(C) Common Dreams
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Coups Are on the Rise. Why? [1]
['Amanda Taub']
Date: 2023-09-13
Following the news lately is enough to make one wonder if coups might be contagious.
Military leaders seized power in Gabon on Aug. 30, adding it to a list of at least seven African countries — including Niger just a few weeks earlier — that have experienced military takeovers in the last three years.
The recent surge is particularly surprising because coups, particularly successful ones, had been relatively rare in the decades following the end of the Cold War.
“If you told me a decade ago that would be happening today, I would not have thought that that was a reasonable expectation,” said Erica De Bruin, a Hamilton College political scientist who wrote a book in 2020 about coup prevention.
Coups are not actually “contagious” in the sense that one directly causes another, experts say.
“We are seeing more coups not because of a contagion, but because of a more permissive environment,” said Naunihal Singh, a political scientist at the U.S. Naval War College. “So countries that are already coup-prone are less restrained.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/world/europe/interpreter-coups-web.html
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