Description:

As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a rebirth for democracy, what emerged was a silent coup – namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power. Exposing the origins of this epic power grab as well as its present-day consequences, Silent Coup is the result of two investigative journalists' reports from 30 countries around the world. It provides an explosive guide to the rise of a corporate empire that now dictates how resources are allocated, how territories are governed, and how justice is defined.

Review

In the spring of 2014, two young journalists walked into a London restaurant to meet Gavin MacFadyen, the relentless founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. Over coffee, MacFadyen issued a characteristically blunt directive: find out what is happening to democracy. The three years of reporting that followed, spanning twenty-five countries and culminating in Silent Coup, answer that question with a portrait of global corporate power so meticulously documented and so damning in its implications that the book operates less as a conventional exposé than as a kind of forensic archaeology. Claire Provost and Matt Kennard do not simply argue that multinational capital has captured the institutions of the postwar order; they trace the very wiring through which that capture was engineered, and they name the midwives who delivered it. The result is an extraordinary feat of investigative journalism — sprawling, indignant, occasionally over-schematic — whose real contribution lies not in the novelty of its central thesis, which will be familiar to anyone who has read the decolonial or anti-imperialist canon, but in the sheer weight of granular, on-the-ground testimony it brings to bear on the question of how, exactly, the democratic promise of national self-determination was hollowed out from within.

The book’s architecture is built around what the authors call a “silent coup against its very core” — the core being democracy itself — and they identify four pillars that sustain it: corporate courts (investor-state dispute settlement), corporate welfare (development finance disguised as aid), corporate utopias (special economic zones and private cities), and corporate armies (private security, paramilitaries, and weapons). Each pillar is given its own section, each section opens and closes with a debrief to MacFadyen, and the whole project is shot through with the memory of the man, whose death in late 2016 gives the investigation its elegiac undertow. MacFadyen functions as the book’s skeptical conscience, and the authors deploy his voice — dry, furious, aphoristic — to deliver some of the book’s sharpest judgments. “If these agencies are supposed to be progressive forces for development that prioritises the poorest, they’re doing a terrible job,” he says over coffee near Goldsmiths. “But, if you think development means that the rich get richer, and can expand as much as they want, then these institutions are perhaps working just fine. Doing great!”

This is the wager of Silent Coup: that the global machinery of finance, law, territory, and force is not malfunctioning but is instead “working as intended.” The point is hammered home in the book’s first section, which takes on the investor-state dispute settlement system. Provost and Kennard travel to El Salvador on the eve of a tribunal hearing brought by the mining corporation OceanaGold, which sued the country for refusing a gold-mining permit in the face of a mass anti-mining movement that had pushed for the world’s first nationwide metals mining ban. At the heart of the chapter is a meeting in a K Street law office with Luis Parada, the attorney who has spent decades defending states in these tribunals. Parada tells them the system is “out of control,” that it was “created with good intentions, but in practice it has gone completely rogue,” and that he does not think “countries get as much from these treaties as the risks that they incur.” The authors, however, go further: by unearthing the founding records of the World Bank’s ICSID arbitration body, they show that the system was deliberately stacked from the start. In 1964, at what became known as “El No de Tokyo,” twenty-one developing countries voted against the convention that would enshrine investor-state arbitration, and were simply overridden. The “good intentions gone rogue” story, they argue, is a fable.

They trace the intellectual lineage back still further, to a 1957 conference in San Francisco sponsored by TIME-LIFE, where the Deutsche Bank chief Hermann Abs unveiled his proposal for a “Capitalist Magna Carta” that would protect foreign investors from “new lands seething with nationalism.” The chapter is a miniature history of the Cold War’s legal architecture, and it introduces the figures — Abs, Lord Shawcross, World Bank general counsel Aron Broches — who built the scaffolding that would allow a Swedish energy company to sue the German government for $1.6 billion over a coal plant on the Moorburg, extracting a secret settlement that weakened water-permit conditions. The book is at its most persuasive when it shows how these mechanisms were deliberately crafted in the boardrooms of the mid-century, then seeded across the decolonizing world before boomeranging back to threaten the rich democracies that invented them.

The second pillar — corporate welfare — is perhaps the most thoroughly documented, and it is here that the authors’ “follow the money” method, inherited from MacFadyen, yields its most startling results. They attend the 2014 Liverpool International Festival for Business, where British officials market aid contracts as a “feel good” export sector, and they trace the genealogy of the UK’s development finance institution, the CDC, from its origins as the Colonial Development Corporation through its privatisation into a vehicle that has funded luxury housing estates for the Salvadoran elite, the billionaire Poma family’s shopping malls, and the Williamson diamond mine in Tanzania, where “extreme pink diamonds” coexist with subsistence farmers. The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm, emerges as a kind of parallel welfare state for capital: $80 million for a Shangri-La hotel in Myanmar, built on land owned by the son of a notorious drug lord; roughly $350 million to the Schwarz Group, the parent of Lidl, for expansion across Eastern Europe; a healthcare chain in Romania that serves wealthy medical tourists while kidney and heart patients are referred to public hospitals. In a devastating pair of chapters on Lidl’s operations in Poland and Romania, the authors interview Solidarity trade unionists and small market traders who had no idea that “development” money was funding their biggest competitor, and who detail the labour abuses — seized bathroom breaks, swollen wrists, a culture of fear — that accompanied the investment. MacFadyen’s voice cuts through the data: “A global welfare system that actually works — just not for who needs it most.”

The book’s third section turns to territory, mapping the global spread of special economic zones from their unlikely origin in Shannon, Ireland, in 1959. The Irish entrepreneur Brendan O’Regan’s free zone became the template that future Chinese president Jiang Zemin studied on a training course in 1980, and the authors trace the lineage from Shannon to Shenzhen, where a surveillance-saturated city of two hundred thousand CCTV cameras was born, and from Shenzhen to Cambodia and India and Vietnam and a billionaire-built corporate city called Lavasa, where the company itself holds “the right to evict, to tax.” The argument is that these zones function as “exceptional spaces” where labour rights, environmental law, and democratic accountability are carved out of national territory, and that they are not exceptions but “role models” intended to be rolled out nationwide. The gendering of zone labour is treated as a deliberate mechanism of control: women make up ninety-five percent of Cambodia’s zone workforce, and the authors cite an Asian Development Bank paper that rationalised the practice with stereotypes about “nimble fingers” and a supposed docility. At the same time, they visit private cities from Florida’s Celebration, master-planned by Disney, to a proposed Mormon settlement on a vast ranch in Orlando, and to the Vermont scheme of a tech entrepreneur who imagines a company town of ten thousand, all of them illustrating what the development economist Arjun Jayadev calls the “secession of the rich” — a physical withdrawal from the messy, redistributive demands of ordinary democracy.

The fourth pillar, private force, is the book’s darkest terrain, because it traces the return of something that the modern state was supposed to have monopolised: organised violence. The authors walk the reader from the colonial chartered companies — the East India Company with its private army, the Royal Niger Company, Unilever’s brutal operations in Leopold’s Congo — through the Cold War’s paramilitary experiments and into a present in which the Chiquita banana corporation, the descendant of United Fruit, paid $1.7 million to Colombian paramilitaries, and the Honduran oligarch Miguel Facussé’s Dinant palm-oil empire stands accused of running its own militia in the Bajo Aguán valley. An anonymous Colombian plaintiff in the class-action suit against Chiquita tells them: “They killed people with chainsaws, with machetes, they set them alight with gasoline. They raped women and girls. They burnt houses.” The book does not flinch from this testimony, and it uses it to ground the larger statistical picture: a private security industry that the authors, drawing on the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey and a dataset they built across eighty-one countries, estimate at $180 billion and twenty million guards — guards who now outnumber public police in countries holding more than half the world’s population. The political economists Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev have shown that more unequal societies deploy more “guard labour,” and the authors treat the industry as “a very physical display of inequality.”

At the far end of this pillar sits the privatisation of the United States nuclear weapons complex. The Bechtel-led for-profit consortium that has run Los Alamos since 2006 — the birthplace of the bomb — operates under a model called GOCO, or Government Owned, Contractor Operated, which the authors document as a disaster for safety, science, and accountability. A 2014 radioactive-drum rupture at the Carlsbad site, triggered by subcontractors using the wrong kitty litter to pack nitrate salts, cost more than $500 million to clean up. A fire at Los Alamos in 2015 burned onto the Santa Clara Pueblo, which lost eighty percent of its forest, and whistleblowers who raised safety concerns were demoted to basements and fired. Patricia Trujillo, a Chicano studies professor from the poor neighbouring county of Rio Arriba, calls it “institutionalised racism. We can take your land. We can poison you. We can pay you the minimum.” The land was taken from indigenous and Hispanic families and never returned; the lab’s workforce data, once public, is now hidden behind commercial confidentiality; and the for-profit structure, the authors argue, embeds a permanent incentive against the abolition of nuclear weapons, because the very threat is the product. Beata Tsosie-Pena, an activist from Tewa Women United, reminds them that “it wasn’t Hiroshima or Nagasaki that were first bombed, but the people of New Mexico,” and her presence in the chapter ties the nuclear story back to the colonial violence from which the book’s whole architecture descends.

One of the quietest achievements of Silent Coup is the way it insists on linking these four pillars to a deliberate, long-range intellectual project — what Eugene Staley, an economist at the Stanford Research Institute, called “peace without democracy” in his 1935 book War and the Private Investor. Staley proposed a World Government with a World Commercial Court and a World Investment Bank, explicitly designed to insulate capital from democratic populations. The authors trace this blueprint through the 1971 Powell Memorandum, which urged American business to organise a counter-attack against threats to “the system,” and through the Bilderberg meetings, the Mont Pèlerin Society, and the work of Quinn Slobodian, whose Globalists identified an interwar project to “encase” the economy in international law beyond the reach of mass politics. The “Capitalist Magna Carta” and the Staley report were not ephemeral conference speeches; they were the blueprints that Broches, Abs, and the World Bank presidents Eugene Black and George D. Woods turned into institutional reality. The book’s invocation of the decolonial historian Walter Rodney — “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” — and the political scientist P. W. Singer, whose concept of “corporate warriors” traces the privatised military industry back to the chartered companies, places Silent Coup squarely within an anti-imperialist and decolonial tradition that reads the post-1945 order not as a break with empire but as its reorientation. The “silent coup” is, in this reading, the continuation of imperial extraction by quieter means.

Yet the very scope that gives the book its power also exposes its vulnerabilities. The four-pillar structure, while elegant, sometimes forces the material into a schema that flattens the messier, more contingent ways in which these institutions evolved. The claim that the “silent coup” constitutes a deliberately coordinated, generations-long strategy — a coordinated corporate war on democracy — rests more on the suggestive alignment of the Staley-Powell-Abs lineage than on documentary evidence that the architects of each pillar operated in conscious concert. The book acknowledges this, and many of its own key arguments are self-flagged as “contested,” including the assertion that tax-haven routing through Mauritius drains poorer states and that the IFC deliberately invests through such structures. The tax-haven chapter, which shows how Malawi Mangoes was incorporated in Mauritius at a “care-of” address while operating in Malawi, is a vivid piece of reporting, but the counterargument — that offshore incorporation is a rational response to weak legal frameworks in host countries — goes unexamined. The authors’ righteous indignation, so electrifying in the sections on paramilitary violence and detention centres, occasionally produces prose that overreaches, as when they imply that the entire architecture of development finance is nothing but a scam, thereby obscuring the real, if deeply compromised, redistributive motivations that still animate some of the institutions they investigate.

The book’s treatment of resistance, while earnest and well-intentioned, can feel rushed. El Salvador’s mining ban, Bolivia’s resource sovereignty under Evo Morales, Argentina’s worker-recovered factories, and the wave of energy remunicipalisation across Germany — each of these is held up as evidence that the silent coup can be answered, but they receive only a few pages apiece, and the structural conditions that made them possible are only sketched. The epilogue, which eulogises MacFadyen and calls for journalism to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable,” is moving but also, in its brevity, risks trading the hard work of analysis for the consolations of the jeremiad. The book’s prose, generally clear and forceful, sometimes slips into the slightly hectoring register of the campaign pamphlet, and the decision to frame the entire investigation as a series of dialogues with a dead mentor, while emotionally effective, can feel like a storytelling crutch that substitutes MacFadyen’s voice for the more difficult work of synthesising twenty chapters of disparate evidence into an integrated argument.

None of this diminishes the work’s value as a piece of journalism. Silent Coup is, in the best sense, a book that reads the way good investigative reporting is practiced: it privileges primary documents, names names, and refuses to let the powerful off the hook. The authors’ methodology — archival digging, Freedom of Information lawsuits, the construction of an original eighty-one-country dataset on private security, the willingness to fly budget routes and stay in cheap hotels for months at a time — is a rebuke to the desk-bound op-ed culture that passes for so much foreign coverage. When they reproduce a TIME magazine supplement from 1957 that framed investor protection as a bulwark against “new lands seething with nationalism,” they are doing the kind of spadework that changes how a reader understands the present. When they ask a Yarl’s Wood detainee what it feels like to be held for three years without charge in a G4S-run immigration centre, and she replies, “We are treated like cattle in a camp,” they are fulfilling, word for word, MacFadyen’s dictum that journalism must deliver “not the respectable truth, but the ugly truth.”

The book is best read as an atlas of the anti-democratic infrastructure that has been built over the past seventy years, and as a summons to the kind of journalism that might begin to map it for a wider public. It does not pretend to offer a comprehensive theory, and it is strongest when it remains close to the ground, showing how a gated community in San Salvador, a Shangri-La hotel in Yangon, a privatised checkpoint on the West Bank, and a nuclear laboratory in the New Mexico desert are all, in the end, pieces of the same construction. The “silent coup” may be less a coordinated conspiracy than a convergent evolution of interests, but the convergence is real, and the book’s great service is to make it visible. It deserves to be read by anyone who has ever wondered why, in a world of formal democratic plenty, so many of the decisions that shape human lives — where the water flows, who owns the land, whether a mine can be dug, whether a coal plant can burn — seem to have been removed from the ballot box long ago.

Notable Quotes

This system is out of control.

Luis Parada, El Salvador's lawyer defending the country against Pacific Rim's investor-state case at the World Bank, describing the international investor-state dispute settlement system — ISDS, corporate power, sovereignty, legal system

I personally don't think countries get as much from these treaties as the risks that they incur. Let's put it this way, if I were the President of a country, I wouldn't be happy with my country being a party to this system.

Luis Parada, the elite lawyer who defended states in investor-state cases, questioning the validity of the entire system he worked within — ISDS, bilateral investment treaties, sovereignty, risk

The new system would give the foreign investor, by virtue of the fact that he is a foreigner, the right to sue a sovereign state outside its national territory, dispensing with the courts of law. This provision is contrary to the accepted legal principles of our country and, de facto, would confer a privilege on the foreign investor, placing the nationals of the country concerned in a position of inferiority.

Chile's representative explaining the opposition of twenty-one countries to the establishment of ICSID at the World Bank's 1964 Tokyo meetings, an event later known as the 'El No de Tokyo' — ISDS, sovereignty, inequality, colonial power, resistance

People must come to accept private enterprise, not as a necessary evil, but as an affirmative good.

Eugene Black, then president of the World Bank, speaking at the 1957 International Industrial Development Conference in San Francisco where Hermann Abs proposed his 'Capitalist Magna Carta' — corporate ideology, World Bank, neoliberalism, Cold War

What we were doing with African countries, when we were negotiating our investment treaties with them, is that we were essentially imposing the same conditions that the Europeans imposed on us. So there was this paradox in our approach … an inconsistency really.

Peter Draper, former South African government trade official, describing how South Africa both suffered from and perpetuated the investor-state treaty system — ISDS, South Africa, hypocrisy, neo-imperialism

Economic apartheid has thrived since 1994. Black South Africans are poorer, white South Africans are richer, with only a smattering of change in between.

Bonnie Meyersfeld, director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, discussing how international investment law undermines post-apartheid justice — inequality, apartheid, South Africa, corporate power

We are the country with the worst water stress in Latin America.

Ángel Ibarra, El Salvador's vice-minister for the environment, explaining why the country's fight against gold mining was existential, not merely political — environment, water rights, El Salvador, mining

There's a threat of more suits. But put in this context – is the bigger threat that the people of your country die, or you get sued in Washington?

Luis Lopez, environmental advisor to El Salvador's FMLN party, on the calculus governments face when the investor-state system threatens action to protect citizens — sovereignty, ISDS, democracy, environment

Welcome to the world of aid-funded business.

Nigel Peters, head of the UK government's Aid-Funded Business Service, addressing corporate executives at the 2014 International Festival for Business in Liverpool, describing $70-100 billion in aid contracts as business opportunities — foreign aid, corporate welfare, development, corruption

We are working 10 hour shifts and get 140 Rand per day.

Mpho Masisi, a 23-year-old worker at the Minaco granite factory in Marikana, South Africa, owned by the Italian investors who had successfully challenged post-apartheid Black Economic Empowerment laws through the investor-state system — labor exploitation, inequality, South Africa, corporate impunity

All we have ever done is farming. And now we have no land. We have no hope, only despair.

Aye Khin, a 29-year-old farmer in Myanmar displaced by the Thilawa Special Economic Zone, sitting in the makeshift house he built after his family home was bulldozed — displacement, SEZ, land rights, development

It was futile to resist the world-wide sweep of capitalist development.

Eugene Staley, the University of Chicago economist whose 1935 book War and the Private Investor proposed a World Government and World Commercial Court to manage the inevitable expansion of corporate empires and suppress democratic resistance — corporate ideology, imperialism, inevitability narrative, planning

Imagine that. A global welfare system that actually works – just not for who needs it most.

Gavin MacFadyen, the authors' mentor, responding to their findings about how international development finance institutions subsidize multinational corporations rather than alleviating poverty — development, corporate welfare, inequality, irony

It's weird, too, that capitalists, who always talk about competition and the risks they take, have this system to cushion their falls.

Gavin MacFadyen on the contradiction between free-market rhetoric and the elaborate support systems that protect corporate investments from democratic accountability — hypocrisy, corporate welfare, free market ideology

Companies don't come and invest in a country or not because it does or doesn't have a bilateral investment treaty. They invest if there is a return to be made.

Xavier Carim, former South African government trade official serving at the World Trade Organization, explaining how South Africa's internal study found no evidence that investment treaties actually increased foreign investment — ISDS, investment treaties, evidence, myth-busting

I can't even sleep at night, because of the stress.

Daw Win, a 56-year-old woman in Myanmar who lost her land and livelihood to the Thilawa Special Economic Zone construction, now living day to day worrying about meals — displacement, human cost, SEZ, Myanmar

How do you get the low-skilled workers demanding higher wages out? That's the whole name of the game in the global economy: to play countries off one another.

Jonathan Bach, professor at The New School in New York, describing how Shenzhen's SEZ evolved from attracting cheap labor to expelling the workers who built it — SEZ, labor, race to the bottom, globalization

They killed people with chainsaws, with machetes, they set them alight with gasoline. They raped women and girls. They burnt houses.

Fernando, a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Chiquita, describing the violence perpetrated by paramilitaries the banana company admitted to paying at least $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 — corporate violence, paramilitaries, Colombia, impunity

We are nothing for rich people, they don't want to see us, or hear us.

An anonymous woman in Ukraine's Vinnytsia region, describing how her community was coerced into giving up land for the expansion of MHP's poultry farms, which received IFC development finance — land rights, displacement, development finance, inequality

Above all, we have a responsibility to tell the truth. Not the respectable truth, but the ugly truth.

Gavin MacFadyen's maxim, quoted in the epilogue as the authors' guiding principle throughout their decade-long investigation — journalism, truth, accountability, democracy

It's a big deal if companies can insulate themselves from democracy inside these zones. It's a bigger deal if these places become 'role models' for entire countries to follow. Then it's not just about the carve-outs, it's about everything.

Gavin MacFadyen warning the authors about the larger implications of Special Economic Zones as testing grounds for policies later rolled out nationwide — SEZ, democracy, corporate power, policy diffusion

The coup was against our economic model … we showed that another Bolivia is possible.

Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, speaking to the authors from his home deep in the Amazon after his 2019 overthrow, which was followed by British officials welcoming opportunities for UK companies to exploit Bolivia's lithium — sovereignty, resistance, Latin America, resource nationalism

Who do natural resources belong to? The people under the control of their state? Or are they privatised under the control of transnationals so they can plunder our natural resources?

Evo Morales framing the central question of the book as a struggle not only in Bolivia but throughout the world — sovereignty, resource nationalism, democracy, corporate power

Crises of faith or lacking trust in democratic institutions from parliaments to the media make sense. Democracy and independence are largely buzzwords that feel hollow – because they were made hollow, over generations with strategic planning, lobbying campaigns and new infrastructure.

The authors' conclusion in the epilogue, summarizing how the erosion of democratic power was not accidental but deliberately engineered through long-range corporate planning — democracy, corporate power, disillusionment, systemic critique

It wasn't Hiroshima or Nagasaki that were first bombed, but the people of New Mexico.

Beata Tsosie-Pena, an indigenous environmental activist with Tewa Women United, reminding the authors that the Trinity Test Site detonation preceded the more famous bombings, and that indigenous communities near Los Alamos remain 'collateral damage for the weapons industry' — nuclear weapons, indigenous rights, environmental justice, privatization