About Coup Atlas
Coup Atlas is an independent research database of coups d'état. It holds 1,162 records — successful coups, failed attempts, and plots uncovered before they were launched — covering 143 countries from 1945 to 2026. Every record is free to read, free to download, and traceable back to the datasets and reporting it came from.
What the database is for
Serious work on coups already exists, but it mostly lives in academic files that are hard to open and harder to read: numeric codes, no plain-language summary, no way to look one event up without downloading the whole set. Coup Atlas takes that scholarship and gives it a front door. A student, a journalist on deadline, or a researcher checking a date can find a single event in seconds, read what happened in ordinary English, see which datasets agree about it, and follow the citations out to the original reporting.
What is in it
Each record names the country and date, says whether the attempt succeeded, failed, or was stopped as a conspiracy, describes who moved against whom, and lists the sources behind it. Of the 1,162 events on file, 472 are recorded as successful. Alongside the events sit the pieces that make them usable: a written summary for every record, the leaders and units involved where they are known, the tactics used, and a cross-check against 6 other published datasets so a reader can see where the scholarship agrees and where it does not.
Where the data comes from
The backbone is the Cline Center Coup d'État Project dataset, a long-running academic collection. Coup Atlas does not replace it. It republishes it in a readable form, adds written summaries and citations, and compares it against other major datasets so disagreements are visible instead of hidden. Every record keeps the identifier it had in its source dataset, so anything here can be traced back to the original. The full method, including what is deliberately left out, is set out on the methodology page.
How careful the record is
Every record carries a documentation grade — H, M, or L — that says how much evidence is on file, not how certain we are that the event happened. Today 324 records are graded H, 653 are graded M, and 185 are graded L. A low grade is a to-do list rather than a doubt: it means the paperwork behind an event is still thin, and the grade rises as research is added. The full definition is in the glossary.
Who makes it
Coup Atlas is built and maintained by Trevor Williams, an independent researcher working on the political history of coups d'état. It is not funded by, affiliated with, or speaking for any university, government, or institution — which is also why corrections arrive and get made quickly. Research questions, data requests, interviews, and speaking invitations are welcome: the form at the foot of any record page reaches him directly.
Using and citing it
The whole database can be downloaded as a spreadsheet or as structured data from the downloads page, and it may be used for research, teaching, and journalism. Please cite both Coup Atlas and the underlying dataset. A suggested citation, the file formats, and the licence terms are all on that page.
Corrections
The record will contain mistakes; a database of this size always does. If you can point to a source, please say so — every record page has a correction form, and each change is checked against the evidence before it goes in. Reader corrections are the main reason the database keeps improving.