To understand why coups succeed or fail, we have to start with a more unsettling truth: violence is a function of the state. This isn’t to celebrate brutality, but to name a foundational reality. The modern state is built not only on legitimacy or social contract, but on its capacity to enforce order; to decide when, where, and by whom force can be used. Everything else including lawmaking, welfare, diplomacy, depends on that bedrock of coercive control. This was famously articulated by Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation (1919), where he defined the state as “the human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Legitimacy is the crucial modifier. It’s what makes the state’s police different from an armed gang. That legitimacy can arise from law, tradition, or consent; but without the muscle to enforce it, it remains a hollow claim.
And that monopoly does not live in parliament or courtrooms. It lives in the barracks, patrol cars, and command centres. The military is not just another institution; it is the state’s concentrated muscle… hierarchical, disciplined, and equipped to seize and hold power, both from external enemies and internal rivals.
That is why, across history, the military often becomes the final arbiter of political crisis. Crowds can unseat leaders; armies decide who governs next.
The Power of Refusal and the Power of Usurpation
In Germany’s 1920 Kapp Putsch, right-wing militias occupied Berlin and declared a new government. The coup collapsed not because of outrage alone, but because the professional army (the Reichswehr), refused to obey the plotters. The generals withheld the state’s coercive power, and the putsch withered. Contrast that with Uganda in 1971. Idi Amin didn’t attack from outside; as army commander, he simply redirected the state’s existing monopoly of violence from within. The army was the coup. The state’s muscle detached from its civilian head and became the government itself.
The Modern Playbook: The Sahel and the Logic of Coercion
The same logic drives the wave of coups across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Gabon. These aren’t isolated incidents but symptoms of a shared pattern:
1. Security Collapse → Military Licence: When governments fail to protect citizens from insurgents, the army claims legitimacy as the “only” actor capable of restoring order. The state’s failure to uphold its monopoly on violence creates the opening for military intervention.
2. The Futility of External Pressure: Sanctions and diplomatic isolation rarely topple juntas unless they split the barracks. A junta that retains loyalty of its troops can withstand immense pressure, because it holds the true levers of power.
3. Many Masks of Military Rule: Some juntas govern in uniform; others hide behind civilian fronts. The difference is cosmetic, the core remains control of the security apparatus. Who Holds the Gun Holds the State.
The People’s Dilemma: When Revolutions Meet Guns
Even people’s revolutions face the same coercive dilemma. In Sudan (2019), peaceful protests toppled Omar al-Bashir after 30 years. For a brief moment, a democratic future seemed possible. But the revolution never dismantled the old coercive order: it only paused it. When the army split, pitting the Sudanese Armed Forces against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the revolution’s gains collapsed into civil war. The very forces once tasked with guarding the state turned on each other, and on the people. Sudan’s tragedy illustrates a hard truth: power flows to whoever commands organised coercion. Protesters can remove dictators, but without control or reform of the armed institutions; the army, police, militias, the revolution remains unsecured. Toppling a ruler is only the beginning. The harder task is rebuilding the state’s coercive core, creating unified, accountable security institutions under genuine civilian oversight. Without that, the state’s monopoly on violence remains contested, and democracy stays hostage to rival guns.
When the Army Stands Down or Splinters
Acknowledging the military’s role doesn’t mean it always acts as kingmaker. Sometimes, restraint or collapse decides outcomes.
1. The Power of Neutrality: In Tunisia (2011), the army’s refusal to fire on protesters; and its parallel refusal to seize power, enabled a rare, civilian-led democratic transition. The military acted as neutral guarantor rather than partisan actor. 2. The Vacuum of Collapse: In Ethiopia (1991), when Mengistu fled and the Derg army disintegrated, no central coercive authority remained. Rebel coalitions had to build new armed institutions from scratch, later forming the Ethiopian National Defence Force. 3. Enduring revolutions: from Vietnam to Eritrea to China, succeeded not by rejecting coercion, but by building parallel armed structures capable of defeating the old order and enforcing a new one.
The Central Paradox and the Gravitational Truth
The state’s capacity for violence is both its necessity and its danger. The very entity meant to protect citizens must, by definition, reserve the right to use force against them. That’s not an endorsement of authoritarianism; it’s a structural fact. The difference between democracy and dictatorship lies not in the presence of force, but in its discipline: who controls it, under what laws, and with what accountability.
When the state’s monopoly fractures through rebellion, factionalism, or privatised violence, authority dissolves. What follows isn’t liberation, but a violent contest among armed actors, each seeking to rebuild that monopoly in their own image.
This is why coups, civil wars, and revolutions orbit the same gravitational truth:
Violence doesn’t destroy the state; it redefines who controls it.
Written by Mwende Mukwanyaga, edited by Lily Mutinda, and proofread by GPT‑5 for grammar and style.
