Coups and people power: the non-electoral routes to regime change

What it is

Military coups and people-power ousters are the two main non-electoral routes to regime change. A coup is an illegal seizure of the state by insiders, typically completing in hours; political scientists Powell and Thyne define a successful coup as one where plotters hold power for at least seven days. People power depends on sustained mass civilian participation to force a leader's resignation, without an armed takeover. The two mechanisms overlap: successful mass uprisings often rely on military defection, and coups sometimes follow street pressure that has already delegitimized an incumbent. Together they define the political risk readers track when a country's election cycle has stalled or lost credibility.

History

The Powell-Thyne dataset, covering global coups from 1950 to the present, records more than 200 attempts across every inhabited continent. Cold War patronage by the US and the Soviet Union sustained a peak from the 1960s through the 1980s; coup attempts fell sharply across Latin America and Southern Europe during the third wave of democratization (1974 to 2000). Africa never shared that trough.

People-power campaigns show a parallel arc. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's NAVCO research found that nonviolent mass campaigns succeeded roughly twice as often as armed insurgencies between 1900 and 2006. The Philippines' People Power revolution in February 1986 set the template: four days of mobilization and military defection ousted Ferdinand Marcos. The model replicated in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Tunisia (2010 to 2011). Since 2010, NAVCO data show nonviolent success rates declining as governments learned to survive through selective repression and co-optation.

The pace accelerated from 2020. Nine coups struck West and Central Africa between 2020 and 2023, in Mali (twice), Guinea, Chad, Sudan (twice), Burkina Faso (twice), and Niger. Civilian campaigns simultaneously brought down governments in Sri Lanka (2022) and Bangladesh (2024), and killed Finance Bills in Kenya (2024 and 2026).

Current state

The Sahel coup belt has stabilized into a military-led bloc. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger formed the Alliance des États du Sahel, expelled French forces, and have stalled internationally mediated paths back to civilian elections as of mid-2026. In Uganda, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba's military occupation of Nation Media Group in June 2026 demonstrated how a presidentially connected commander can test civilian institutions without staging a formal coup.

In Europe, eighteen months of student-led protests in Serbia ended with President Aleksandar Vučić pledging to resign and call early elections in June 2026. In Kenya, the second anniversary of the 2024 Finance Bill protests produced police teargas and mass arrests on June 25, 2026, followed by the documented abduction and torture of six activists by the Kenya Human Rights Commission. Iran's leadership vacancy after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's death in June 2026 opened the most consequential strongman succession since Hugo Chávez's death in Venezuela in 2013.

Relationships

The four tracked subjects share a common logic. Gen Z Uprisings are the broadest: leaderless, social-media-organized youth protest waves driven by unemployment and corruption, active in at least 14 countries since 2022. The Coup Belt is the geographically concentrated variant, military takeovers in West and Central Africa following civilian governance failure, with analogs in Myanmar (2021). Strongman Succession is the downstream risk when personalist leaders accumulate unchecked authority and leave no organic transition mechanism, creating vacuums that invite military intervention. People Power Ousters is the civilian mirror to coups: bottom-up and unarmed where coups are top-down and military-led, but aimed at the same target, the sitting executive. In practice, people-power campaigns succeed or fail largely on whether the armed forces stay neutral.

What to watch

Serbia's snap elections will test whether Vučić's departure pledge produces a genuine transfer of power or a managed transition that keeps his bloc in control. Kenya's reparations process for 2024 protest victims will determine whether Gen Z mobilization continues into 2027 electoral politics. The Alliance des États du Sahel's promised electoral roadmaps in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have each been delayed at least once; any new timelines set in late 2026 will be the metric for the Sahel's direction. Iran's post-Khamenei transition will show whether theocratic-military hybrid systems absorb succession differently from pure military juntas.