“My belief is that coups are as coups do.”
The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition · August 2026
Naunihal Singh, who studies coups for a living, resists treating them as categorically good or bad. Pressed on whether a coup in an authoritarian country is something to root against, he argues that coups should be judged by what follows them rather than by the label — noting that the democratic wave of the 1970s began with a coup in Portugal.
Transcript
…And so what we end up doing is we put our short-term convenience, we want to maintain our relationships with these countries against what we think of as a long-term consideration. Oh, someone else can deal with democracy. But in the end, there's short-term harms as well. And this is a problem.
…you know, if a coup were to occur in an autocratic country and then perhaps the military can usher in elections and then actually solidify democracy, has that ever happened? Could it happen? Are there any cases in which, as I asked, counterintuitively, coups actually are a good thing for democracy?
…important examples of democracies which have taken root after a coup. For example, the third wave of democracy, which started in the 1970s, starts with a coup in Portugal. And Portugal is now a democracy. But that democracy comes about because of a coup. The Arab Spring cases are almost all coups. There was a coup in Tunisia in support of the demonstrators. There was a coup in Egypt as well. My belief is that coups are as coups do. The question is not, is a coup bad or good? A coup against a democracy is clearly bad. A coup against an autocracy, the way I judge it is, what are the consequences? What happens as a result of this? To what extent do we move in a more pro-democratic direction? And sometimes, in fact, we do. The democracy that was created in Tunisia lasted for a while, although democracy in Tunisia has gotten…
I want to go back to dispelling maybe some of the media myths in addition to the myth of the coup contagion. And one of them is perhaps not a myth at all, but I'm just curious whether there has been an uptick in coups, empirically speaking, in the past couple of years. Our past few years, you've…
I would argue they never left. And so there's definitely an uptick, right? We are seeing more coups. And I think part of what might be responsible for this is, like I said, an increased permissive atmosphere. The fact is that junta leaders know that they've got a lot more options than they used to.…
And in keeping with this line of questioning about dispelling, perhaps dispelling media myths or not, there's been a lot of coverage about the coup leaders themselves receiving training from Western militaries, namely the United States and France. To what extent do you feel that this is a factor…
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