How to Prevent Coups d'État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival

Erica De Bruin's book offers the most comprehensive account to date of whether counterbalancing (or coup proofing) can deter coup attempts and lower the risk of coups being successful. A major accomplishment of the book is that it offers a quantitative analysis based on an impressive dataset collected by the author... Erica De Bruin's book deserves to be read not only by academics and dictators, but by anyone interested in research on coups.

De Bruin's How to Prevent Coups d'État makes a real contribution to the study of civil-military relations. The most important of which are that counterbalancing institutions do reduce the likelihood of a successful coup, but paradoxically, their very existence may trigger the very act it is designed to prevent... How to Prevent Coups d'État should be a staple in any course on civil-military relations and read alongside classics including Eric Nordlinger's Soldiers in Politics, Samuel Finer's The Man on Horseback, and Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the State.

[T]his book is an insightful empirical introduction to counterbalancing and its implications on coup attempts. I would recommend it to those interested in civilian-military relations[,] specifically due to the richness of the cases and the novelty and accessibility of the findings.

In How to Prevent Coups d'État, De Bruin provides a compelling narrative of the role that counterweights to the military play in civil-military relations and conflict processes more broadly. The book, and the data it uses, should inspire many additional studies of civil-military relations and vigorous discussion for years to come. It is highly recommended for all serious students of civil-military relations, security studies, and conflict processes more broadly.

In this lively and provocative book, Erica De Bruin looks at the threats that rulers face from their own armed forces. Can they make their regimes impervious to coups?

How to Prevent Coups d'État shows that how leaders organize their coercive institutions has a profound effect on the survival of their regimes. When rulers use presidential guards, militarized police, and militia to counterbalance the regular military, efforts to oust them from power via coups d'état are less likely to succeed. Even as counterbalancing helps to prevent successful interventions, however, the resentment that it generates within the regular military can provoke new coup attempts. And because counterbalancing changes how soldiers and police perceive the costs and benefits of a successful overthrow, it can create incentives for protracted fighting that result in the escalation of a coup into full-blown civil war.

Drawing on an original dataset of state security forces in 110 countries over a span of fifty years, as well as case studies of coup attempts in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, De Bruin sheds light on how counterbalancing affects regime survival. Understanding the dynamics of counterbalancing, she shows, can help analysts predict when coups will occur, whether they will succeed, and how violent they are likely to be. The arguments and evidence in this book suggest that while counterbalancing may prevent successful coups, it is a risky strategy to pursue―and one that may weaken regimes in the long term.

Erica De Bruin has identified a real lacuna in the civil-military relations literature, as those of us who have thought about coups have rarely considered the role of counterbalancing institutions explicitly, let alone viewed them through a theoretical lens.

Erica De Bruin is Assistant Professor of Government at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Her work has been published in Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Foreign Affairs. Follow her on Twitter @esdebruin.