Following the news lately is enough to make one wonder if coups might be contagious. The recent surge is particularly surprising because coups, particularly successful ones, had been relatively rare in the decades following the end of the Cold War. “If you told me a decade ago that would be happening today, I would not have thought that that was a reasonable expectation,” said Erica De Bruin, a Hamilton College political scientist who wrote a book in 2020 about coup prevention. Coups are not actually “contagious” in the sense that one directly causes another, experts say. “We are seeing more coups not because of a contagion, but because of a more permissive environment,” said Naunihal Singh, a political scientist at the U.S.

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Persons: ”, Erica De Bruin, Naunihal Singh Organizations: Hamilton College, U.S . Naval, College Locations: Gabon, Niger