Isegoria

In today’s world, with incredibly quick dissemination of information, Santi Ruiz of Statecraft asks Edward Luttwak, how have coups changed?

Well, I don’t think they have changed at all. If you look carefully at the structure of recent events, you see that they haven’t changed.

Every state has to have a security apparatus — military, non-military, police, security services. Those organizations are depicted in organizational charts as if they were machines. But they’re not machines, they’re run by people. Each of these organizations and sub-organizations has a chief. Now that chief may be a commanding figure, whose every word is implemented without question, or it could be simply the head who was appointed a week ago or something. Either way.

But it is evident that the coup d’état is a specific way of changing governance, and that is not to attack the state as a whole from the outside, not to attack the state from launching attacks on government ministries and palaces, as an enemy might do, but simply a process whereby these people who run the actual active elements of the state — which is, let’s say, that armored brigade, which is close to the capital city, the police, the gendarmerie if there’s a separate gendarmerie, everybody with guns in their hands — can intervene physically.

If you can coordinate them, then, mechanically speaking, you can take over the headquarters of the government: the presidential palace, the prime minister’s office, whatever it is. You can do that. You can shut down the mass media. And you can stop the internet because the internet operates from specific physical facilities. You can just open a door, enter there, and switch it off.

You are now free to call in your media, or the media generally, and make your statement: because of the intolerable abuses and misbehavior of the previous ruler, we, the committee of national salvation, have taken over, and so on.

Even if it is only one individual who runs everything, he never presents himself: “I took over.” It’s “The National Salvation Committee, of which I’m the humble secretary,” or chairman or whatever. Then you denounce the previous government and announce wonderful useful reform measures that people have been calling for.

You stop all flights, you control the airport. And then you say, “In order to ensure everybody’s safety, there are checkpoints: please don’t cross the checkpoints unless you’re willing to present yourself and say you have to take a child to hospital and things of that sort.”

And you stabilize the situation. While everything is stabilized, you go and arrest all the political leaders that could challenge you: all the ones that might stand up and speak in front of a group of people or a camera or microphone. You arrest them and you just physically detain them, perhaps to be liberated in a day or so with apologies, perhaps to be killed on the spot — anything in between. Those mechanics of the coup have not changed.

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