Regime Vulnerability and the Military Coup

In the past few decades, the world has hardly been deprived of military coups,1 nor has it lacked analytical efforts to explain these intriguing political phenomena. The analyses have managed to run the gamut from cultural determinism, through quasi-class dialectics, to the bored-soldiers-in-the-barracks hypothesis. Be that as it may, a clearly dominant focus in the military-in-politics literature has centered on the question of regime vulnerability. In essence, a basic point is asserted again and again: governmental institutions and leadership in those systems subject to domestic military intervention are weak and therefore vulnerable to such intervention. To avoid what appears to resemble (in bald reductionist form) a tautology, writers on this topic customarily address the question of why the institutions are weak. A further step may be taken in an attempt to clarify the missing link-why military personnel sometimes attack the weak or weakened targets. For all the volume of materials currently available, however, only rarely do any of the analyses come to grips with the apparent corporate alld not-so-corporate motivations of the military coup-makers.2