Seizing Symbolic Targets is Crucial to Coup Success
In this guest post, William Akoto examines the relationship between strategic symbol targeting and coup plot success.
To pull off a successful coup, conspirators must displace the incumbent leader by capturing or incapacitating him or her in some way.
Once a leader is under their control, conspirators can force the leader to cede power or simply announce they are now in charge. To achieve this, all that coup makers need to do is capture the leader — taking control of the presidential palace, where the incumbent likely spends most of his or her time, should suffice.
To counter possible resistance, coup plotters might also seize nearby military bases that house troops potentially loyal to the incumbent. However, plotters frequently go beyond capturing the presidential palace and key military bases. In many instance, they also take control of other targets such as the airport, parliamentary buildings and national power plants.
This behavior is somewhat puzzling.
Coup plans have to be kept secret until conspirators are ready to make their move. Practically, this means coup makers must keep the conspiratorial circle small to avoid leaks and possible detection.
Consequently, they typically have limited resources and few troops at their disposal to execute the coup.
So why expend forces capturing locations that have little direct bearing on actually taking and holding power such as the airport? Why capture the presidential palace when the president is out of the country? Why seize parliament buildings in the middle of the night when parliament is not even in session?
Analysis of why coup makers target particular buildings has escaped academic attention perhaps because analysts implicitly assume that these targets primarily serve tactical and functional purposes.
This assumption is not unreasonable.
Capturing the presidential palace is necessary to house the new post-coup leadership and taking the national radio station is important so coup plotters can inform the public of the change in leadership and to control the narrative.
But if these buildings only served a functional purpose, they would only be important once the coup is over.
The new leader only needs the presidential palace after the coup has succeeded, not before.
They only need to capture the radio station once the coup is firmly over and they have won.
However, targets like the radio station and presidential palace are often the first targets that coup makers go for (even when the president is out of the country).
This behavior suggests that perhaps the capture of these targets goes beyond their functional value, serving a strategic purpose that is integral to the success of the coup itself.
In an upcoming paper, I look beyond the functional motives for capturing these buildings and examine their potential strategic benefits for coups.
I argue that coup makers capture these targets partly because it helps limit resistance to the coup attempt from government forces. When regime loyalists believe that coup plotters are militarily stronger or better organized, they may surmise that resistance is futile. This makes it easier for the coup plotters to prevail.
However, coup plotters have a credibility problem.
They have an incentive to overstate their level of support or the strength of their forces. They therefore need a credible means of communicating their strength and resolve to regime loyalists that might want to resist the coup.
I contend that capturing symbolic buildings of national power such as parliament buildings, airports and power plants, serves as such a credible signal.
Successfully capturing these targets helps convince regime loyalists that the coup makers are militarily stronger or better organized than them. Resistance would thus result in unnecessary bloodshed and leave them worse off than if they acquiesced.
Consequently, coups where plotters successfully capture symbolic targets of national power should face less resistance from regime loyalists and thus be more likely to succeed.
To test this proposition, I collect new data on coup attempts where conspirators captured symbolic buildings of national power such as the presidential palace, parliament buildings and the national airport.
Figure 1 is a plot of the number of successful coups against the number of coups where symbolic targets were seized per year. The plot is estimated with a loess regression (the shaded region represents the 95% confidence interval).
This curve shows that the seizure of symbolic targets is positively correlated with coup success.
To draw a more robust link, I analyze how capturing symbolic targets influence the probability of coup success using logistic and mixed-effects regression models (Table 1). The results confirm that the probability of coup success is significantly higher in cases where coup conspirators capture symbolic targets of national power (Figure 2).
These results hold even after accounting for several potential confounding factors (Table 1).
These include the effects of cross-country differences in regime type, economic development, armed conflict, size of the armed forces, military spending and changing temporal dynamics in coup propensity.
This suggests that the incentive to capture particular targets during coup attempts may go beyond the functional purposes of these targets. It also moves us closer to a fuller understanding of why some coup succeed and why others fail so spectacularly.
