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How to Stage a Coup
4.6k Plays2 years ago
In the first installment of our new podcast, we sit down with Professor Rory Cormac to discuss coups, subversion, and covert influence. Professor Cormac teaches International Relations at the University of Nottingham, and specialises in secret intelligence and covert action. Rory is the author of "Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy", and the co-author of "The Black Door" and "The Secret Royals". Recently, Rory has published "How to Stage a Coup", which examines covert action and influence.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. In each episode, we sit down with leading experts to talk about dangerous acts, organisations and people. We examine historical cases, as well as the risks these subjects currently pose. From assassinations and airline shootdowns, through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the dangerous actors behind them and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them.
00:00:38
Speaker
In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions. However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
Meet the Hosts and Guest Expert
00:01:05
Speaker
I'm Louis H. Passant, the founder and editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm also a doctoral researcher at the University of Loughborough in the field of intelligence and espionage in the private sector. In my day job, I provide intelligence to corporate executives on complex geopolitical and security issues. I'm Cormac McGarry. I'm an associate director at the Global Specialist Consultancy Control Risks, where I help companies from every sector understand the implications of global geopolitical issues on their business.
00:01:34
Speaker
So joining us today, we have Professor Rory Cormack, who teaches international relations at the University of Nottingham, and specialises in secret intelligence and covert action.
Book Discussion: 'How to Stage a Coup'
00:01:43
Speaker
Rory's the author of Disrupt and Deny, Spies Special Forces in the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy, and is the co-author of The Black Door and the Secret Royals. Recently, Rory published a very interesting book titled How to Stage a Coup, which examines covert action and influence. And that's going to be the discussion of today's podcast. So Rory, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for joining us. Absolutely pleasure. Thanks for having me.
00:02:04
Speaker
So I suppose the first question is, why did you choose to write this book? Why does this topic need to be defined and studied? Because it feels like it's everywhere. You know, specifically since 2016 in the US presidential elections, everyone's been talking about disinformation, electoral rigging, and then before then with the Russian annexation of Crimea, the hybrid warfare, the little green men, fake news.
00:02:33
Speaker
And then ever since really, it's been all over, it's been everywhere.
Historical Context of Covert Operations
00:02:36
Speaker
In all its guises, whether it's propaganda and fake news, whether it's electoral interference, whether it's covert political interference and influence work, we've seen numerous warnings.
00:02:47
Speaker
about Chinese operations, for example, whether it's sabotage and secret wars, all the way up to assassination. And we've seen numerous examples of alleged Russian escapades in this area. But of course, none of this is actually new. And I wanted to explore this in a bit more detail. What is this phenomenon? What's going on? Who's doing it? Why are they doing it?
00:03:15
Speaker
Does it work? How long have states been doing this? Is this some new thing which just magicked out of thin air in 2014? The answer, of course, is no. But that's what the book is. It's an exploration of the who, what, the whys, the wheres, and the so whats of all sorts of types of dark arts of statecraft, if you like.
Statecraft and Mercenaries
00:03:35
Speaker
And Rory, like you said, none of this is new. And maybe this is because of my
00:03:42
Speaker
studies and where my career has kind of focused a lot on. But when we talk about coups, my mind wanders over to the continent of Africa. And something that's prominent in the African coups, particularly of the 80s and 90s, is the presence and influence of mercenary companies. And I guess my question, I'm thinking of the executive outcomes and the sand lines of those decades. I guess my question is, are these kinds of companies still around today
00:04:12
Speaker
Are they still at the disposal of governments and would be revolutionaries? Are they out just to make a profit or are they quasi tools? Well, any private company, you know.
00:04:25
Speaker
someone's paying them. So follow the money I suppose. But the big question here is what do we mean by sponsorship of coups? And as academics I think we quite lazily just define everything as a sponsor of a coup. Something's happened and therefore who's the hidden hand behind it? Who's the state sponsoring these
00:04:51
Speaker
mercenary companies. And we always assume that they can condense a whole spectrum of activity down to sponsorship. So when a state is involved or might be in touch with one of these private companies, it doesn't mean they're sponsoring a coup. Now it can be anything from turning a blind eye to something that's already happening.
00:05:13
Speaker
to cautiously waving it on, to passive neutrality, and then all the way through to instigating and sponsoring. And I think the executive outcome and the sand lines of this world highlight that difficulty when we're trying to unpack covert operations. Because where does the private military company end and state sponsorship, if you will?
00:05:42
Speaker
begin. How do we isolate the role of the state, the agency of the state, and then equally difficult, how do we isolate which particular state, because often there are multiple ones acting together. And we see this in Africa a lot, doing in Cold War Africa, for example, you know, multiple
00:06:05
Speaker
coups in the 60s and 70s where French mercenaries in particular involved in post-imperial Africa, giving French governments an element of deniability. But also there's this debate about how much was the French government actually instigating this and how much was it turning a blind eye and just being complicit in this. And those two things, I would argue, are very different. And we saw an example, you may remember back in the 90s with Sandline International,
00:06:32
Speaker
when they were accused of providing medical support and indeed arms to a counter coup in Sierra Leone in 1998 I think. And this led to questions about were SIS involved? Was this a British covertly sponsored, there's that word again, sponsored coup? And the chief of SIS was very adamant saying,
00:06:54
Speaker
We had absolutely nothing to do with this, but we were in contact with some of the people working for Sandline. So then the question becomes, well, how much contact? And of course, intelligence agencies are in contact with private security organizations. Many private security organizations are staffed by people who have worked in intelligence or in special forces or in some sort of state capacity.
00:07:19
Speaker
They are useful sources of intelligence. And I think there's a danger sometimes we equate being in contact with something.
00:07:26
Speaker
to sponsoring and instigating. I suppose just because a private organisation is in touch with a state, and just because it might be acting in the interest of that state, doesn't mean the state has sponsored a particular coup or instigated a particular coup. In some cases, yeah, it does. But I suppose my point is that we need to recognise this spectrum of activity
00:07:53
Speaker
and look at the nature of contacts and similarly in remember in 2004 in Equatorial Guinea there was a failed coup attempt where former British Army officer Simon Mann was found to be
00:08:10
Speaker
to be meddling. In the words of one spy writer, on that case, SIS adopts a stance of passive neutrality. So there's a whole spectrum here from green light, instigate sponsor, it's passive neutrality to just turning a blind eye. And that question about mercenaries and commercial outfits, I think really gets to the heart of the difficulty in understanding
00:08:38
Speaker
and knowing covert operations. That's fascinating. So you've spoken a lot there about some of the kind of bigger, more powerful nations, you know, about France, we've brought up Russia and some of the British organisations out there. What about the smaller states who don't have CIA, FSB, DGSE level capabilities? Do they have the ability to exercise that sort of covert influence?
Social Media's Role in Coups
00:09:02
Speaker
Is that something they can do? This is something that
00:09:06
Speaker
surprised me, maybe I shouldn't surprise me, but it's something that really struck me as I was writing the book. We associate the world of covert operations historically with the CIA. All the books on coups and electoral interference are about the CIA and the Cold War. And we associate it in the contemporary world with Russia and everything they've been doing since at least 2004.
00:09:31
Speaker
when actually loads of states do this. And we're not just talking about Russia and the US, we're talking about France and the UK. Different approaches, different scales, of course, doing it in very different ways. I don't want to create false equivalence between these different countries. But lots of states engage in unacknowledged or deniable interferences. But what really struck me was other regional mid-tier powers.
00:09:58
Speaker
Take the 1973 coup in Chile, for example. We associate that almost exclusively with the CIA. The CIA sponsored it through a coup, overflows it, end it, and that's the story. Well, archival research, not done by me, my Portuguese is a bit rusty, has just thrown up Brazil.
00:10:20
Speaker
was involved in covertly infiltrating some Brazilian military intelligence officers into Chile, posing as tourists and starting to agitate against Allende, which doesn't feature in the books about the CIA. Now, one would assume that the CIA with its greater resources had a bigger impact in the eventual outcome, but it's really important to recognize that other countries are doing this as well. And in fact, Australia will also be supporting the CIA in that particular coup.
00:10:48
Speaker
Another example comes from Benin in 1977 when there was a disastrous failure of a coup which
00:10:58
Speaker
We remember as being French-sponsored, it was it was mercenaries with the complicity of the French government. They hadn't reckoned on North Korean troops being in the capital at the time, which kind of scuppered the plans. But documents found at the scene showed that it wasn't just France, it was Morocco were involved in this and Gabon were involved in this. And often, we remember the bigger states, but there are multiple other states involved. A decade or two earlier in the 1950s,
00:11:27
Speaker
Iraq was involved in trying to instigate coups against Syria. Jordan joined in a year later alongside Iraq to try and instigate a coup in Syria. Egypt has a long track record during the NASA years of trying to subvert and covertly overthrow various regimes across the region.
00:11:50
Speaker
It's a global phenomenon. I suppose two main points. One, it's not new. And two, it's not confined to the big players. This has been going on for a long time, done by lots and lots of different countries. Rory, jumping forward here. So back into the 21st century, the big new tool that seems to be at the disposal of would-be coup organizers is the big social media.
00:12:21
Speaker
So what's the difference now? Has the playbook changed fundamentally with social media? Is there a playbook that has to be used by the organizers or governments who are trying to instigate coups? Communications and propaganda has always been a
00:12:37
Speaker
a really important part of setting the groundwork for a coup and coups don't happen out of nowhere. You need to ensure that the supposed playbook would suggest you need to ensure support of key groups like the military. You soften those militaries up with propaganda, which lays the groundwork for sometimes months, even years before
00:12:56
Speaker
the eventual coup takes place. How has social media changed this landscape? I think it's actually muddied it. It's created more confusion because what we've seen in the 21st century, the last decade in particular, is it's more difficult than ever before to build up a positive narrative in which people will buy into.
00:13:21
Speaker
because there are so many different channels of information. It's no longer the case. It has one radio station, and you get that radio station, and you've got a captive audience of the entire country. Or you get a friendly newspaper. You slip an article into a friendly newspaper, and everyone's reading it. Now, social media and blogging, everyone's a citizen journalist. It's got massive fragmentation of the media landscape, which makes controlling narratives really difficult.
00:13:51
Speaker
what it does instead
Secrecy and Intelligence in Coups
00:13:52
Speaker
is pollutes the information environment with so much stuff that it stops your adversary's narrative taking hold. So instead of building up your own, what social media allows is to sow confusion, and it's more negative, sow confusion, sow distrust, chip away at authority, chip away at narratives, chip away at
00:14:15
Speaker
institutions and trust in the media, trust in judiciary systems, judicial systems, trust in democracy. That's where the social media comes in. And it seems like, I guess in history, but even today, the successful use of propaganda, it's probably wrong going by what you're saying. It's wrong to think of social media or propaganda methods in general.
00:14:41
Speaker
as being a tool that can tip 100% of the population into your favor. It's more incremental. It's about tipping the population over some sort of threshold, whether it's the population or the military or the government. And it seems like you can do that successfully without ever having a coup almost. Would you and your definitions in your book, would you label that a coup where
00:15:07
Speaker
maybe there's no military action required, there's been enough propaganda to shift a country from one political direction to another. I suppose technically it wouldn't necessarily constitute a coup in a technical academic sense where the classic definition is about infiltrating and seizing a small but critical segment of a state apparatus and that's seizure and control.
00:15:32
Speaker
One would normally need, whether military force or palace insider, you know, King's uncle or something in the classic coups of the Persian Gulf. But what the social media is enabling is not necessarily allowing
00:15:48
Speaker
100% of the population to buy into something. I think that would always be over optimistic even in the days of mass newspapers. But it will create enough apathy and disillusionment and confusion whereby people are so cynical
00:16:11
Speaker
they just think everyone's as bad as each other and they just accept it and there might be a coup, there will be rumors that this might be illegitimate or sponsored by a foreign state, those rumors will be
00:16:25
Speaker
met with a barrage of counter narratives, none of which will make sense or they will contradict each other, but it's not about getting people to buy into those counter narratives, it's about just spamming the audience with enough 1001 different distractions that we lose sight of what's actually happened and the narrative where
00:16:50
Speaker
that this is a foreign-sponsored plot loses traction. And the average person on the street just said, well, I don't know who to believe anymore. They're all as bad as each other. I think that's the role that social media plays in spreading cynicism, spreading apathy, which creates vulnerabilities for this kind of stuff to happen. And staying on that kind of focus for a minute in the realm of new media and social media,
00:17:18
Speaker
How do the conspirators in a coup avoid detection in your studies, particularly for the planning, the recruiting of a coup? How do you find and recruit people, put them into key positions for the coup to succeed without that information slipping out and getting into the hands of the nemesis of the coup?
00:17:42
Speaker
It's obviously very difficult these days to do something completely secretly. It's very difficult for particularly human intelligence gathering and working.
00:17:55
Speaker
working as old-fashioned spies when in the world of biometric data and trying to get into airport stuff and no doubt there are some very clever people at intelligence agencies trying to come up with ways to bypass that. There are a couple of things to think about. One is that
00:18:14
Speaker
it doesn't have to be completely secret. And this can start to leak. All you need is the deniability. And then as we've discussed, the social media just creates such confusion that there might be rumours, this is leaks, someone's a bit dodgy, but that's been counteracted by a swirl of other nonsense and people just
00:18:33
Speaker
they're all dodgy and they forget about it. So I think this idea that covert operations to be successful have to be totally secret. I don't buy into. And they also think even in the glory days of the golden age of covert action back in the 50s, they weren't secret then.
00:18:51
Speaker
In Iran, for example, when people were talking about Britain being behind that coup, as it was going on. Fast forward to today, say there's a planning going on, there will be rumours and people will be pointing the fingers at the usual suspects.
00:19:08
Speaker
The key is that you get away with it because you don't acknowledge it. It's exposed, but it's not acknowledged. And you get away with it because there's a million other narratives going on which just spread confusion, cynicism, and apathy. The other thing I'd say about going undetected, or trans-going undetected, would be
00:19:28
Speaker
If you are covertly sponsoring a Kufra outside, and that's what my research focuses on is the external role in sponsoring or turning a blind eye or pattern neutrality as we discussed as a whole spectrum. You don't do it from scratch. And I think that's a really important point is that these are only ever about nudging along internal forces.
00:19:53
Speaker
It's these people are already in place. They already have ambitions to do coups. And the role of the Foreign Intelligence Agency isn't to create somebody, create grievances, and then manufacture the whole thing.
Government Strategies Against Coups
00:20:08
Speaker
It's to try and work out, well, we know so-and-so is keen for advancement, shall we say. We know he or she is willing to receive a bit of
00:20:22
Speaker
external support, let's gently nudge those forces along, which goes back to what we were talking about earlier, it's very difficult then to know what the role of the state is, how much of this would have happened anyway, how much of this is instigated by a hidden hand or how much of it is just standing back and allowing something that was going to happen anyway. So I suppose the other caveat I would add is that
00:20:49
Speaker
We're talking about covert action and state intervention. But the vast, vast majority of coups, it should be remembered, are internal and don't have hidden hands sponsoring them or instigating or whatever. And I think the misnomer is my fault. I've written a book about foreign instigation, covert action. But we shouldn't assume this is behind every coup. It's a small minority.
00:21:26
Speaker
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00:21:50
Speaker
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00:22:06
Speaker
So we've talked a lot about what we at Encyclopedia Geopolitica refer to as the kind of red team, the dangerous forces doing these kind of things, the people behind the coups. So let's move on to the blue team, the people defending against it. In the book you refer to this as defence against the dark arts. So I suppose my first question is, if you were a ruler, a dictator, a government, how would you go about coup proofing your regime?
00:22:29
Speaker
We need to think about who are the most likely people to launch coups against me if I was a dictator. And the answer tends to be military or relative. Historically, relative.
00:22:46
Speaker
going to watch out for the generals and your brother, your half brother. And so how do we then prove against that? Well, first of all, we need to make sure the military is big enough to quash rebellions, but not too powerful to be able to overthrow me as the dictator. So we need a separation of powers. We need multiple different organizations. We need a kind of presidential guard as well as the military, as well as the internal intelligence organization.
00:23:12
Speaker
to make sure that a divide and rule strategy, if you like. So if one unit or wing gets any ideas, then there are others which can quickly put them down. And then we also need to ensure that there is loyalty amongst those units, whether it's patronage or cultural reasons, familial reasons, trying to cultivate certain people in positions of power.
00:23:40
Speaker
But this comes at a risk. It's a trade-off. Dictators are always trying to balance that coup-proofing with protecting against wider popular uprisings. Because as soon as you start putting all your family, Kith and Kin, in positions of power, that then creates an inequality. It creates an angry, alienated, wider population who are excluded from decision-making, who then may be more willing to rise up and overthrow.
00:24:10
Speaker
Whereas if you then go too far the other way and have a nice, healthy, inclusive democracy, then you might get booted out anyway. So dictators face this dilemma between do we go gamma-coo-proofing route or do we go down the quallen popular uprisings? And most of them will be somewhere along that scale, depending on the threats that they're facing at the moment.
00:24:36
Speaker
So are there any examples you could talk about where you've seen successful counter-cooperations because dictators or rulers have found that right balance? I think the UAE is a good example over the Arab Spring era.
00:24:51
Speaker
a good book on this by a scholar called Matthew Hedges, who was written about the UAE security state and in an era of turmoil after 2010, seeing uprisings, we're seeing regime change. What the UAE has done is expanded its security apparatus. It has cultivated, you use patronage to cultivate different leaders of different organizations. It's ensured that no one
00:25:19
Speaker
uh, defensible organization is too powerful. It's kind of that separation of powers and balancing as we've discussed. And it's even extended some of its, uh, toes into, um, commercial activity as well. So you see the security state, um, extending
00:25:38
Speaker
all over the state. I should have asked them, that's hedges is take rather than my own research. But I think it's really interesting. It's a really interesting example. So Rory, looking at, we've been talking about the kind of insular actions, let's say, within the state quite a lot, particularly talking about dictators. But I asked this question in the context of both dictators as well as democratic, like properly democratically elected governments.
Resilience through Education and Governance
00:26:09
Speaker
in the realm of covert action and covert interference externally, which you discuss in your book, how can governments insulate themselves from that? Again, just thinking specifically on the external pressures rather than those that come within the state. There's no
00:26:28
Speaker
easy answer and no government can fully protect themselves against it. It's all about risk mitigation, particularly in democracies. We don't want to create police states where we're surveilling everybody to get perfect security. It's a balance. We just have to manage the risks as best we can. We don't want to censor people's speech. So what we need to do is we need to
00:26:54
Speaker
boost resilience against this type of interference. We need to ensure that citizens, populations and democracies are able to spot fake news, able to spot dodgy stuff that's being churned out by inauthentic Twitter networks, are able to recognise which sources are actually linked to the Kremlin so that we don't have to then
00:27:23
Speaker
get into horrible debates about managing disinformation and censoring disinformation and saying what we can and can't talk about online because that would be horrible. But we need to
00:27:33
Speaker
increase people's ability to spot that stuff and to call it out. I don't even think fact checking and denying stuff always works as well as proponents might believe because it just becomes another thing in the information ecosystem where it becomes, he said, she said. So I think the best thing to do is it's long term, it's educational, it's
00:28:02
Speaker
funding courses in critical thinking. This is a school, this is a university. This is what the Finns do. Finland is widely regarded as excellent in countering foreign interferences, have a lot of practice from its next door neighbour, but it's long term.
00:28:23
Speaker
There are no quick fixes, and I think quite often we think, well, what's a quick fix we can do that's cheap? But we've joined up government thinking because this isn't just the role of the intelligence services, for example. It's the role of all of us, of academia, of business, of government. And that's why it's bizarre when we talk about the importance of countering foreign interference and disinformation
00:28:51
Speaker
and then in the UK, at the same time, make cuts to the BBC and the World Service and attack those things. It doesn't make sense. I mean, argue the BBC isn't worth it if you want to argue it, I would disagree. But don't then say, well, we've got this problem of inauthentic information going on. So it's joined up thinking, which is quite often lacking. It's long-term joined up thinking to build resilience against this. That's the answer. It's difficult.
00:29:21
Speaker
But that is the answer rather than turning to more security powers, more censorship, more surveillance to try and inculcate ourselves from the threat. Is the nation of philosophers impervious to a coup? And actually, to take that to a serious point, I wonder, is there a correlation between the education of a population and the stability of their government against coups?
00:29:49
Speaker
That's a great question. I do strongly believe that the more education, the more training we give people in critical thinking, in source analysis, this is relatively basic stuff. I'm not talking about PhDs in this. We're talking about school instead of
00:30:13
Speaker
slashing history instead of slashing music when kids are 13, 14, 15 and focusing only on proper subjects, as ministers might suggest, we need to build this up. Media studies is widely mocked in the British press as being the archetype of Mickey Mouse degree, whereas how we navigate the contemporary media environment
00:30:40
Speaker
might be the difference between remaining in democracy and not remaining in democracy. So quite frankly, it's an incredibly important, incredibly important degree. Let me follow up on that question. When we think about the difference between democracies and dictatorships and all the various forms of government that are somewhere in between, when it comes to preventing coups, insulating themselves from covert action, is one better than the other? Does one have an advantage there?
00:31:07
Speaker
Historically, democracies have been more vulnerable to coups and indeed to electoral interference. They will be more vulnerable to electoral interference given that non-democracies don't have free and fair elections in the first place. But democracies are more vulnerable because we have the space for hostile actors to operate. There is a free press that can be manipulated, that can be sponsored. There are opposition parties that can be
00:31:34
Speaker
supported. There is freedom of assembly, protest, rights to protest, all these things allow hostile actors a way in, a means to exploit in a way that a single party state that's been in power for a very long time and is built up.
00:31:56
Speaker
a lot of experience and coup-proofing, that space just isn't necessarily there. And it's one of the great paradoxes of democracy, isn't it? It's the same with counter-terrorism. Our freedoms are used against us, but we need to keep hold of those freedoms because they're so incredibly, incredibly important. So it's all about balance. It's all about
00:32:18
Speaker
it's all about risk mitigation but yes democracies historically are more vulnerable but not necessarily very well established democracies when it comes to coups in particular successful coups have a have a sweet spot
00:32:33
Speaker
where you have a self-functioning bureaucracy, which is able and willing to operate under new leadership. Whereas in the US or the UK, for example, that self-functioning bureaucracy is mature enough to know when something dodgy is happening. And we see that in the States during January the 6th, whatever you want to call it.
00:32:59
Speaker
this, you know, it wasn't allowed to go ahead. This self-function bureaucracy recognises something's wrong, and I would like to think the same would happen here when a Prime Minister is told to leave by his party. He might put up some resistance, but eventually he goes, because our political system is mature enough to know... I mean, the Constitution works. Britain's Constitution is famously
00:33:27
Speaker
and excellent not written but it worked and I think that's an important point so where the sweet spot is for a coup is it's a bureaucracy which is not too mature but also not too tied to the particular leader that's the that's the the ripe spot for a coup Rory you're an expert in this field you spend more time thinking about it than most people on this planet what
00:33:55
Speaker
keeps you up at night. What makes you worry? Less the the coups from a UK US perspective I don't think.
00:34:05
Speaker
we would see a coup for the reasons we've just been discussing, a mature, self-functioning bureaucracy ready to spot when something isn't right. But what I worry about is actually something below the level of regime change. And we've been talking this whole chat about regime change. But most covert operations and covert influence goes on below the level of regime change. And what I worry about
00:34:32
Speaker
is a gradual erosion of democratic norms and standards, where we think it's all fine, nothing's really happening. But it's a boiling frog scenario. Gradually over time, things just start to erode. Now, that could happen for internal reasons rather than external reasons. And there's often interplay between internal and external. You see hostile foreign actors exploit internal weaknesses and divisions. So getting our own house in order
00:35:03
Speaker
solving some of these rifts and toxic public discourse as a way to prevent hostile foreign interference. And it would be myopic to just focus on the bad guys, so to speak, and think that we're completely innocent in our own internal issues. So the problem, the thing that keeps me up is the gradual long-term corrosion
00:35:28
Speaker
of democracy, of trust in the media, in judges, in democratic institutions. That's what I worry about. And it's gradual chipping away, which plays on our own insecurities and our own problems. This isn't just foreign instigated. But that's what I worry about, much more than the bigger, more dramatic coups.
Effectiveness of Covert Operations
00:35:54
Speaker
So Rory, what's a question that we should be asking you about this topic? When I say we, I don't mean us as Encyclopedia Geopolitica, but the broader community trying to address these problems. What's the unasked question that people should be looking for answers on? Does it work?
00:36:10
Speaker
So what, what's the consequence of this? And it's a slightly cheeky answer for me because people are starting to ask this question in a more sophisticated manner, but it's incredibly difficult to answer it. And we need lots more people asking this question because, I mean, we've hinted at it during this discussion. How do you isolate impact if a foreign state is just nudging history along, is exploiting internal divisions?
00:36:38
Speaker
is supporting pre-existing forces. How do you know that that state had an impact, had any agency?
00:36:47
Speaker
How do you know that they sponsored it rather than just turned a blind eye to it? And even if they did, what constitutes success here? Because yes, they might overthrow a particular government, but then that government might become repressive or might end up leading to a terrible relationship with the sponsoring government in the first place and the whole thing would have been a waste. Is it worth it? And these are big questions.
00:37:15
Speaker
If you overthrow a government, you get a client, a leader in place, brings you 20 years of stability, but then leads to something horrific. Was that a success? Was it not a success? And I don't think there's enough discussion about the impact and the implications because so much of this, because it's interesting, focuses on the stories and what happened, the spies, the bonds, the bonds, all this kind of the myth.
00:37:45
Speaker
without thinking in a sophisticated manner, or did it work? How do we know it worked? How was that success constructed? It starts to get quite philosophical, but I think it's really, really important. You've got to get away from the spy stories, as fun as they are, and think, well, so what?
00:38:02
Speaker
Well, this has been an absolutely fantastic discussion, if not a slightly unnerving one. As a reminder for our listeners, Rory Cormack's new book, How to Stage a Coo, is available in bookstores now. A link to the book and other works by Rory, as well as those discussed in this episode, will be available on encyclopediagiopolitica.com in the show notes.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:38:19
Speaker
Rory, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. This episode was hosted by me, Lewis Agepersonne, along with Cormack McGarry.
00:38:29
Speaker
Our producer for this episode was Edwin Tran. Our researchers were Ananay Agawal and Alex Smith.