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 contending 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 violence 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 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 experiencing coups.⁶

Western military training is not causing coups—despite how it looks

Most recent coup attempts have either been carried out by military men who were trained or educated in the United States or have taken place in countries where the U.S. military had a significant presence. The most striking example is the coup in Guinea. On 5 September 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 Africa and the United States, including during U.S. Africa Command’s annual 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 militaries 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 Mahamat 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 a coup attempt.¹¹ U.S. Africa Command does not track how often officers 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 conducted 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 particular, often attend programs run by foreign militaries or go abroad for military training—not just in the United States, but also in other countries including China, Canada, England, France, and Russia.

The Real Roots of Coup Activity

If neither contagion, nor insurgent violence, nor international training is to blame for the recent wave of coups, then what is? Three key structural factors made these countries particularly vulnerable to coup attempts: a recent history of successful coups, low economic development, and regimes that are neither highly democratic nor highly authoritarian.¹³

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 Western 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 Related 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 Western government or associated liberal multilateral organization, and every coup that took place between 2005 and 2009 was.¹⁷ When financial 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 condemned. In 1994, the Security Council adopted a resolution authorizing the UN Mission in Haiti to use “all necessary means” to remove the military 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 embraced anti-coup norms: the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (AU). Both the OAS and the AU adopted measures enabling the suspension of member states after a coup. The OAS’s 1991 Santiago Commitment to Democracy and 1992 Protocol of Washington (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, specified 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 effect in 2012.¹⁸ Not all regional organizations embraced this norm equally, 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 dramatically. During the Cold War, there were, on average, nine coup attempts a year, and not a single year passed without at least one attempt somewhere 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 sanctions 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 taking 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, weakening their deterrent effect. There are two key reasons for this: inconsistent 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 automatic imposition of sanctions on the grounds that the event was a “popular 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 voluntarily suspend aid to these countries in a manner consistent with the law.²¹

Section 7008 was written narrowly to apply to cases where the military acts largely alone and takes power by overthrowing a duly elected president. It does not require that the State Department make a determination 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 responding 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 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 creating an effective deterrent to future coups.

The Power of Peer Pressure?

Some regional bodies vigorously condemn coups but are still generally unwilling to do much else in response—for example, to impose sanctions or restore the previous government by force. The AU has suspended 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 noting 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 consistent 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 consensus 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. Similarly, the GCC neither censured nor sanctioned the 2021 coup in Sudan.

Even when countries do face sanctions for coups, they can now cushion the blow because they have other options for patrons and allies. In the first two decades after the Cold War, by contrast, most developing 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 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 though Beijing has reason to worry about the possible destabilization of Burma under the junta. Similarly, after a 2006 military coup in Fiji, Chinese aid to Fiji rose from US$23 million to $161 million.²⁵

Although Beijing’s opposition to prodemocratic norms is the most consequential given the size and weight of the Chinese economy, it is not the only country that coupmakers can turn to. After Egypt’s military overthrew President 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 government $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 Mali’s primary external security partner, but relations between France and Mali soured during the nine years of France’s counterinsurgency campaign 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 compromise 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 former 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 deterrent 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, 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 leaders 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 often 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 returning to Africa, and while it has far less to offer now than it did during 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 regimes 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 aggressively 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.

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 penalties, 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 response 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 government assets held in the Central Bank of West African States were frozen, 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 estimated 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 democratization, Go¦ta’s junta dug in, gaining assurances from neighboring Guinea (another ECOWAS member led by a military junta) and Mauritania (a non-ECOWAS member) that they would not enforce the trade embargo. At the same time, that embargo hurt other ECOWAS members, 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 sanctions, 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 significant 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 intervention, 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 presidency 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 experienced 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 making 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 significant sanctions as a result.

International norms against coups have eroded and are likely to become weaker still. Penalties against coupmaking are also weak and inconsistently applied. When Western countries fail to act against coups out of fears of disrupting security relationships, they appear hypocritical, 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 authoritarian 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 implementation of prodemocratic and anti-coup norms, without loophole or exception. 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 democratic and peaceful world. Anything less guarantees that governments will continue to be overthrown by the militaries that are meant to serve them.

Notes