I'm sorry to say I'm unfamiliar with Stephen Zunes, but I hope I can contribute to this discussion in some small way. Edward N. Luttwak's seminal 1968 book on coups mostly deals with them from a military perspective, but insofar as it still represents current thinking, there are a few parallels between his observations and this piece. In his wealth of examples and hypotheticals, he clearly relies far more on ensuring the neutrality or disorganization of the politically active portions of the population than on their immediate persecution and confrontation. For an army alone, he uses the (frighteningly prescient) example of late '60s Portugal, where he games out how 3,000 sympathising troops can block out the 57,000 remaining troops on the Portuguese mainland. Combined with a deliberate tactic of occupying symbolic buildings and bureaucratic nerve centers, his understanding of a coup is largely a chess-like game of "chicken," holding out just long enough to convince civil servants and the armed forces that they have effective control over the workings of the government.

However, being a game of "chicken," a Luttwakian coup is very fragile. Luttwak gives the example of the Algiers Putsch of 1961, where rebellious French generals possessed enough of the armed forces in Algeria to make good on a threat of invading Paris by force, at a time when Charles de Gaulle was out of the country. However, de Gaulle was able to transmit his opposition to the coup from Senegal, and the subsequent refusal of parts of the civil service and French unions to accept the new regime eventually tilted the remainder of the French military to unify against the coup attempt and arrest its leadership.

Luttwak focuses mostly on the potential rallying points of major political leaders, but Curzio Malaparte's 1931 Technique du Coup D'Etat better details the general strike that took down the Kapp Putsch in 1920. Both books stress the power of strong institutions that have an interest in preserving the old system, or at least opposing its replacement by a coup. Luttwak opines that modern American political parties are not up to the task of physically disrupting a coup in progress, though he recommends cutting communications between local organizations. However, insofar as his strategy of convincing-the-fence-sitters holds true, anything that can convince stakeholders to refrain from accepting a coup attempt will have a high likelihood of preventing the consolidation of the coup.