How to Prevent Coups d’État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival. Erica De Bruin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.

“Where coup plotters can coordinate extensively in advance, the coup can be accomplished without visible movements of troops at all. Instead, coup plotters simply announce that they have taken power.”[1]

Erica De Bruin’s How to Prevent Coups d’État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival was a long-awaited release for a couple of reasons. First, the initial article this book is based on has been cited nearly 100 times in less than three years. Introducing a way to quantify a notoriously difficult to quantify concept changed the discussion in national security and civilian-military relations, and not just among coup scholars. Second, De Bruin is thorough in examining consequences throughout her work. Every policy has both intended and unintended consequences, and this is certainly true of coup-proofing exercises. De Bruin uses both qualitative and quantitative evidence on counterbalancing and coup attempts to be as transparent as possible about past implications of counterbalancing as a coup-proofing strategy.

De Bruin uses her novel dataset on counterbalancing and case studies to paint a compelling picture of what leaders can expect in implementing this technique, fractionalizing the monopoly of force, to prevent coups d’etat. In Chapter 2 she presents statistical evidence that counterbalancing decreases the likelihood of a successful coup, which she then fleshes out in Chapter 3 using case studies of Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya, King Hassan II in Morocco, and Manuel Noriega in Panama. In these cases, counterbalancing had an impact on the coup’s outcome. Chapter 4 once again returns to the data to examine whether counterbalancing is effective in deterring coup attempts, finding that they do not deter coup attempts, but in fact increase the risk of a coup attempt in the following year. In Chapter 5 she compares the failed counterbalancing attempt of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana to the more successful efforts of Saskia Stevens in Sierra Leone, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Modibo Keita in Mali. In Chapter 6, she argues that counterbalancing can increase the risk that coup attempts escalate to civil war. For example, she compares two coup attempts in the Dominican Republic: the bloodless coup in 1963 and the 1965 coup which escalated into a civil war. 

Why Counterbalancing Matters

If a coup attempt is defined as “illegal and overt actions intended to seize executive authority in a state” that “originate[s] from within the regime in power”, while “the threat of violence underlies all coup attempts,” then even an unsuccessful coup attempt seems like a fundamental concern for leaders.[2][3] Worse, nearly half of coup attempts succeed, a definite threat to leaders in power. Normatively, although some successful coup attempts may bring about democracy, most successful coups in authoritarian regimes replace one authoritarian with another.[4] In summary, preventing coup attempts is an important consideration for leaders regardless of outcome.

What’s a Leader to Do?

Knowing that coup-proofing is in the self-interest of state leaders, De Bruin focuses her discussion on a particular type of coup-proofing, known as counterbalancing. Counterbalancing the military is the exercise of expanding the monopoly of force to a specific subset of actors outside of the military— in this case, civilians. As De Bruin describes it, one may counterbalance the military “with republican guards, secret police, and other security forces outside the regular military chain of command…This is because, over time, presidential guards, secret police, civilian militia, and other security forces develop their own organizational interests, distinct from those of the military.”[5]

Commitment problems stem from counterbalanced forces posing a direct threat to a coup-installed regime. Their influential position may be mobilized by the ousted leader to stage a rebellion or they may be disbanded by the fledgling regime. This threat of demotion, De Bruin argues, is what incentivizes counterbalancing forces to not support coup-borne regimes.

The problems faced by coup plotters in counterbalanced militaries include coordination and commitment. First, coordination problems arise when planning coup attempts because leaders of counterbalanced forces rarely meet, especially when compared with unified armed forces, where leaders often meet without suspicion. Coup plotters may be forced to make public statements of support without formalized agreement. Commitment problems stem from counterbalanced forces posing a direct threat to a coup-installed regime. Their influential position may be mobilized by the ousted leader to stage a rebellion or they may be disbanded by the fledgling regime. This threat of demotion, De Bruin argues, is what incentivizes counterbalancing forces to not support coup-borne regimes. In chapter 3, she examines the qualitative evidence of sixteen coup attempts, 12 unsuccessful, 4 successful, and finds commitment problems, including the threat of resistance, a much more prominent causal mechanism than coordination problems. For those questioning whether military size is a prominent confounding factor, she finds only weak correlations between military strength and coup success, as well as weak correlations between military strength and counterbalancing suggesting that military strength is not what drives her results.

However, De Bruin argues that counterbalancing is costly. Counterbalancing can lead to discontent within military ranks and an increase in coup attempts. Chapter four presents statistical evidence that new counterweights have a positive and statistically significant relationship with coup attempts, and that creating a new counterweight increases the risk of a coup attempt in the following year. While she argues that counterbalancing causes increased coup attempts, she is transparent that she cannot find empirical evidence to validate this claim over an alternative argument: that leaders facing increased coup risk are more likely to counterbalance and also more likely to experience a coup attempt on their watch.[6] That there are patterns by regime type, in terms of number of counterweights implemented, is a result that is additive to the literature, particularly in the wake of findings that successful coups are capable of changing the regime type.

She finds that while coup attempts are not particularly likely to bring about civil war, the presence of an armed counterweight increases the risk that coups will escalate.

Given these findings, we return to the question raised earlier: What’s a leader to do? In chapter 5, she presents cases and lessons that are a pivotal part of the book and of utmost interest to the strategic security community. De Bruin uses Ghana (1960-66), Sierra Leone (1968-74), Mali (1960-68), and Cuba (1959-65) to explain divergent outcomes following the creation of new counterweights. The case comparisons here are well-structured and detail-rich without becoming overly scrupulous. These cases suggest that the type of force used to counterbalance the military may matter for the level of grievance among existing forces. Paramilitary police forces were created in the two successful cases of Sierra Leone and Cuba, while Ghana created a presidential guard and Mali developed a popular militia. Dividing the large-N data by type of force, De Bruin finds that new popular militias and new intelligence services increase the risk of a coup attempt in the following year, while there is no statistically significant relationship between the creation of a presidential guard or a militarized police force and risk of a coup attempt in the following year.

While chapter 5 gives some insight into what works for leaders, in chapter 6 De Bruin explores the ever-present discussion of coups and the risk of civil war. She finds that while coup attempts are not particularly likely to bring about civil war, the presence of an armed counterweight increases the risk that coups will escalate. This is a danger of counterbalancing that should be highlighted and taken into account in any policymaking calculus, and De Bruin makes clear that there are no definitive policymaking prescriptions that come from this book as a result of these sometimes severe trade-offs.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this book is an insightful empirical introduction to counterbalancing and its implications on coup attempts and the likelihood of success, as well as the possibility of later conflict. I would recommend it to those interested in civilian-military relations, especially in countries with considerable coup risk, specifically due to the richness of the cases and the novelty and accessibility of the findings. De Bruin has paved the way for a more empirically-grounded study of coup-proofing in general and counterbalancing specifically.

To those with a background in coup studies or civilian-military relations, How to Prevent Coups d’état draws parallels to Naunihal Singh’s Seizing Power, particularly as an extension of coordination games applied to the field of coup studies. I found it interesting that this work applied coordination problems and commitment problems, two often-discussed game theoretic explanations for conflict, but other game theoretic explanations of conflict, such as issue indivisibility and incomplete information, or incentives to misrepresent, are not fully fleshed out, even as analytic narratives. In an event with such a profound impact on the professional and even personal lives of counterweight force members, rapport and unwillingness to compromise might play a large role, be it rapport with other branches of the armed forces, rapport with the leader, or rapport with the other civilians potentially impacted by regime change or lack thereof. Likewise, transparency issues seem to abound in the narratives given in each of the case studies, ultimately suggesting that these could play a role, but they are not a central emphasis of this work. This book is a great addition to the literature as it paves the way for further exploring rationalist explanations of both coup-proofing and coup success, implementing what we know from bargaining models of war to other sorts of political conflict and civilian-military relations.

Emily VanMeter is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and a Post-Field Work Dissertation Completion Fellow at University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.

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Header Image: Protest in Myanmar against Military Coup 14 Feb. 2021 (Htin Linn Aye).

Notes:

[1] Erica De Bruin, How to Prevent Coups d’etat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020: p. 7.

[2] Erica De Bruin, How to Prevent Coups d’etat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020: p. 6.

[3] See Jonathan Powell, Mwita Chacha, and Gary E. Smith, “Failed coups, democratization, and authoritarian entrenchment: opening up or digging in?” African Affairs 118, no. 471 (2019), 238-258 for more on failed coup attempts.

[4] Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans, “Coups and Democracy,” British Journal of Political Science 44, no. 4  (2014), 799-825. Clayton Thyne and Jonathan Powell, “Coup d’état or Coup d’Autocracy ? How Coups Impact Democratization, 1950-2008, ” Foreign Policy Analysis 12, no. 2 (2016), 192-213.

[5] De Bruin (2020), p. 7-8.

[6] De Bruin (2020), p. 87.