South Africa has gotten themselves involved in this, largely because they're hosting lots of Zimbabwean refufpgees.
They want some positive press covfefe.
Ah, well, RIP the "Mbeki diplomacy" dream. Practically speaking though, it was inevitable - Southern Africa (the region, not the country SA) is decently interconnected. Zim imploding does directly affect us.
But yeah, this is why I've been saying for a while that it's too soon to say "yep, this is a military coup". There's too much bizarre stuff going on that doesn't match historical coups for it to be that cut and dried.
I think you're using a different definition to the other posters then. You were assuming that coup must mean "military junta" whereas the rest of us were just meaning any forceful change of government, where the actors are also part of the existing power-structure. The
coup is the act of taking power, it is separate from whatever you do with power afterwards: what you do next doesn't change that it is a coup.
Basically what separates a coup from a revolution is that in a coup, the actors come from within the power structure (which could be political, military, perhaps with collusion from their industrial backers), while in a revolution, the actors are attacking the power structure from outside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27%C3%A9tatHere, there was a review of the history of coups since WWII, it found about a 50% success/failure rate, and also a 50% rate for ending with democracy vs dictatorship after successful coups. So there's no real necessary connection with military juntas and coups
per se. After a coup, you basically have even odds of ending up with democracy or not. The ones that
did end with dictatorships tended to be more repressive than before the coup however, but in the big picture, that's excluding the
less repressive half of coup-leaders. It tells you nothing about whether coups
on average make things better or worse.
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