Coup d’état and a democratic signal: The connection between protests and coups after the Cold War
| Author | Taku Yukawa,Kaoru Hidaka,Kaori Kushima,Masafumi Fujita |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433211053187 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Coup d’e
´tat and a democratic signal:
The connection between protests
and coups after the Cold War
Taku Yukawa
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,
University of Tokyo
Kaoru Hidaka
Graduate School of Law, Tohoku
University
Kaori Kushima
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University
of Tokyo
Masafumi Fujita
Center for Pacific and American Studies,
University of Tokyo
Abstract
What connection exists between protests and coup attempts? Although recent studies have revealed that the former
incites the latter, they generally do not consider international factors. We contend that post-Cold War nonviolent
protests have promoted coup attempts. With sentiment in the international community turning against coups
following the end of the Cold War, coup organizers have had to portray their actions as democratic. Launching a
coup attempt during ongoing nonviolent protests became a convincing method to prove democratic bona fides. This
is because the international community favors nonviolence, and it signals that the emerging regime will not have
extreme preferences and will keep order. Conversely, the international community does not regard violent protests as
legitimate, and staging a coup attempt during violent protests will not enable a military to claim legitimacy. This
argument is tested through statistical analysis and by using the 2011 Egyptian coup as a case study. As expected, the
results indicate that the impact of protests on coup attempts varies depending on (1) whether those protests are
violent or nonviolent, and on (2) the period. Specifically, only the nonviolent protests in the post-Cold War era
prompt coup attempts meaningfully.
Keywords
coups, democracy, legitimacy, protests
Introduction
Essentially, there are two methods through which to
force a dictator to resign (Svolik, 2012; Wig & Rød,
2016: 793). The first occurs when strong opposition
within the elites forces a dictator to give up their power;
known as a coup. The other is witnessed when popular
protests escalate to the point that systemic transforma-
tion or the resignation of the dictator is the only alter-
native; this is often referred to as a revolution. A coup is
considered a horizontal dispute over power and revolu-
tion a vertical one.
In traditional comparative politics, coups and popular
protests have often been examined as separate phenomena
(Escriba
`-Folch, 2013; Svolik, 2009). However, in recent
years, a few studies have focused on the relationship
between coups and popular protests (Barany, 2016; Lee,
2014). One of the most prominent ideas related to this
topic is that protests incite coup attempts. The mechan-
isms that have been proposed are that coup attempts in
the midst of protests are more likely to succeed (Russell,
1974; Casper & Tyson, 2014; Johnson & Thyne, 2018),
that the occurrence of a protest helps to solvethe collective
action problems among military elites planning a coup
Corresponding author:
m.fujita.rsrch@gmail.com
Journal of Peace Research
2022, Vol. 59(6) 828–843
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433211053187
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attempt (Casper & Tyson, 2014), and that a governmen-
tal order to repress protests provokes defection by the
disloyal military (Croissant, Kuehn & Eschenauer,
2018: 143).
Thus, protests are thought to encourage coup
attempts, and multiple causal pathways have been pro-
posed for the mechanism. However, it has been noted
that studies attempting to theorize the behavior of the
military in popular mass uprisings have remained scarce
(Cassell, Booth & Seligson, 2018: 3; Koehler, 2017:
365). What this article considers to be particularly lack-
ing in research is the theorization of the conditions under
which protests will trigger coup attempts. What is the
difference between a case where protests trigger a coup
attempt and one where they do not? In answering this
question, this article makes a novel theoretical contribu-
tion by presenting the perspective of a democratic signal
to the international community. Since the end of the
Cold War, militaries that staged coups have been forced
to justify their illegal acts of regime overthrow to the
international community, as evidenced by the dataset
on military discourse co nstructed in this article. This
change in the international environment has significantly
transformed the relationship between protests and
coups.
Based on the above perspectives, we present the argu-
ment that nonviolent protests have promoted coup
attempts since the end of the Cold War. First, we argue
that protests must be divided between those that are
violent and those that are nonviolent. Second and more
importantly, we argue that the impact of protests on
coup attempts varies based on the period. That is, only
the nonviolent protests in the post-Cold War era
strongly prompt coup attempts.
Marinov & Goemans (2014) demonstrated that the
end of the Cold War radically transformed the way coup
attempts were staged, but that analysis has not been
linked to other research examining the connection and
causal factors between protests and coups. What were the
major changes caused by the end of the Cold War? One
is that the international community began to condemn
and punish coups (Marinov & Goemans, 2014; Shan-
non et al., 2015). This meant that the organizers of a
coup were forced to show the international community
that their actions were backed by popular opinion –
namely, they had to prove that what they were launching
was a democratic coup. One of the most convincing
methods through which they could prove their demo-
cratic bona fides was to initiate their coup attempt
during ongoing nonviolent protests. We argue that the
post-Cold War necessity to show the international
community that coups reflect public opinion has meant
that nonviolent protests have, in turn, come to incite
coup attempts.
This article contributes to the literature on the study
of coups. First, it offers new knowledge about the inter-
national factors involved in coup attempts. The role of
these international factors has not been researched thor-
oughly (Chacha & Powell, 2017: 824); however, we
introduce a new perspective on how the orchestrators
of a coup demonstrate to the international community
that that coup is a democratic one. Furthermore, with
the data collected from post-coup statements issued by
militaries that launched coups, we empirically show that
the need to send such a democratic signal arose. The
second contribution of this article is its perspective that
both the relationship between protests and coup
attempts and the factors influencing coup attempts vary
depending on the era. A coup attempt that occurred
during the Cold War took place within an entirely dif-
ferent international environment than one that occurred
after it; hence, these coup attempts must be analyzed
separately. It is necessary to reconsider trying to use a
single theory to explain every coup attempt after World
War II and apply quantitative analysis to them as a
whole. The third perspective this article offers is that it
discriminates between violent and nonviolent protests.
Each type has a distinctly different effect in the context
of coup attempt occurrence; it is therefore not possible to
merely lump them together as ‘protests’.
Previous research
Studies have extensively examined the factors that cause
a coup attempt (Belkin & Schofer, 2003; Roessler,
2011). The variables mentioned in those studies can
be divided into structural and trigger factors (Wig &
Rød, 2016), and the type of protest examined in this
article is considered a trigger factor. In practice, there
is a close relationship between the population revolting
against the establishment and the military launching a
coup attempt that overthrows the government. Many
studies have highlighted that both large-scale popular
uprisings and political instability may serve as triggers
for military coup attempts.
1
Existing studies have presented three mechanisms
through which protests cause coup attempts. The first
is the high chance of success that coup attempts staged
1
See Russell (1974), Casper & Tyson (2014), Johnson & Thyne
(2018), Belkin & Schofer (2003), Powell (2012), Wig & Rød
(2016), and Gassebner, Gutmann & Voigt (2016).
Yukawa et al. 829
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