Alex Norris

My dissertation is on the “coup trap,” the empirical observation that coups d’état tend to lead to more coups in the same country. I ask why this happens and in what circumstances the coup trap can come to an end. My work combines process tracing, network analysis, and survival models to answer this question at multiple levels. The cases I study for the process tracing and network analysis elements of this project are Syria, Sudan, and Iraq.