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

Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups is Alabama-based Air War College Professor Naunihal Singh’s well-researched study of the strategic logic behind military coups d’état, particularly emphasizing such coups in African countries. It tabulates, for example, Ghana’s successful and unsuccessful military coups between February 1966 and June 1983 (p. 12). Chapter 4 discusses in detail military coups staged by officers from the top echelons of the armed forces, with Ghana as a case study (pp. 88–102).

In the introduction (pp. 1–14), Ghana’s New Year’s Eve 1981 military coup d’état, which unseated President Hilla Limann’s elected government, receives prominent exposure as an example of how a military officer, Flight Lieutenant John Jerry Rawlings, after his own military coup d’état, hands over power and later deems it necessary to seize that power again. “Rawlings and just a handful of men managed to take control of a military of 9,000 [men and women] and a country of 11,000,000” (p. 1).

Showing the uniqueness of the Ghanaian situation, Singh demonstrates that in the former USSR, a 1991 coup attempt failed miserably, though the plotters had more resources at their disposal. Instead, as Singh explains, “Rawlings attacked with only ten men carrying small arms and broader alliances with mainly disgruntled enlisted men and student radicals” (p. 1). Further explaining the uniqueness of the situation in Ghana in 1981, Singh discusses how Rawlings’s appeal for soldiers and civilians to join what he described as a holy war and a revolution were treated with indifference by the public: for the first time in the Ghanaian history of military takeovers, the call by Rawlings “even produced opposition from civilians, who had greeted prior successful coups with public jubilation. Yet, despite all these seeming obstacles, Rawlings prevailed” (p. 1).

Singh succeeds in making the first concrete and sustained theoretical and empirical overview of why some coup attempts fail while others succeed. To do so, he has utilized “almost 300 hours of interviews with coup participants and an original dataset of all coup attempts around the world between 1950 and 2000” (p. 2) with analysis to develop and test what he describes as “a novel theory of coup dynamics and outcomes” (p. 2).

Under the subtitle of “Understanding Coup Outcomes and Dynamics,” Singh makes clear that it is never an entire military force that plans and executes a coup, but only a section of them. Looking at, for example, how a master sergeant, Samuel K. Doe, led a successful coup against the entrenched Americo-Liberian government of President William R. Tolbert Jr., Singh explains that “a coup organized by sergeants, for example, is not a coup by ‘the armed forces’ but a coup by the lowest tier of the armed forces, whose success would threaten everybody above them in the military hierarchy, as well as remove the sitting government from power” (p. 5).

Singh shows that when low-ranking officers stage coups, they tend to hide their identities initially. According to Singh, there are various reasons for such behavior: “For example, when Muammar Gaddafi (then only a junior officer) overthrew King Idriss of Libya, he announced the coup attempt in the name of the entire armed forces, keeping his identity secret until after the coup had succeeded” (p. 153).

It is fascinating to read about instances of soldiers, in some countries, for various reasons, staging coups in the very year that elections have taken take place or are scheduled to take place. Here, Nigeria is a case in point: “The Nigerian election of 1993 was annulled by a military incumbent that did not wish President-elect [M. K. O.] Abiola to come to power, and newly elected President Ndadaye of Burundi (a Hutu) was assassinated by Tutsi officers a few months after he was sworn in” (p. 57). Singh shows how military officers stage coups after elections deemed fraudulent or rigged. For example, “President Shagari of Nigeria...