Following the Free Officers: Explaining the Politics of Coup Contagion and Containment

Abstract Observers have long posited that military coups can spread across borders, yet empirical support for such contagion remains inconsistent. We argue that existing analyses overlook key dynamics that shape both the ability and disposition of actors to emulate foreign coups. First, conventional approaches privilege immediate imitation, obscuring how post-coup trajectories abroad recalibrate would-be plotters’ incentives over time. Second, prior work focuses almost exclusively on coup plotters, neglecting how threatened regimes proactively constrain domestic actors’ ability to launch similar interventions. Third, most studies rely on data capturing only realized coup attempts, omitting cases where foreign events emboldened would-be plotters who ultimately refrained from acting or were preempted. We demonstrate these dynamics through an examination of coup politics in the Middle East following Egypt’s 1952 Free Officers coup. Our analysis shows that while coups can alter political calculations across borders, they simultaneously trigger defensive countermeasures that thwart the spread of similar acts.