Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
with very powerful consequences for the persistence of a particular form of political organization: the state. As shown by Frederick Cooper (2008) with the example of the Mali Federation, on the eve of independence, the power of international principles of statehood also foreclosed other potential forms of political organization.
In contrast to IR, African studies thus mainly focused on the imprint of international legitimacy principles on the constitution of and struggle over the state itself – thus on domestic order (Cooper 2008: 186). In this sense, the external constitution of African states has been one of the core tenets for understanding both persistence and change in African politics (see, for instance, Clapham 1996; Bayart 2000; Englebert 2009). Christopher Clapham’s (1996) foundational book Africa and the International System interprets politics in Africa as interacting with and integrated into an international system that provides both normative and material incentives for the maintenance of order and the ‘politics of survival’ in which most African states and their leaders came to be entangled (see also Herbst 2000). Others provided a more nuanced account of individual agents and forms of agency that stem from the rents of international recognition. Jean-François Bayart’s (2000) theory of extraversion and Pierre Englebert’s (2009) account of the ‘legal command’ as a consequence of internationally recognized authority, for instance, reinterpret the imprint of the international from a more agency-based perspective. Both investigate how African actors – governments, rebel groups, ‘civil society’, and local authorities alike – make use of the rents that derive from international norms and recognition as rightful authority (see also Piccolino 2012; Fisher 2014). Here, Africans are not passive victims caged in their state because of dominant international principles of sovereignty. Rather, international norms are a vehicle for agency, despite their structuring (and thus constraining) effects. As particularly stressed by Bayart (2000: 255), more often than not, this agency comes with ambiguous consequences and thus defies an interpretation as the mere realization of external, postcolonial role expectations.
In short, tracing the consequences and investigating the transnational links that sustain orders on the continent is anything but a novelty in African studies (Death 2015: 5). Instead, international norms of legitimate authority – and their changing meanings – provide a crucial avenue for African studies scholars to understand political dynamics within African states, and there is a set body of literature that has for a long time taken this analytical path. Yet what often remains missing in these accounts is a more thorough engagement with the changing contours of ‘the international’ itself, particularly with the role of African actors therein. Despite Clapham’s (1996: 110) discussion of the OAU as sustaining a system of mutual recognition and preservation, what remains largely unaccounted for are African actors’ own contributions to providing and disseminating the international normative structures upon which domestic struggles over the state are fought out (an exception is van Walraven 1996). Thus, the international has often been depicted as if its nature and agents were self-explanatory, static, and above all external to the continent. African studies scholars’ sensitivity to local dynamics and agencies is not mirrored in a similar sensitivity vis-à-vis the nature and constitution of the international itself, described on the basis of current African experiences (see also Abrahamsen 2016).
Summary
In summary, scholars in both IR and African studies have been interested in understanding how international norms on legitimate authority affect the formation of orders. In IR, this has mainly been debated as historically changing legitimacy principles that defined rightful membership and conduct in the international society of states and thus constituted international order. African studies scholarship, in turn, has been more interested in understanding how international legitimacy principles affect both the very persistence of states and power struggles within them. Its focus has hence been on domestic order. In this sense, the two disciplines have been reproducing the (misleading) international/domestic divide and the dominant division of labour between IR and area studies, which attributes to IR an expertise about the ‘general’ (here, the international system) while the area specialist holds intimate knowledge of a particular case (here, a specific domestic context). Although much of African studies scholarship transgresses at least the international/domestic divide by conceiving the international as constantly present in the struggles in and about the state, there has been less interest so far in reading current developments in Africa as a ‘window on the contemporary world’ more generally (Abrahamsen 2016: 127) – that is, in delineating the actual nature of the international based on African experiences and identifying the role of African actors in making and enacting this international.6 This book aims at developing such a perspective and making it resonate with both disciplines. For this purpose, I will again turn to IR and recent scholarship on the role of IOs as sites and agents for the definition of international legitimacy principles, as discussed in the next section.
International organizations and the dissemination of legitimacy principles
When studying historically changing international principles for what counts as legitimate authority, critical constructivists have mainly focused on changing grounds upon which peoples were granted a right to a state. By contrast, this book is interested in the emergence and consequences of changing meanings of legitimate authority in existing states. As will be argued in this section, at least since the end of the Cold War, one can observe a general international trend towards legalizing, universalizing, and expanding (‘thickening’) the internationally disseminated meaning of legitimate authority. The African anti-coup norm is but one example of this trend. Second, this more recent ‘thickening’ of international norms of legitimate authority also expanded the powers and practices of IOs, which, like the AU, increasingly serve as sites to define what counts as ‘good order’. Together, both developments raise questions as to how this affects the relationship between states, societies, the individual, and the international, to which this book seeks to provide some answers based on an in-depth study of the post-coup intervention in Madagascar and the consequences of the AU’s anti-coup policy.
The expansion of international legitimacy principles
Already in the early 1970s, Martin Wight (1972: 2) observed that international principles of legitimate authority evolved from the mere recognition of allegiance to a matter of rights, a history in which the referents and scope of these rights gradually changed and expanded. Over time, what counts as legitimate authority has increasingly become legalized and couched in universalized terms.
While since the eighteenth century legitimate authority was thought to be based in ‘the people’, as opposed to the divine ruler, the global spread of liberal norms gradually enlarged the scope of who counted as ‘the people’ and what was required for the effective realization of the ideals of collective and individual self-determination. Historically, this is reflected in a gradual expansion of internationally enshrined rights: from a right to a state for people under colonial rule, to the effective protection of minorities in existing states, to the international guarantee of political and civil rights vis-à-vis the state (Roth 1999). One may therefore add to Wight’s observation cited above that international legitimacy principles also became much ‘thicker’ over time (Neumann & Sending 2007: 690; Bartelson 2014). Today, a government’s mere claim to ‘effective control’ alone does not suffice any more as a criterion for membership in the international society of states. In this sense, David Scott (2012: 197) diagnosed a ‘normative sea change’, a paradigm shift by which with the end of the Cold War legitimate authority became increasingly based on more substantive conditions. This paradigm shift is usually attributed to both the rise of international human rights principles and the spread of democracy as the international standard for recognizing legitimate authority. As argued by Clark (2005: 173), ‘[S]ince the end of the cold war, rightful membership has been expressed, not simply about states, but about certain types of state’ [emphasis in original]. More precisely, the shift introduced a new thinking by which the ‘internal political character of a regime ought to have a bearing on its standing in the international community of states’ (Scott 2012: 199). The internal make-up of states was thus opened up for more consequential international scrutiny and evaluation.
To