Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Foreign Affairs.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How to Prevent Coups d'État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival, and reported the following:
Browsers opening to page 99 would get a good sense of what the book was about. The page describes the February 1966 coup in Ghana, which removed President Kwame Nkrumah from power:Visit Erica De Bruin's website.Officers viewed these plans as evidence that Nkrumah was seeking to replace them. In late 1966, he sought parliamentary authorization to form a new popular militia. While the stated rationale for the militia was to aid Rhodesian independence, it would also have been “separate from the army and designed as a counter to it.” Meanwhile, rumors that Nkrumah planned to enlarge the POGR yet again began to circulate.The book examines one of the most common strategies that rulers use to prevent coup d’etat: establishing presidential guards, militia, and other security forces to “counterbalance” the military. It shows that coups are more likely to fail where rulers counterbalance. In that sense, counterbalancing works. Yet it is not without risk: the resentment that counterbalancing generates among regular military officers can provoke new coup attempts, even as it creates obstacles to their execution.
It was in this context that a coalition of Gã-Ewe officers in the military and police service staged the February 1966 coup that ousted Nkrumah from power. The coup attempt began when Colonel Emmanuel Kotoka, commander of the army’s Second Brigade in Kumasi, north of the capital, began to move his troops toward Accra. It was timed to coincide with Nkrumah’s trip abroad to Vietnam. The Chief of Defense Staff and other top officers were also abroad in Addis Ababa for Organization of African Unity business. Coup forces quickly captured the presidential palace, as well as the Ministry of Defense, the radio station, and the post office. In a speech explaining the coup, Police Commissioner John Harlley noted that Nkrumah had raised a “private army of his own at an annual cost of over half a million pounds in flagrant violation of a constitution which him himself had foisted on the country to serve as a counterpose to the Ghana Armed Forces.” He also complained that Nkrumah had armed the POGR “with the most modern and lethal weapons while the national army was neglected. Later, he decided secretly to disband [the] national army and replace it with a militia formed from fanatics.”
The specific coup attempt discussed on page 99 is an example in which efforts to counterbalance backfired spectacularly. In the years prior to the coup attempt, Nkrumah had sought to expand a preexisting presidential guard regiment, called the President’s Own Guard Regiment (POGR), and to establish a new national militia to counterbalance the military. Army officers feared that these were the first steps in a plan to abolish the military, and resented the diversion of resources and recruits to other forces. To preserve their status, they staged the February 1966 coup that ousted Nkrumah.
Nkrumah’s experience thus serves as a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of counterbalancing. It also raises a new question: why are some rulers able to establish counterweights without provoking coups, while others are not? The rest of the chapter that this excerpt is a part of tackles that question by comparing Nkrumah’s failed attempt to counterbalance to more successful efforts by rulers in similar political and economic circumstances.
While page 99 doesn’t showcase what I think of as the central empirical contribution of the book—the new dataset it compiles on counterbalancing across the globe—it does emphasize one of the book’s central take-aways: while counterbalancing can prevent successful coups, it is a risky strategy to pursue, and one that may weaken regimes in the long term.
--Marshal Zeringue
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