Abstract
During the years between 1958 and 1987, the African continent saw 143 actual and attempted military takeovers. Most followed a single scenario: Rebel troops surrounded key positions in the capital, arrested or executed the head of state, and quickly established a new government without shaking the country's administrative and economic infrastructure. During the late 1980s, African rulers who had achieved their positions by taking over the capital were well aware that they could be overthrown by the same means. To protect their regimes, they concentrated most of the state's meager resources and their well-trained loyal troops in the capital, leaving the periphery uncontrolled. Coup plotters in Ethiopia, Chad, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda exploited the lack of authority in the peripheries of their respective countries, built up rebel forces in the border areas, and from there advanced toward their capitals. This new strategy resulted in prolonged civil wars that consumed human lives and devastated the economy and the society. Two coups in Liberia, a failed one in 1985 and a successful one in 1989, are paradigms that demonstrate the changing pattern of coup styles in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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