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Singh, Naunihal. 2014. SEIZING POWER: THE STRATEGIC LOGIC OF MILITARY COUPS. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. 252 pp.
Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups is Alabama-based Air War College Professor Naunihal Singh's well-researched study of the strategic logic behind military coups d'état, particularly emphasizing such coups in African countries. It tabulates, for example, Ghana's successful and unsuccessful military coups between February 1966 and June 1983 (p. 12). Chapter 4 discusses in detail military coups staged by officers from the top echelons of the armed forces, with Ghana as a case study (pp. 88-102).
In the introduction (pp. 1-14), Ghana's New Year's Eve 1981 military coup d'état, which unseated President Hilla Limann's elected government, receives prominent exposure as an example of how a military officer, Flight Lieutenant John Jerry Rawlings, after his own military coup d'état, hands over power and later deems it necessary to seize that power again. "Rawlings and just a handful of men managed to take control of a military of 9,000 [men and women] and a country of 11,000,000" (p. 1).
Showing the uniqueness of the Ghanaian situation, Singh demonstrates that in the former USSR, a 1991 coup attempt failed...