Coup d'Etat

The sudden, illegal seizure of state power, typically carried out by a country's own military or a small faction within its existing political or military establishment rather than by a foreign power or a mass popular uprising, distinguishing it in political science and criminological literature from a revolution, which generally involves broader societal mobilization. A coup is generally prosecuted, when its participants are apprehended and the ousted government or its successor retains the capacity to do so, under a country's treason, sedition or rebellion statutes rather than under a freestanding coup offense in most legal systems, since the act itself is an attack on the constitutional order rather than a separately codified crime. Political scientists Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne have compiled a widely cited dataset tracking coup attempts worldwide since the mid-twentieth century, documenting several hundred attempts, a majority of them in the decades following the wave of decolonization in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with a closely studied and mixed record of success and failure.