Coups and Conspiracies in the Modern Middle East
Salah Ben Hammou & Jonathan Powell
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This project began as part of an effort to revise and expand the Powell & Thyne "Global Instances of Coups" dataset. Given substantial changes in the availability of relevant sources since the dataset's original creation over a decade ago, Ben Hammou & Powell reinvented the way coup activity is documented and recorded. Previous projects have largely aggregated and revisited prior coup lists by creating a list of "candidate" cases and investigating those candidates. This has generally meant broadening the use of available sources to conduct research on already-identified events.
Recognizing the potential for candidate lists to be undermined by reporting bias, this project ignored prior coup lists altogether (including Powell & Thyne) and instead conducted an exhaustive search of potential coup events from traditionally used English-language sources (e.g., New York Times, Keesings), major French outlets (e.g., Le Monde), region-specific magazines (e.g., Jeune Afrique, West Africa), regional newspapers (e.g., Addis Herald, Al-Ahram), political biographies, memoirs from politicians and soldiers, country histories, and other related academic outputs. |