Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
theorists offer a variety of normative standards upon which to assess what is needed for an order to be considered legitimate: the capacity to provide security, recourse to established cultural norms, the rule of law, or the provision of justice and welfare, to name but a few. Max Weber (2006), for instance, identified his famous three ideal types of legitimate authority on the basis of their underlying principles of legitimacy: the characteristics of the ruler (charismatic rule), the fit to established cultural norms (traditional rule), or the rule-bound character (legal-rational rule). What Weber underlined with this distinction is that the terms of legitimate authority, the legitimacy principles, may change over time and depend on social context (Weber 2006: 218). What counts as legitimate authority is thus contingent, contextually and historically bound, and subject to interpretation. One might add that this also means that different principles of legitimacy may coexist at a given point in time and that indeed the core of politics is a struggle over which principles should prevail (Schlichte 2012). This book is not interested in establishing principles of legitimate authority or to assess their relative normative validity. Rather, it investigates the consequences of an increasingly internationalized effort to establish what counts as ‘good order’, as revealed when the perceived normalcy of ‘good order’ experiences a sudden rupture.
In a world in which the state has become the dominant form of political organization, the question of what counts as rightful authority is of concern not only for those subject to a particular system of rule or those seeking to establish their rule. It is also of importance for those deemed to recognize the state from without. As argued by Mlada Bukovansky (2002: 211), ‘an entity that deserves the name “state system”, even if it displays a degree of heterogeneity, enshrines certain modes of authority and order, privileging some forms of rule over others’. In this regard, Christian Reus-Smit (2001: 520) observed that what counts internationally as legitimate authority serves as ‘the dominant rationale that licenses the organization of power and authority into territorially defined sovereign units’. Thus, what counts internationally as legitimate order has tangible effects. Indeed, the state itself is one of the most overt examples for this. The globalization of the state as a form of political organization can be regarded as a very consequential effect of a particular international definition of ‘good order’, which henceforth became normalized as a dominant mode of political organization (Herbst 2000; Migdal & Schlichte 2005: 17).3 While over time, as will be elaborated below, statehood has become more substantially defined, the international still retains a crucial role in licensing the organization of authority within states. This constitutive link between international norms of legitimate authority and the formation of orders has also been a key concern for scholars in IR and African studies alike, yet the two disciplines approached this issue from rather different angles, as the remainder of this section will elaborate.
IR scholarship: sovereignty principles and international order
In IR, scholars traditionally studied the links between the international and statehood using the concept of sovereignty. But for a long time, the dominant realist perspective assumed sovereignty to be an ontological fact, a natural accompaniment of the state (Biersteker & Weber 1996: 2; Krasner 2001: 1; Agnew 2009). As a consequence, IR scholarship has largely ignored the question of how the principles underpinning notions of sovereignty contribute to the formation of orders as a relevant problematique for the study of international politics.
With the rise of (critical) constructivism in IR theory, another analytical perspective on sovereignty became possible.4 Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (1996: 1) called for an understanding of sovereignty as a social concept. This implies recognizing both how notions of sovereignty have been subject to changing meanings over time and how each of them had constituting effects on dominant forms of social and political organization (Biersteker & Weber 1996: 4; Murphy 1996). Sovereignty therefore defined what Reus-Smit (1999: 31) called the ‘moral purpose of the state’ based on hegemonic ‘reasons that historical agents hold for organizing their political life into centralized, autonomous political units’. What counted internationally as legitimate authority was thus not taken for granted, but regarded as being ‘presented, debated, and applied in the context of particular events in international history’ (Clark 2005: 1; for a critique, see Bartelson 2014).
For constructivists, ideas about sovereignty constituted rather than merely described the state (see also Murphy 1996: 87). This perspective allowed investigating how dominant notions of legitimate authority have changed over time, how different referents of what counts as good order entered the realm of international legitimacy principles, and how this enabled and constrained politics within states, constructed particular subjectivities, and empowered certain actors over others (for overviews, see Barkin 1998; Roth 1999). Analytically speaking, sovereignty thus became historicized and subject to concrete practices: a matter of making rather than an empirical fact. Such a perspective not only underlined the generally amenable and historically contingent meanings of sovereignty; it also revealed the constitutive linkages between dominant notions of sovereignty and the nature of international order itself. Evolving legitimacy principles defined both rightful membership and rightful conduct for the members of ‘international society’ and thus shaped the very nature of this society (Clark 2005: 5). Shifting notions of sovereignty and the normative structure of the international thus also structured what kinds of conduct were possible and legitimate among the actors of the international system. They served to define what was possible in international politics by establishing who was a legitimate participant and by providing the overall purposes, the rationale, for their conduct (Aalberts 2012). As summarized by Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin (1994: 128), changing principles of legitimate statehood ‘affect the ways in which states are constrained and enabled to act in their international relations’ and by way of consequence what was considered deviant behaviour or a threat to international order (see also Finnemore 2003).
Altogether, the critical constructivist thinking on sovereignty in IR introduced three fundamental tenets: first, that principles of legitimate statehood are subject to international definition; second, that such principles are historically contingent; and third, that changing notions of legitimate authority also define the particular form of international order. So, from an IR perspective, international norms of legitimate authority mainly affected the constitution of international order: they defined membership, set the conditions for state recognition, and prescribed certain rules of rightful conduct and, in case these were infringed, of conflict resolution. This order was largely considered as an international order in which states are the primary agents. In short, IR scholars were mainly concerned with the question of how the primary units of the international system (i.e. states) relate to that system and how constitutive principles shape their conduct (Aalberts 2012: 238). As will be elaborated further below, more recent IR scholarship also seeks to describe how changing notions of legitimate authority affect the ‘making of the international itself’ (Walters 2012: 7) and thus transcend the state-centric and inter-national imaginary of previous works. Scholars in African studies, in turn, have mainly focused on studying the domestic effects of changing international principles of legitimate authority.5
African studies: sovereignty and the struggle for domestic order
For scholars in African studies, the international principle of sovereignty has been a concern with tangible consequences for the very nature of the state itself. Here, sovereignty was not only a matter of law or power politics, but, as famously argued by Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg (1982), the very reason for which Africa’s so-called weak states persisted (see also Grovogui 2002). The authors distinguished de facto, positive sovereignty, the capacity of a government to exercise effective control over its territory, from de jure, negative sovereignty, which derives from external recognition and membership in IOs. External recognition and the internationally upheld principle of sovereignty was thus much more relevant for the constitution of African states than their de facto capacities to exercise the role and functions international sovereignty principles imagined them to exercise. Membership in IOs, the two authors argued, provides African states with the opportunity to ‘both influence and take advantage of international rules and ideologies concerning what is desirable and undesirable in the relations of states’