MAIN IDEA:

This is a very detailed manual on how to conduct a coup. It describes everything required to conduct a successful coup, from the political conditions of society that make a coup possible to the psychological preparation of participants and even tactical recommendations on force allocation and the sequence of objectives.  It also provides very good statistical data about this form of political activity. Here is the table describing the overall results over the last historical period:

MY TAKE ON IT:

This book was first published in 1968 when coups were quite
common and in a very old-fashioned way: as military action. The author
correctly identifies preconditions for the coup:” The social and economic
conditions of the target country must be such as to confine political
participation to a small fraction of the population.” It seems to me that such
preconditions have become increasingly improbable because of widespread social
media and the availability of multichannel communications with high levels of redundancy.
There has also been a massive change in the requirements for legitimacy, which
now often includes at least some form of popular vote, whether real or
falsified. In short, the change of people in power is becoming much more dependent
on the manipulation of the political opinions of the population than on the
support of a small group of military men in the capital of a country. A
contemporary coup requires the ability to organize mass demonstrations in its
support, which then transferred into taking political power away from previous
rulers via some emergency election, however faked, rather than just getting a
small military detachment to arrest these previous rulers. With the world being
currently in turmoil unseen since the wave of dissolution of the communist
system in Europe, we’ll probably have the opportunity to see how the new,
qualitatively different generation of coups happens in the near future.