[1] The concept of a soft coup as a strategy is attributed to the American political scientist Gene Sharp, a Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who has been a theorist and author of works on the dynamics of nonviolent conflict.
He studied the potential to spark, guide, and maximize the power of sometimes short-lived mass uprisings, as he tried to understand how unarmed insurrections have been far more politically significant than observers focused on military warfare have cared to admit.
[2] According to Axel Kaiser, a Chilean lawyer member of the Mises Institute, the soft coup is often part of a conspiracy theory used by Latin American populists who seek the centralization of power but do so under the pretense of improving democracy.
[4] This notion of democracy is opposed to the one traditionally held in the United States, which considers that rulers must have limits to their power;[4] it also conflicts with minority rights.
There is a perception of those coups as negative events; the legacy of Operation Condor evokes continuing mistrust among the general population.