Coup d’talk

Abstract Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup has been variously described as ‘a popular, peaceful revolution’, ‘military assisted transition’, ‘non-coup-coup’, ‘gentle’ coup, ‘the politest coup in history’, the ‘softest military coup’, a ‘modern’ coup, and ‘a very Zimbabwean coup’. This chapter debunks the aforementioned representations of the coup as exceptional or different from other coups. The chapter argues that Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup shared comparable justifications and operational attributes with coups elsewhere in Africa. Exceptionalist representations of the 2017 Zimbabwean coup do not engage instructive literature on the history of coups in Africa—hence their mischaracterization of the military action. Finally, the examples of gendered coups discussed in Chapter 2 amply demonstrate that, regardless of time (cold war versus post-cold war) and geography (Zimbabwe versus ‘the average African experience’), an essential quality of coups is that they are gendered operations. Gender destabilizes neat categorization of cold -war-type coups and post-cold-war-type coups.