How can you anticipate…a coup
After falling steadily from their 1960s peak and hitting historic lows between 2010 and 2019, coups have crept back into the headlines. From 2020–2023, we saw a modest resurgence, largely in Sub-Saharan Africa, though coups are not uniquely African. The region simply concentrates many of the conditions that make them more likely.
Perfect foresight isn’t possible. Unless you’ve planted a microphone in a general’s office, the exact timing of a coup is nearly impossible to predict. What you can do is track the structural drivers, short-term indicators, and spark-like catalysts that make one more or less likely. That’s the basis of anticipatory intelligence.
This article isn’t a comprehensive catalogue of every variable at play. Instead, it’s a window into how we think about building tools to better anticipate threats like coups.
Why Coups Matter for Business
Coups are not just political trivia. They ripple into economies, societies, and boardrooms, and anticipating them provides organisations with a real strategic advantage.
In the months and years that follow, policymaking often deteriorates, corruption deepens, and the rule of law weakens. Anti-government protests intensify, sometimes from those angry at the ouster, sometimes from citizens quickly disillusioned with the new order. For executives and security teams, that translates into more unrest, more disruption, and an environment that becomes harder to read.
The economic fallout is rarely kind. Growth slows, debt and deficits rise, and foreign investors retreat. Myanmar’s 2021 coup shrank its economy by nearly 20% in a single year. While not every case is that extreme, the pattern is consistent: coups drag economies backwards.
Relationships also unravel. Investors who painstakingly built ties with one regime suddenly find them worthless, with no certainty about how the new rulers will treat them, particularly if they were seen as too close to the old order. Coups are also contagious. When one country tips over, neighbours with fragile politics are more likely to follow. For multinationals, that means risk doesn’t stop at borders.
So while coups may look like the business of soldiers and politicians, they land squarely on the desks of CFOs, COOs, and boards. Understanding where they’re more likely to happen, and preparing for the fallout, is both strategic defence and competitive advantage.
The Drivers: Slow-Burn Fragility
Think of drivers as tectonic plates. They shift slowly, but set the stage for how stress builds.
Demographics are one of the clearest. Countries with very young populations are consistently more prone to coups. Mali, Niger and Chad, all with youth populations close to seventy percent, experienced repeated coups and coup attempts between 2020 and 2023. History also matters. Once a country has gone through a coup, the odds of another rise sharply. Some fall into what researchers call a “coup trap” - Bolivia is a case in point, with 23 coups or coup attempts between 1950 and 1984. According to IMF research, it takes more than twenty coup-free years before probabilities meaningfully drop.
Governance is another fault line. Low literacy, weak institutions, economic exclusion, and high inequality all act as dry tinder. Close to ninety-two percent of coups occur in closed or electoral autocracies, where political inclusion is already scarce and resentment runs high. Put simply: the weaker the system, the easier it is to push it over.
The Indicators: Stress in Real Time
If drivers are tectonic plates, indicators are the tremors that reveal pressure is building.
Economic distress is one of the most reliable red flags. When inflation pushes past ten or fifteen percent and food prices rise, governments start to wobble. Add negative or stagnant growth and you have a recipe for discontent. Political turbulence adds another layer: cabinet reshuffles, government crises, or the sudden dismissal of senior figures often suggest deeper fractures. Violence and terrorism also expose a regime’s inability to maintain control.
Even defence budgets have their own story to tell, although not a simple one. In the years before a coup, military spending often rises as leaders sense the threat and try to shore up support. However, cutting defence budgets can increase the risk of a coup, as it leaves military elites disgruntled and more likely to turn against the regime.
The Catalysts: Sparks That Light the Fuse
If drivers are the tinder and indicators are the smoke, catalysts are the spark. They are often random and unpredictable, but obvious in hindsight. Few observers would have predicted that a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation in 2010 would ignite the Arab Spring, yet it did. Similarly, in coup-prone states, sparks can be corruption scandals, the dismissal of powerful officials, or shocking acts of violence that crystallise public anger.
The Interplay: Fragility Compounded
These layers rarely act alone. Weak governance amplifies economic stress. Demographic pressure magnifies the impact of unemployment. A coup is rarely the product of a single factor, it happens when vulnerabilities stack and a trigger sets them alight.
The wave of coups from 2020–2023 was no accident. Pandemic fallout, global inflation, and worsening insecurity combined to tip fragile states over the edge.
Mini-case: Mali’s Coup Trap (2020–2021)
Mali’s history of coups stretches back to independence, and the 2020–2021 sequence shows how structural fragility, economic pressure, and acute political crises stacked together into rupture.
Deep Drivers of Instability
Legacy of coups: Mali has been locked in a “coup trap” since the 1960s, with multiple interventions undermining institutional consolidation. The 2012 coup left scars that were never healed; by 2020 the memory of a fallen president and a fractured military was still raw.
Youth bulge: Roughly two-thirds of Mali’s population is under 25, one of the highest ratios globally. While this can be a demographic dividend, in contexts of weak governance and poor job creation it instead fuels frustration and mobilisation potential.
Weak governance and corruption: Transparency International consistently scores Mali poorly on corruption perception indexes. Political exclusion and disputed institutions (like the Constitutional Court’s contested 2020 parliamentary ruling) eroded legitimacy further.
Security overload: Since 2012, Mali has been at the epicentre of a jihadist insurgency stretching across the Sahel. The state has struggled to control territory, especially in the centre and north, relying heavily on foreign security partners. Military overstretch, repeated attacks, and mounting casualties undermined public faith in the state.
Economic fragility: Though growth averaged ~5% through much of the 2010s, it was fragile, heavily reliant on gold and agriculture. Poverty remained high, with roughly 40% of Malians living below the poverty line. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, GDP contracted, fiscal space shrank, and food inflation accelerated.
Indicators and Catalysts Leading to the 2020 Coup
Political breakdown: Parliamentary elections in March 2020 saw irregularities and a court ruling that awarded 10 extra seats to President Keïta’s party. This became the lightning rod for the M5-RFP protest movement, which organised mass demonstrations from June to August.
Protest escalation: By July 2020, tens of thousands were on the streets of Bamako. Security forces killed at least 11 protesters and injured over 120 in mid-July clashes.
Economic distress: Growth turned negative in 2020, unemployment rose, and food inflation jumped into double digits, making basic staples unaffordable for many households.
Persistent insecurity: Jihadist attacks surged through 2019–20, with hundreds killed annually in central Mali. Military failures to stem the violence became a key grievance.
Catalyst: On 18 August 2020, mutinying soldiers at Kati garrison detained President Keïta and forced his resignation. The CNSP junta, led by Col. Assimi Goïta, promised reform and elections, but kept power firmly in military hands.
The 2021 Coup
Fragile transition: An interim government was installed with Bah N’Daw as president and Goïta as vice president. But the arrangement was unstable, plagued by infighting and continued insecurity.
Trigger event: In May 2021, N’Daw and PM Ouane attempted a cabinet reshuffle that sidelined key military figures. Within hours, Goïta ordered their arrest. On 24 May 2021, he declared himself transitional president, consolidating military power.
Structural headwinds: None of the deeper problems (poverty, food inflation, insurgency, corruption) had improved meaning the second coup unfolded against the same backdrop of fragility.
The 2020–2021 coups were not sudden shocks; they were the predictable result of overlapping vulnerabilities:
A young, frustrated population.
A corrupt and exclusionary political system.
Economic contraction and rising food costs.
An overstretched military and growing jihadist insurgency.
A legacy of coups eroding institutional resilience.
When protests, lethal repression, and political deadlock added pressure, the military stepped in. And then stepped in again.
Mali shows how once a country enters a coup cycle, structural fragility makes it extremely hard to break free.
Coup-Proofing 101 (For Leaders Who’d Rather Not Be Cooped)
So you’re an insecure leader worried about your generals getting a bit… coup-y? No worries - we’ve compiled our top tips for what the research says about how to increase your chances of staying in power (without having to do anything slow and boring like actually, addressing poverty, inequality, and social exclusion, improving fiscal health, tackling deep rooted insurgency or rooting out systematic corruption).
1. Pay your military and use units wisely.
It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many leaders forget. Cutting defence budgets and you don’t really save money. You can go one further and down the elite guard approach. A hand-picked unit, loyal only to you, better fed, better paid, and usually very good at pointing their guns inward. Think Saddam’s Republican Guard. Effective, if not exactly subtle.
2. Don’t just reward loyalty over competence.
Sure you can stack your senior military ranks with cousins and classmates, and they’re loyal which is great, but how effective will they be at stopping an active rebellion? Make sure you’ve got competent leaders around you.
3. Send them abroad.
Peacekeeping missions are a handy way to ship off potentially grumpy soldiers. They get medals and extra pay, you get fewer armed men loitering near the capital. Everyone wins.
4. Find a friend with a big stick (or tanks).
Having a regional heavyweight on speed dial helps. Kazakhstan’s government might have toppled in 2022 without a quick intervention from Moscow. Few coup plotters want to test whether Russia’s paratroopers mean business.
5. Pick your regime style wisely.
Oddly enough, the sweet spot for coups is the messy middle, the “not quite dictatorship, not quite democracy” zone. So you have choices - full democracy (messy, but with clear rules for succession) or go full dictatorship (grim, but stable).
Conclusion: Anticipation Beats Surprise
Coups may look sudden, but they rarely come out of nowhere. By tracking the slow drivers, monitoring short-term indicators, and staying alert to catalysts, we can anticipate where risks are mounting.
For businesses, that foresight buys time: to reassess investments, refresh relationships, and avoid being blindsided.
That’s exactly why we’re building our anticipatory intelligence platform - to help organisations move from reacting to headlines to anticipating tomorrow’s threats. You can’t stop a coup, but you don’t have to be caught off guard by one.