Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
our people have committed themselves to respect of the rule of law based on peoples [sic] will expressed through the ballot and not the bullet’ (OAU 2000a: 1).
The OAU Assembly decided to reject ‘any unconstitutional change as an unacceptable and anachronistic act, which is in contradiction of our commitment to promote democratic principles and conditions’ (OAU 2000a: 1). It was decided that governments that come to power through unconstitutional means shall not be recognized and shall therefore be suspended from participating in the continental organization. The following situations were defined as unconstitutional changes of government:
i) military coup d’etat against a democratically elected Government; ii) intervention by mercenaries to replace a democratically elected Government; iii) replacement of democratically elected Governments by armed dissident groups and rebel movements; iv) the refusal by an incumbent government to relinquish power to the winning party after free, fair and regular elections. (OAU 2000a: 3)
The definition of ‘unconstitutional changes of government’ thus explicitly referred only to acts committed against democratically elected governments. However, unlike their Latin American counterparts, African heads of state and government refrained from bindingly defining what ‘democratic’ means (Legler & Tieku 2010: 471). As a result, how to interpret this condition became a recurring topic in the ensuing debates about the adequacy and refinement of the African anti-coup norm, as Chapter 2 elaborates in more detail.
More crucially, however, the OAU Assembly also decided to mandate the organization to actively work for the respective country’s return to constitutional order. It established that:
[a] period of up to six months should be given to the perpetrators of the unconstitutional change to restore constitutional order. (…) The Secretary-General should, during this period gather facts relevant to the unconstitutional change of Government and establish appropriate contacts with the perpetrators with a view to ascertaining their intentions regarding the restoration of constitutional order in the country; the Secretary-General should seek the contribution of African leaders and personalities in the form of discreet moral pressure on the perpetrators of the unconstitutional change in order to get them to cooperate with the OAU and facilitate the restoration of constitutional order in the Member State concerned. (OAU 2000a: 3)
In this so-called Lomé Declaration, African leaders thus defined governments coming to power by unconstitutional means as deviance from the orderly norm, a path that has to be corrected. As observed by Stef Vandeginste (2013: 23), the continental organization thereby moved from being a mere ‘registrar’ to playing the role of a ‘judge’, setting terms and limits for what counts as legitimate authority and ‘good order’ within its member states. However, the mandate to facilitate the return to constitutional order also meant that beyond being a mere judge, the continental organization and those acting on its behalf in fact became active parties in re-establishing constitutional order.
Since this decision, the African continent has seen an unprecedented reinvention of regional and subregional organizations and the development of policy instruments to promote peace and security, democratic governance, and human rights in African states. After the transformation of the OAU into the AU in 2002, the organization’s mandate to address and prevent political crises in member states was gradually expanded and integrated into a more robust institutional framework, the so-called African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). The AU was given an explicit mandate to promote democracy, protect human rights, and suspend any government that comes to power unconstitutionally (OAU 2000e: Art. 30). The PSC was set up and mandated to institute sanctions against perpetrators of coups (AU 2002: Art. 7(1g)). With the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance of 2007, the anti-coup norm was even given a legally binding status (AU 2007: Art. 23). It was also decided to likewise outlaw constitutional manipulations, with the recognition that not only putschists, but also incumbents, can be a threat to the ideal of people’s right to political self-determination, as once declared in Lomé.
As will be elaborated in Chapter 2, the Lomé Declaration was meant to provide the OAU/AU with a clear manual on how to handle disruptions to what was defined as ‘normal’ and to avoid arbitrariness both in access to power in the organization’s member states and in international reactions thereto. It was an attempt to discipline both politics within the state and politics within the OAU/AU and the wider international community. In the imaginary of the Lomé Declaration, returning a country to constitutional order therefore follows a rather mechanistic and legalistic path: condemnation, facilitation, completion (see also Tieku 2009: 76).
However, contrary to the hopes at the time, neither more elaborate legal scripts nor continental institutions were able to eradicate the politics of defining what it means to restore constitutional order. The Lomé Declaration itself outlawed coups, but the above-quoted mandate to ‘facilitate the restoration of constitutional order’ (OAU 2000a: 4) left rather open what that entails. The anti-coup norm outlawed deviance from an assumed constitutional normalcy, yet without determining on what grounds, with whom, and for what purpose constitutionality is to be reinstated. Moreover, in this mandate, constitutional order should not only be ‘restored’, but should also prevent future crises. The Lomé Declaration therefore stipulated that ‘the strengthening of democratic institutions will considerably reduce the risks of unconstitutional change on our Continent’ (OAU 2000a: 2). The rationale of the Lomé Declaration thus entailed both a claim that the organization should and can ‘undo’ coups, as well as a promise that the new orders will be somewhat better than the preceding ones, that ‘undoing’ was not only temporal but sustainable.
What we know so far
Despite a growing academic interest in the AU, the African anti-coup norm and resulting efforts to re-establish constitutional order in African states have so far received little academic attention. Besides general overviews on African reactions to coups (Engel 2012a; Witt 2012a; Souaré 2014; Nathan 2017), there are only a few more detailed case studies, usually in the form of book chapters or policy briefs (Cawthra 2010; Yabi 2010; Asante-Darko 2012; Nathan 2013; Hartmann 2017). This relative indifference on the part of academia not only contradicts the political and practical importance attributed to the phenomenon; it also contrasts with how detailed other AU practices, military interventions in particular, have been studied so far (see, for instance, Söderbaum & Tavares 2011; Brosig 2015; de Coning et al. 2016). Overall, discussion of these engagements has been confined to area specialists or scholars interested in regionalism and regional organizations more specifically. Neither scholarship on international interventions nor that on IR more generally has adequately taken note of these developments. In general, interventions are still mainly considered as something Western states or global actors such as the UN do. Despite increasing efforts to decentre the study of interventions (see Schroeder 2018; Turner & Kühn 2019), the empirical relevance of non-Western, particularly African, interveners has so far not been adequately reflected in academic research. Moreover, a substantial part of the available literature on the AU’s reactions to coups stems from decidedly policy-oriented research. In fact, there is – in sharp contrast, for instance, to the Americas – a clear dearth of theory-driven and theory-generating perspectives on regional reactions to coups in Africa.2 Unsurprisingly, this lack of theory-informed empirical engagements with the AU’s anti-coup norm also affects how these developments have been analysed and what we know so far. On the one hand, the dominant policy orientation favoured a perspective on post-coup engagements ‘through the eyes’ of the AU, which paints a rather top-down and often apolitical image of what these engagements are about. On the other hand, this also meant that the effects of African reactions to coups have mainly been studied and evaluated based on the terms provided by the interveners themselves. In order to situate this book within the existing literature, I will first summarize how the latter has so far conceived of and analysed the processes of returning a country to constitutional order (i.e. what post-coup interventions are) before I turn to a discussion of the answers the existing literature provides on the aims and effects of post-coup interventions (i.e. what they do).
What post-coup interventions are: policy, mediation, or what?
Existing