development. The eight countries
that experienced coup attempts between February 2021 and 2022 were
among the poorest in the world, ranking in the bottom fifth of world
economies (by GDP per capita), according to the World Bank. They also
ranked low on other measures of development such as infant mortality.
Naunihal Singh 79

Regime type. Fully consolidated democracies and highly authoritar-

ian regimes with well-developed repressive apparatuses are less likely
to experience coup attempts than countries that fall somewhere in be-
tween, sometimes called anocratic or hybrid regimes. Most of the states
that have suffered recent coup attempts would be considered either
hybrid regimes or fledgling democracies that lack consolidated institu-
tions and norms. Seven of the nine coup attempts occurred in countries
with (at least nominally) elected governments. The two exceptions were
Mali and Sudan, both of which had unelected transitional governments
in 2021 that had been put in place after the overthrow of their previous
regimes. The fairness of the elections in the other six countries varied
considerably, from very fair in Burkina Faso to a total sham in Chad.
Freedom House characterized all eight countries that experienced coup
attempts as Partly Free or Not Free.

The Rise and Fall of Anti-Coup Norms

During the Cold War, the UN Security Council never addressed the
issue of coups d’état.14 And fewer than 30 percent of all coups from
1975 to 1989 received any international condemnation from the West
at all, even when taking into account the statements made by all West-
ern governments and liberal multilateral organizations including the
United Nations and IMF.15 But late in the Cold War, an international
norm against coups began to develop as a byproduct of the burgeoning
prodemocratic norms taking root around the same time.
In 1985, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Assistance and Re-
lated Programs Appropriations Act, prohibiting foreign aid from going
to El Salvador in the event that the president of the country was removed
by a military coup. Congress widened the scope of the law the following
year to stop the flow of broad categories of economic and security aid to
any country whose leader had been deposed in a coup. This provision,
known as Section 7008, has been a part of the State Department’s annual
appropriations bill ever since.16
By 1990, a majority of coups were condemned by at least one West-
ern government or associated liberal multilateral organization, and ev-
ery coup that took place between 2005 and 2009 was.17 When finan-
cial and diplomatic penalties accompanied such censure, the costs of
coupmaking shot up significantly, especially in developing economies
undergoing structural adjustment. These countries were often desperate
for capital, so losing access to financial aid from the West and the IMF
could be a very big deal indeed.
The United Nations began to embrace the norm against coups after
the 1991 military coup in Haiti, which the UN General Assembly con-
demned. In 1994, the Security Council adopted a resolution authorizing
the UN Mission in Haiti to use “all necessary means” to remove the mil-
80 Journal of Democracy

itary junta and restore the legitimate government. This pressure helped
to return the deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power.
Along with Western nations and liberal multilateral organizations,
two regional organizations in the most coup-prone regions also em-
braced anti-coup norms: the Organization of American States (OAS)
and the African Union (AU). Both the OAS and the AU adopted mea-
sures enabling the suspension of member states after a coup. The OAS’s
1991 Santiago Commitment to Democracy and 1992 Protocol of Wash-
ington (which went into effect in 1997) called for the suspension of any
country whose democratically elected government had been overthrown
by force. The Inter-American Democratic Charter, signed in 2001, spec-
ified how the OAS should proceed in the event of an interruption of
democracy in a member state.
The AU’s predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (1962–
2002), was never particularly committed to prodemocratic norms, and
instead emphasized sovereignty and noninterference. The Constitutive
Act of the African Union (2000), however, prohibits unconstitutional
changes of government in its member states, as does the 2007 African
Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance, which went into ef-
fect in 2012.18 Not all regional organizations embraced this norm equal-
ly, however. Both the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) prioritize sovereignty and
have members that oppose prodemocratic norms.
Since the end of the Cold War, coup activity has decreased dramati-
cally. During the Cold War, there were, on average, nine coup attempts
a year, and not a single year passed without at least one attempt some-
where in the world. But in the last three decades, there have been only
3.7 coup attempts a year on average, less than half the earlier level.
Formerly coup-prone regions, such as Latin America, the Middle East,
and Asia, now go multiyear stretches without a single attempt. Even
Africa, which still tops the rest of the world in coup activity, has seen a
20 percent drop in coup attempts.
What accounts for this change? Although multiple factors are surely
at play, statistical analysis has found that the threat of international sanc-
tions has contributed to the post–Cold War decrease in coup activity,
especially when criticism comes from a major power, trading partner, or
ally.19 It is also worth noting that coupmakers today tend to explain or
justify their actions with language that seems to be responsive to anti-
coup norms. In fact, in the post–Cold War era, successful putschists have
been three times more likely to claim that their military intervention was
not, in actuality, a coup; twice as likely to justify their actions in terms of
democratic values; and 45 percent more likely to say that they were tak-
ing power only temporarily.20 All this suggests that the rise of anti-coup
norms, more broadly, has helped to curb coupmaking globally.
 For some time, however, anti-coup norms have been eroding, weak-
Naunihal Singh 81

ening their deterrent effect. There are two key reasons for this: incon-
sistent enforcement and the rise of regimes that do not share this norm.
It is not easy for any country or multilateral organization to prioritize
punishing (and hence discouraging) coups over competing political and
security concerns. This is true even for those countries and bodies that
pioneered and promoted anti-coup norms in the first place. The United
States, for example, does not always cut off financial aid after a coup.
The legislation requiring it to do so applies only to coups that unseat
a “duly elected” leader. Thus there was no automatic cessation of aid
to Niger after the 2010 coup or Zimbabwe after the 2017 overthrow
of Robert Mugabe, although in both cases aid was stopped for other
reasons. Countries where coups were accompanied by popular protests,
such as Burkina Faso in 2014, have also been exempted from the auto-
matic imposition of sanctions on the grounds that the event was a “popu-
lar uprising” and not a coup.
When coups topple governments in strategically important countries,
the U.S. State Department can decline to formally declare those changes
in government to be coups. This happened in Egypt in 2013, Algeria in
2019, and Chad in 2021. In the case of Egypt, Congress went so far as
to insert new language into the 2014 appropriations bill making it clear
that funds could still go to Egypt. In fact, in the past decade, only Fiji,
Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Mali, and Thailand have been cut off as a
result of the anti-coup restrictions in the Foreign Aid Appropriations
Bill. In addition, while the State Department did not classify events in
Honduras in 2009 and Niger in 2010 as automatically invoking sanction
under the law (Honduras was categorized as not a “military coup,” and
the military intervention in Niger was not considered a coup because
the president had overstayed his original constitutional term), it did vol-
untarily suspend aid to these countries in a manner consistent with the
law.21
Section 7008 was written narrowly to apply to cases where the mili-
tary acts largely alone and takes power by overthrowing a duly elected
president. It does not require that the State Department make a determi-
nation as to whether a military intervention is a coup. This is something
that Congress could easily change but so far has chosen not to, most
likely because of the priority placed on maintaining security assistance.
The United Nations has also been both inconsistent and weak in re-
sponding to coups. Despite the UN’s strong response to the coups in
Haiti in 1991 and Sierra Leone in 1997, the Security Council has since
been silent on the vast majority of coups, including those in Pakistan
(1999), Egypt (2013), and Thailand (2006 and 2014). The Security
Council rarely issues formal resolutions condemning military takeovers.
When it does, its censure usually targets coups in countries with little
strategic importance to its permanent members, such as the 2012 coup in
Guinea-Bissau.22 While the Security Council’s press releases have been
82 Journal of Democracy

more critical of coups than have its resolutions, it almost never imposes
major sanctions after a coup.23 Although the Security Council is the UN
body that is best equipped to apply penalties enforcing the anti-coup
norm, China and Russia do not accept this norm, the United States is
ambivalent about strong international institutions, and all members at
certain times might simply prefer to prioritize other concerns over creat-
ing an effective deterrent to future coups.

The Power of Peer Pressure?

Some regional bodies vigorously condemn coups but are still gener-
ally unwilling to do much else in response—for example, to impose
sanctions or restore the previous government by force. The AU has sus-
pended all but two member states whose governments have fallen to
coups since 2010, the exceptions being Zimbabwe in 2017 and Chad in
2021. Of the countries that experienced coups between February 2021
and 2022, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan were suspended—a
record number of member suspensions in a single year. It is worth not-
ing that Chad dodged suspension largely on specious grounds related to
internal insecurity in the country.24 Yet Burkina Faso and Mali also face
a significant transnational insurgent threat and were still suspended.
This discrepancy shows that even organizations that are generally con-
sistent about suspending members will still defer to political pressure
when it comes to strategically important countries. The bigger problem
for the African Union, however, is that membership suspension alone is
not truly a significant penalty for most members (membership confers
mainly diplomatic benefits, and does not come with either economic or
security goods), and therefore seems neither to deter coupmakers nor to
force them to restore democracy quickly.
Other regional organizations, including ASEAN, refuse to penalize
their members for coups d’état. ASEAN abides by the principles of con-
sensus and nonintervention. Moreover, China, while not a member, is
the biggest power in the neighborhood and a major trading partner for
most ASEAN members. Not only did ASEAN not impose any penalties
after coups in Thailand (2014) and Burma (2021), but the body failed
even to criticize the coupmakers for what they had done. Needless to
say, sanctions—diplomatic and economic—were off the table. Simi-
larly, the GCC neither censured nor sanctioned the 2021 coup in Sudan.
Even when countries do face sanctions for coups, they can now cush-
ion the blow because they have other options for patrons and allies. In
the first two decades after the Cold War, by contrast, most develop-
ing countries relied almost exclusively on the United States and other
Western countries and organizations. But today, the military junta in
Burma, for example, can offset U.S., EU, U.K., and Canadian sanctions
with Chinese financial and diplomatic support. Chinese foreign policy
Naunihal Singh 83

opposes sanctions, which it sees as an intrusion into a country’s internal

affairs. Thus Beijing has supported the junta even though China had
also maintained close relations with the Aung San Suu Kyi–led National
League for Democracy administration
that the military deposed, and even
Applying penalties though Beijing has reason to worry
sporadically will weaken about the possible destabilization of
their deterrent effect: Burma under the junta. Similarly, after
Why would an aspiring a 2006 military coup in Fiji, Chinese
aid to Fiji rose from US$23 million to
coup leader not expect at
$161 million.25
least a chance of being Although Beijing’s opposition to
spared any negative prodemocratic norms is the most con-
consequences associated sequential given the size and weight of
with seizing power? the Chinese economy, it is not the only
country that coupmakers can turn to.
After Egypt’s military overthrew Pres-
ident Mohamed Morsi in 2013, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United
Arab Emirates (UAE) rushed to pledge $12 billion to support Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi’s junta in the first week after the coup.26 While the United
States, IMF, and World Bank have all paused economic assistance to
Sudan after the 2021 coup, the UAE has offered the military govern-
ment $6 billion in long-term investments and a $300 million deposit into
Sudan’s central bank.27
Russia has proved itself another powerful potential backer, although
more in the realm of security than financing. France had once been Ma-
li’s primary external security partner, but relations between France and
Mali soured during the nine years of France’s counterinsurgency cam-
paign in Mali, and became appreciably worse as a result of the military
coup. In 2021, France announced that it would scale back its presence in
Mali. Whereas in the past the Malian junta might have had to compro-
mise with the French to maintain significant levels of foreign security
support, Mali’s junta was instead able to invite in the Wagner Group, a
Kremlin-linked private military firm, whose mercenaries began arriving
at the end of that year. At the beginning of 2022, Mali expelled France’s
ambassador and in May withdrew from its defense accords with the for-
mer colonial power.
The combination of reluctant (or silent) condemnation of coups by
prodemocratic organizations and the increase of potential support from
countries that do not embrace anti-coup norms is making it easier for
juntas to evade significant punishment—thereby reducing the deter-
rent effect on would-be coupmakers. This does not mean that we will
start seeing coup attempts in countries where they had previously been
unlikely. But it may remove some of the factors that discourage coup
plotters—particularly in countries experiencing a contested transition,
84 Journal of Democracy

where military actors are actively considering pushing civilian partners

out of the government.
Given the enduring domestic factors that make countries vulnerable
to coups and an evolving international order that can shield coup lead-
ers from punishment and inure them to inducements to restore the old
order, coup activity is not likely to fall to the low levels seen in the
post–Cold War era. Rather, the current increase in coup activity may be
long-lasting and may continue to grow.

Countering Coups
Although Western governments want to promote and support the
spread and consolidation of democracies around the world, they too of-
ten place economic and security goals first. As a result, the West will
continue to penalize juntas inconsistently and only in countries deemed
strategically unimportant. Sanctions will be levied against countries
such as Fiji but not Honduras, Mali but not Chad, and never against
Egypt or Pakistan. Applying penalties sporadically will weaken their
deterrent effect: Why would an aspiring coup leader not expect at least
a chance of being spared any negative consequences associated with
seizing power?
As the geostrategic rivalry between the West and China and Russia
intensifies, democracy promotion risks becoming less of a priority for
the West. This will have two serious consequences. First, repairing anti-
coup norms will be put permanently on the backburner. And second,
Western countries may choose not to impose sanctions for coups that
remove hostile elected governments and replace them with pro-Western
military juntas. At the same time, Russia and China will have stronger
incentives to continue undermining anti-coup norms. Russia is now re-
turning to Africa, and while it has far less to offer now than it did dur-
ing the Cold War, the Kremlin has clear incentives to build a broader
portfolio of diplomatic and economic partnerships, especially given the
sanctions imposed on it since its invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin,
therefore, will probably try to undercut sanctions against the juntas that
recently grabbed power.
Beijing has made it clear that it considers unilateral sanctions to be
illegitimate and believes that penalizing countries that have military re-
gimes is an interference in their internal affairs. If the United States and
Europe delink their economies from China’s and their relationships with
Beijing become more confrontational, Beijing may respond by more ag-
gressively courting countries that the West has actively shunned. The
promise of Chinese support—even if it is not enough to fully replace
lost support from Western countries or from suspended IMF or World
Bank loans—might substantially undercut the deterrent effect of any
anti-coup sanctions that are applied.
Naunihal Singh 85

For now, regional organizations such as the OAS, AU, and ECOWAS
may continue to oppose coups, but are unlikely to do more to enforce
anti-coup norms than what they have been doing already. Worse still,
they may begin to do even less. These bodies, after all, have only limited
ability to punish military juntas, and not one of them has the leverage
that big donor countries possess. All three can threaten diplomatic pen-
alties, but the suspension of membership in a regional body can carry
only so much weight as a deterrent.
The failure of ECOWAS sanctions against Mali may be instructive
in this regard. ECOWAS imposed a series of harsh sanctions in re-
sponse to Mali’s 2021 coup (its second in less than a year) and Go¦ta’s
proposal to delay the return to democracy for five years. In addition
to suspending Mali’s membership in the organization, Malian govern-
ment assets held in the Central Bank of West African States were fro-
zen, land and air travel within member states were prohibited, and a
significant amount of trade with ECOWAS countries was banned.28
Similar sanctions that were imposed after Mali’s 2019 coup were es-
timated to have reduced imports by as much as 30 percent, enough to
cause significant economic disruption.29
But rather than offer to significantly shorten the timetable for democ-
ratization, Go¦ta’s junta dug in, gaining assurances from neighboring
Guinea (another ECOWAS member led by a military junta) and Mauri-
tania (a non-ECOWAS member) that they would not enforce the trade
embargo. At the same time, that embargo hurt other ECOWAS mem-
bers, including Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, raising the cost of meat amid
rising global inflation. The junta managed to convince Malians that both
ECOWAS and France were to blame for their problems; it was the sanc-
tions, not the military takeover, that were harming people’s livelihoods.
This narrative inevitably damaged ECOWAS’s standing in Mali, and in
the end it was ECOWAS that blinked. After a July 5 meeting with Mali’s
leaders, ECOWAS gave up on sanctions without obtaining the desired
concessions from the junta.30 After failing so drastically to enforce sig-
nificant and sustained penalties on Mali’s junta, ECOWAS leaders will
probably not mount a similar response again; their mild responses to the
coups in Guinea (sanctions against the junta alone) and Burkina Faso (a
mere warning) indicate as much.
So what does all this mean? Are coups “back,” as Antonio Guterres
warned? The answer is not straightforward. Coup activity is increasing,
but not everywhere. Latin America, once a hotbed of military interven-
tion, has seen a dramatic drop in coup activity in recent decades. There
has not been a successful coup attempt in Argentina, where attempted
power grabs once abounded, since 1976. Twenty years ago, the presi-
dency of Argentina changed hands four times in two weeks without even
the hint of a coup.
Africa is a different story. The seven countries that recently experi-
86 Journal of Democracy

enced coups will be even more vulnerable to future coups. Democratic

decline across the region will expand the number of hybrid regimes with
weak institutions. And years of a global pandemic followed by Russia’s
war on Ukraine, which is having worldwide ramifications, are not mak-
ing poor countries any richer. All these conditions make the region ripe
for coups. Outside of Africa, Burma, Thailand, and Pakistan are facing
similar circumstances; each has suffered successful coups with no sig-
nificant sanctions as a result.
International norms against coups have eroded and are likely to be-
come weaker still. Penalties against coupmaking are also weak and in-
consistently applied. When Western countries fail to act against coups
out of fears of disrupting security relationships, they appear hypocriti-
cal, preaching the virtues of democracy but placing a low value on
democracy-promoting actions in practice. When Western countries do
sanction military governments, Beijing, Moscow, and other authoritar-
ian powers are willing to step into the breach, thus further reducing
the deterrent impact of any anti-coup action. All these factors have
contributed to the most serious democratic slump in decades.
In the end, there is no substitute for clear and consistent implementa-
tion of prodemocratic and anti-coup norms, without loophole or excep-
tion. This can be inconvenient in the best of circumstances; sometimes
it can be very costly for competing strategic priorities. In the long term,
however, steadfast support for these norms will lead to a more democrat-
ic and peaceful world. Anything less guarantees that governments will
continue to be overthrown by the militaries that are meant to serve them.

NOTES

1. All references to the number of coups between 1950 and the present are derived
from the updated version of the Powell and Thyne coup dataset: Jonathan M. Powell and
Clayton L. Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups from 1950 to 2010: A New Dataset,” Jour-
nal of Peace Research 48 (March 2011): 249–59. The definition of a coup in this dataset
is slightly different from the one provided in this essay.

2. See, for example, “ECOWAS Chairman Says ‘Contagious’ Mali Coup Has Set a
Dangerous Trend,” France24, 3 February 2022, www.france24.com/en/africa/20220203-
west-african-leaders-hold-summit-after-wave-of-coups-bring-turmoil-to-region; Beverly
Ochieng, “Burkina Faso Coup: Why Soldiers Have Overthrown President Kaboré,” BBC,
25 January 2022, www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60112043; Nick Turse, “Another U.S.-
Trained Soldier Stages a Coup in West Africa,” The Intercept, 26 January 2022, https://
theintercept.com/2022/01/26/burkina-faso-coup-us-military.

3. Michael K. Miller, Michael Joseph, and Dorothy Ohl, “Are Coups Really Conta-
gious? An Extreme Bounds Analysis of Political Diffusion,” Journal of Conflict Resolu-
tion 62 (February 2018): 410–41.

4. Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), “Surge in Militant Islamist Violence in
the Sahel Dominates Africa’s Fight Against Extremists,” 24 January 2022, https://africa-
center.org/spotlight/mig2022-01-surge-militant-islamist-violence-sahel-dominates-afri-
ca-fight-extremists.
Naunihal Singh 87

5. ACSS, “Surge in Militant Islamist Violence.”

6. While there is some scholarship that demonstrates a statistical relationship between

civil wars and coup attempts in general, it does not apply well to the dynamics observed
in these particular coup attempts. Curtis Bell and Jun Koga Sudduth, “The Causes and
Outcomes of Coup During Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 61 (August 2017):
1432–55.

7. Declan Walsh and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Forces Were Training the Guinean Soldiers
Who Took Off to Stage a Coup,” New York Times, 10 September 2021.

8. Lee J.M. Seymour and Theodore McLauchlin, “Does US Military Training Incubate
Coups in Africa? The Jury Is Still Out,” The Conversation, 28 September 2020, http://
theconversation.com/does-us-military-training-incubate-coups-in-africa-the-jury-is-still-
out-146800.

9. Stephanie Savell, “U.S. Security Assistance to Burkina Faso Laid the Groundwork
for a Coup,” Foreign Policy, 3 February 2022, http://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/03/burki-
na-faso-coup-us-security-assistance-terrorism-military.

10. U.S. White House, “Letter to the Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore
of the Senate Regarding the War Powers Report,” 8 June 2021, www.whitehouse.gov/
briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/08/letter-to-the-speaker-of-the-house-and-
president-pro-tempore-of-the-senate-regarding-the-war-powers-report.

11. While a highly influential early study by Savage and Caverly (2017) found a rela-
tionship between training in two major U.S. foreign-military education programs and the
likelihood of a coup in a country, later research that examined a broader set of U.S. military
training programs does not support that conclusion. See Jesse Dillon Savage and Jonathan D.
Caverley, “When Human Capital Threatens the Capitol: Foreign Aid in the Form of Military
Training and Coups,” Journal of Peace Research 54 (July 2017): 542–57; Stephen Watts et
al., Building Security in Africa: An Evaluation of U.S. Security Sector Assistance in Africa
from the Cold War to the Present (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2018); Theo-
dore McLauchlin, Lee J.M. Seymour, and Simon Pierre Boulanger Martel, “Tracking the
Rise of United States Foreign Military Training: IMTAD-USA, a New Dataset and Research
Agenda,” Journal of Peace Research 59 (March 2022): 286–96.

12. Nick Turse, “The Military Isn’t Tracking US-Trained Officers in Africa,” Respon-
sible Statecraft blog, 30 March 2022, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/03/30/us-mil-
itary-isnt-tracking-the-officers-it-trains-in-africa; Seymour and McLauchlin, “Does US
Military Training Incubate Coups in Africa?”

13. Naunihal Singh, Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

14. Richard Gowan and Ashish Pradhan, “Why the UN Security Council Stumbles in
Responding to Coups,” International Crisis Group, 24 January 2022, www.crisisgroup.
org/global/why-un-security-council-stumbles-responding-coups.

15. Taku Yukawa, Kaoru Hidaka, and Kaori Kushima, “Coups and Framing: How Do
Militaries Justify the Illegal Seizure of Power?” Democratization 27 (July 2020): 816–35.

16. Alexis Arieff, Marian L. Lawson, and Susan G. Chesser, “Coup-Related Restric-
tions in U.S. Foreign Aid Appropriations,” Congressional Research Service, 24 February
2022, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11267/11.

17. Yukawa, Hidaka, and Kushima, “Coups and Framing.”

18. Oisín Tansey, “The Fading of the Anti-Coup Norm,” Journal of Democracy 28
(January 2017): 144–56.
88 Journal of Democracy

19. Jonathan Powell, Trace Lasley, and Rebecca Schiel, “Combating Coups d’Etat in
Africa, 1950–2014,” Studies in Comparative International Development 51 (December
2016): 482–502. Clayton Thyne et al., “Even Generals Need Friends: How Domestic and
International Reactions to Coups Influence Regime Survival,” Journal of Conflict Resolu-
tion 62 (August 2018): 1406–32.

20. Yukawa, Hidaka, and Kushima, “Coups and Framing.”

21. Arieff, Lawson, and Chesser, “Coup-Related Restrictions in U.S. Foreign Aid Ap-
propriations.”

22. Oisín Tansey, “Lowest Common Denominator Norm Institutionalization: The An-
ti-Coup Norm at the United Nations,” Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism
and International Organizations 24 (April–June 2018): 287–305.

23. Tansey, “The Fading of the Anti-Coup Norm.”

24. Paul-Simon Handy and Félicité Djilo, “AU Balancing Act on Chad’s Coup Sets a
Disturbing Precedent,” ISS Africa, 2 June 2021, https://issafrica.org/iss-today/au-balanc-
ing-act-on-chads-coup-sets-a-disturbing-precedent.

25. Jian Yang, “China in Fiji: Displacing Traditional Players?,” in The Pacific Islands
in China’s Grand Strategy: Small States, Big Games (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), 75–88.

26. Tansey, “The Fading of the Anti-Coup Norm.”

27. Nafisa Eltahir, “Exclusive UAE to Build Red Sea Port in Sudan in $6 Billion Invest-
ment Package,” Reuters, 21 June 2022, sec. Middle East, www.reuters.com/world/middle-
east/exclusive-uae-build-red-sea-port-sudan-6-billion-investment-package-2022-06-20.

28. Agence France-Presse, “Mali’s Junta Breaks Off from Defense Accords with
France,” VOA, 2 May 2022, www.voanews.com/a/mali-s-junta-breaks-off-from-defense-
accords-with-france-/6554711.html.

29. Tiemoko Diallo, “West African Bloc May Lift Mali Sanctions Soon, Says En-
voy,” Reuters, 23 September 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-mali-security-idUSKC-
N26E2XR.

30. This is not to say that the Malian junta offered nothing. They passed a new elec-
toral law, made arrangements for an election authority, and assured ECOWAS that elec-
tions would be held in 2024.