Naunihal Singh has written a powerful book on military coups. Singh’s argument is convincing and straightforward: The success of military takeovers is a function of creating the impression that victory is on the side of the coup-plotters and that the loyalist opposition is doomed to fail. If the success of a coup attempt is widely believed to be inevitable within the officer corps, then that perception will be translated into facts even when conditions are initially unfavorable for the putsch. The opposite is also true: If the officers involved in a coup fail to spread the impression that loyalist resistance is futile, then their action is likely to unravel, even when the correlation of force within the armed forces is initially favorable. The collapse of the 1991 Soviet coup attempt is a case in point.

Officers, according to Singh, are rational actors with two priorities in mind: First, they don’t want to be on the losing side of the coup. Second, they want to avoid a split in the armed forces that could threaten their cohesiveness, and potentially set the scene for civil war. Thus, when news of a coup spread, officers initially hedge their bets: If the putsch looks likely to succeed, they will refrain from opposing it. By contrast, if the powers that be seem to be gaining the upper hand, the officers will remain within the loyalist camp. Either way, it is less political beliefs or normative commitments that structure officers’ agency as much as perceptions pertaining to the likelihood of coup success—and failure.

Coups, thus, are coordination games in which shaping officers’ expectations is key to success. To do so, coup-plotters need to quickly control symbolic targets in their nation’s capital (e.g. the presidential palace; the parliament building; the ministry of defense). More importantly, officers involved in coups need to control public information and broadcasts in order to project an image of inevitable triumph by exaggerating the amount of support they are receiving within the armed forces. This is what Singh calls “making facts.” Singh notices that coups from the top (i.e. putsches triggered by military elite) are more likely to succeed than coups from the middle (mid-ranking and junior officers); in turn, coups from the middle are more likely to prevail than coups from the bottom (very junior officers; NCOs; and enlisted men). Put differently, the higher the ranks of coup-plotters the greater the likelihood of success. Singh argues that the seniority of military elite facilitates their efforts to shape the perceptions of their subordinates in the officer corps. Coups from the middle are less likely to succeed because mid-ranking and junior officers have less soft power than their superiors; shaping expectations within the officer corps at large is a much harder task for them. The same is true, a priori, for coup-plotters in the bottom of the military hierarchy.

Singh makes a threefold contribution to the literature on coups. First, much has been written on officers’ grievances leading to coups, beginning with the foundational work of William R. Thompson (1974). We now know a great deal about the reasons why officers decide to trigger putsches—but we know less about the outcomes of coup attempts, and why some succeed while others fail. By investigating a question that has been somewhat neglected, Singh fills a gap in the literature. Second, Singh disaggregates the military by rank into three categories: Senior officers; mid-rank and junior officers; and very junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted men. He thus breaks with simplistic perceptions of the armed forces as a unified actor and opens the black-box of the officer corps—and military institutions at large. This is a must from an analytical perspective. Unfortunately, the internal complexity of military institutions is often ignored because academics buy the fiction of the armed forces as hierarchical and necessarily disciplined institutions, or, simply, because investigating intra-military politics is too hard a task. Finally, perceptions do indeed matter in shaping actors’ strategic behavior and Singh does a fine job analyzing the logic, and implications, of “making facts” in the armed forces.

That said, one aspect of Singh’s book is debatable. As mentioned previously, Singh presents officers as rational actors reacting to events on the basis of self-centered considerations and loyalty to the armed forces. There is little room in his framework for passions raised by ethnic animosities or ideological commitments. I concur that officers do not determine their agency strictly on the basis of political preferences; but whether these preferences play no role at all in shaping how officers react to coups is questionable. When Franco rebelled against the Republican government in Spain, most officers joined his camp, while some remained faithful to the Republic. Ideological commitments played an important role in determining which side officers chose to join, as Spanish politics were highly polarized at the time. Ethnic loyalties and animosities played a direct role in shattering the unity of the Syrian officer corps in the 1960s, and shaped alliances and conflicts within the Syrian military. Officers do not react to coups like an apple is compelled by gravity. Rather, they assign meaning to the events unfolding in the military through cognition and ideational understanding—thus, ethnic and ideological commitments are part of the story.

Additionally, the book would have benefited from expanding the section pertaining to the effects of social media on coups (pp. 224–227). Singh argues that Twitter and Facebook cannot alone make facts—traditional media remain much more powerful in shaping expectations and structuring officers’ reactions to coup attempts. Consequently, the rise of social media does not necessarily alter coups dynamics, according to Singh. Coups, of course, have been staged in the social media age (e.g. Egypt in 2013; Thailand in 2014). Is it true that the effect of social media was negligible on the unfolding of recent military takeovers? This is an important question and it requires an empirical answer which is nowhere to be found in the book.

In the final analysis, however, Singh’s work remains impressive. This reviewer would not be surprised if Seizing Power quickly establishes itself as a must-read for students of coups and military politics in the years to come.