In a scene that has become familiar across parts of Africa of late, a group of armed men in military garb appeared on state TV on Dec. 7, 2025, to announce that they had suspended the constitution and seized control.

This time it was the West African nation of Benin, and the coup was relatively short-lived, with the government regaining full control a day later. But a week before, senior military officers in Guinea-Bissau had more success, deposing President Umaro Sissoco Embaló and effectively annulling the Nov. 23 election in which both Embaló and the main opposition leader had claimed victory. A month earlier it was Madagascar, where a mass Gen-Z uprising led to the elite CAPSAT unit of the Malagasy military ousting President Andry Rajoelina and installing Colonel Michael Randrianirina as leader.

The cluster of coup attempts follows a broader pattern. Since 2020, there have been 11 successful military takeovers in Africa: one each in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Sudan, Chad, Madagascar and Gabon; and two each in Burkina Faso and Mali. Benin represents the fifth failed coup over the same period.

The prevalence of military takeovers led United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to warn as far back as 2021 of a coup “epidemic.”

But can coups, like the pathogens of many epidemics, be contagious? Certainly observers around the world continue to ask whether a military takeover in one country can influence the likelihood of another one happening elsewhere.

Cross-national research offers little firm evidence that a coup in one country directly increases the chances of another. And some scholars remain skeptical that such a phenomenon exists. Political scientist Naunihal Singh, for instance, argues that the recent wave’s coup plotters are drawing less from contemporary events than from their own countries’ long histories of military intervention.

In addition, he suggests that any observed regional cluster mostly reflects shared underlying conditions. For example, the countries across the Sahel region that have been the center of post-2020 African coups share a

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