{"id":17769,"date":"2016-07-23T07:11:02","date_gmt":"2016-07-23T12:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=17769"},"modified":"2016-07-23T07:11:02","modified_gmt":"2016-07-23T12:11:02","slug":"guerilla-warfare-history-the-world-of-coups-since-1950","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/07\/23\/guerilla-warfare-history-the-world-of-coups-since-1950\/","title":{"rendered":"Guerilla Warfare History: The World of Coup’s Since 1950"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"coups\"<\/p>\n

An attempted coup in Turkey last week shocked and surprised many across the world. But coups and attempted coups\u00a0have long been an all-too-familiar occurrence\u00a0around the world.<\/p>\n

How many exactly?\u00a0Well, at\u00a0the time of writing, there have been around 475 coup attempts since 1950.<\/p>\n

That’s according to a dataset compiled<\/a> by Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, two\u00a0assistant professors who work in the political science departments of the University of Central Florida\u00a0and the\u00a0University of Kentucky respectively.<\/p>\n

WorldViews reached out to Powell to ask him some questions about what the definition of a coup is, why a coup happens and what trends we’re seeing in coups.\u00a0The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n

WorldViews: How do we define a coup in this dataset? What did it mean that Turkey\u2019s 1997 \u201cpostmodern\u201d coup wasn\u2019t included, for example?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jonathan Powell: We define coups as “illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.”<\/p>\n

We don’t code the 1997 “coup” because we can’t definitively say the action was actually illegal. Omer Aslan of Bilkent University has written about the event in depth<\/a>. Even including recent evidence that has come to light, he concludes the military ultimately relied on legal procedures to undermine Erbakan.<\/p>\n

[Ed note: In 1997, generals<\/a> used pressure behind the scene to force the Islamist government of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan from power. The coup is often described as “postmodern” in Turkey as no military force\u00a0was actually used.]<\/em><\/p>\n

WV: There are\u00a0some pretty big variations on the number of coups in different countries. Do you have any theories for what makes a country more likely to have a coup?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JP: The primary reason for large variation is that once a country has a coup, it very often experiences more. For example, coups are now a bit of a rarity, but in the last decade or so, Mauritania, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea Bissau, Thailand and Madagascar have all had multiple attempts (I could easily be forgetting others).<\/p>\n

So the question becomes why did they have the first one? Coups also generally occur in disproportionately poor countries that suffer from other forms of political instability (such as protests and\/or civil war). In recent years, there seems to be an increasing proportion of coups in new democracies, especially those that seem to already be backsliding toward authoritarianism. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the government is a crucial indicator.<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at Washington Post<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An attempted coup in Turkey last week shocked and surprised many across the world. But coups and attempted coups\u00a0have long been an all-too-familiar occurrence\u00a0around the world. How many exactly?\u00a0Well, at\u00a0the time of writing, there have been around 475 coup attempts since 1950. That’s according to a dataset compiled by Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, two\u00a0assistant…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[5513,2004,1286,5586,4418],"tags":[13022,6087,13023,13024,3766],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17769"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}