Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt

       1

       Norms, intervention, and the making of orders

      Research always implies a perspective. This chapter introduces the theoretical vantage point from which this book analyses the evolution of the idea and the practices of re-establishing constitutional order in African states. The chapter situates these engagements, what they are and what they do, within broader theoretical debates in IR, African studies, and peace and conflict research. The aim of this chapter is hence twofold. First, it introduces the ‘conceptual resources’ (Howarth 2009: 311) that underpin this book: (1) to think of IOs as sites for the definition and dissemination of knowledge regimes that define ‘good order’; and (2) to conceive of interventions as moments of actualization of such knowledge regimes that open up a transnational space of interaction in which orders are renegotiated and reconfigured. Second, the chapter links current developments on the African continent to broader theoretical debates. It thereby aims at overcoming the largely atheoretical approaches that have hitherto dominated the literature on the AU (Edozie & Gottschalk 2014: xxxv) and seeks to interpret the AU and its anti-coup policy as part of more general phenomena that are more broadly of interest to IR scholarship. In doing so, the chapter connects both to recent calls in IR for a more global study of international politics and to demands for a more theory-inspired engagement with politics in Africa as advanced in African studies.

      As demanded by Amitav Acharya (2014), in order to truly become a discipline of global international studies, IR needs to engage more thoroughly with empirical and theoretical pluralism – ‘multiplexity’, in Acharya’s own terms. He argued that ‘regional worlds’, while in themselves highly diverse, may serve as a starting point in this endeavour. But according to Acharya, such a focus on regions should clearly transcend the hitherto established division of labour between the regional, often non-Western ‘periphery’ and the discipline’s ‘core’, where the former contributes the material while the latter provides the theory (Acharya 2014: 648; see also Comaroff & Comaroff 2011).¹ He therefore pleads for a different approach to theorizing, aiming ‘to develop concepts and approaches from non-Western contexts on their own terms, and apply them not only locally, but also to other contexts, including the later global canvas’ (Acharya 2014: 650). ‘Regional worlds’, Acharya demands, should thus become objects for theorizing and concept development, rather than sites of allegedly atheoretical empiricism or experience-distant theory-testing.²

      A lack of interest in theorizing experiences in and of the non-Western world has also been problematized from the other side. Rita Abrahamsen (2003), for instance, criticized African studies’ indifference towards their own theoretical and thus also political underpinnings (see also Bryceson 2012; Death 2015; Abrahamsen 2016: 129). She argues that theory, and in particular critical and postcolonial perspectives, are too often dismissed for their alleged practical irrelevance and their failure to generate tangible, policy-relevant knowledge. Theory here seems to be contrary to the practical demands that, for some, ought to drive academic engagements with the continent. In this view, poverty and injustice require practical, not theoretical, knowledge; theory and lived reality are two separate worlds. The dominant reading of the AU’s reactions to unconstitutional changes of government, as outlined in the introduction to this book, is reminiscent of this binary between knowledge that is allegedly relevant to policy and life, on the one hand, and theory, on the other.

      This chapter seeks to overcome this binary and to stress that, as argued by Abrahamsen (2003: 190), it is exactly the endurance of poverty and injustice that requires a more thorough engagement with the links between power, discourse, political institutions, and dominant political practices (Gabay & Death 2014: 15). In this sense, policy is itself an inherently political enterprise whose impacts on the world need to be analysed in terms other than those policy employs to describe itself (Bacchi 2009: 7; Stepputat & Larsen 2015). The role of theorizing and the purpose of repositioning conceptual lenses is thus to allow for a different perspective on the assumptions underpinning and consequences emanating from currently dominant answers to very practical challenges – such as coups. Theorizing in this sense is not antithetical to, but part of a concern for, (political) practice in that it may serve to provide the terms for a redescription of existing forms of government, understood as a particular mode of regulating and governing problems (Foucault 1994). In James Tully’s (2002: 534) words, such a redescription of existing forms of government may serve to transform ‘the self-understanding of those subject to and struggling within it, enabling them to see its contingent conditions and the possibilities of governing themselves differently’. This is the explicitly critical approach this research is based upon. Its practical consequences will be taken up again in Chapter 7.

      What, then, is the function of theory? It seeks to establish ‘an alternative set of relationships between dimensions of international social life’ (Reus-Smit 2004: 14) that are deemed relevant to seeing a given phenomenon in different lights. In this sense, the role of ‘conceptual resources’ (Howarth 2009: 311) is to guide our gaze towards particular aspects of an empirical phenomenon – here, processes of transnational order-making – and to render them visible and intelligible. The notion of ‘conceptual resources’ underlines that the theoretical vocabulary developed here is used in a constructive way. The rationale of this chapter is hence to explicate a certain perspective – a vantage point – whose merit should be judged by the community of readers in terms of its coherence and its contributions to seeing a particular social phenomenon at all, or differently than before.

      The remainder of this chapter proceeds in three steps. It first integrates the idea and practices of outlawing coups into a body of literature that interrogates the links between international standards of legitimate authority and the constitution of orders. This has been a concern for IR and African studies alike. But the two disciplines addressed this question from rather different angles: while IR scholarship has mainly been concerned with the historical constitution of international order and changing membership criteria for ‘international society’, scholars in African studies mainly focused on the consequences of international state recognition for domestic order. This book seeks to integrate these two perspectives by scrutinizing the simultaneous making of orders in and beyond the state. To this end, the chapter second turns to recent IR scholarship on the role of IOs as sites for the definition and licensing of principles of legitimate authority and corresponding practices of intervention. Such a perspective raises the important question of how this affects the relationships between states, societies, the individual, and the international. Contemporary African experiences may contribute valuable insights to this debate. Third, the chapter proposes a heuristic for analysing reactions to coups not as policies or mediation, but as sites of transnational interaction and order-making. I suggest for this purpose the term ‘intervention’ in order to describe a transnational space of interaction between a variety of agents, interests, and rationalities that is shaped by both politics (i.e. conflict and negotiation) and power, and in which authorities, responsibilities, and subjectivities are reconfigured – hence in which orders are made.

      Legitimate authority, the international, and the constitution of orders

      The question of how to establish standards for legitimate authority – what counts as ‘good order’ – has been one of the centrepieces of political theory and philosophy. Indeed, as argued by Anne Orford (2011: