Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
norms such as political rights, internationally enshrined, for instance, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, did exist before. This new conditioning of statehood, however, addresses the state’s political order in its entirety and thus goes beyond the mere international enshrinement of individual rights (Sandholtz & Stiles 2008: 290; Scott 2012). Moreover, unlike before, today these rights are pursued in a much more consequential way. The rise of the idea of the responsibility to protect (R2P) – however one may assess its legal status and normative validity – is probably the most widely cited and hotly debated outcome of this ‘normative sea change’ (Bellamy 2014; Hofmann & Zimmermann 2019). The AU’s own Article 4(h), which allows for military intervention in cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, is another case in point (Mwanasali 2006; Wilén & Williams 2018). Much of the academic debate on the status and consequences of this apparent normative shift has been focused on questions relating to the legitimacy of the use of force in addressing the most severe infringements of these principles (for an overview, see Seybolt 2016). This book, in contrast, is interested in the more subtle ideas and corresponding practices that resulted from the rise and expansion of international norms of legitimate authority. In this sense, the expansive internationalization of what counts as legitimate authority is not only to be found in changing norms of military intervention and the use of force in cases of large-scale atrocities. It also gave rise to a great variety of international practices and the responsibilization of agents that affect state–society relations on a more subtle and more everyday basis. International mechanisms to promote good governance and democracy, the conditioning of development aid, election observation missions, international human rights monitoring, the expansion of international sanction schemes, and the internationalization of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and state reconstruction after violent conflicts are all fields in which expansive international ideas on what counts as legitimate authority affect how societies are (made fit to be) governed and how order in states is upheld and legitimated (Abrahamsen 2000; Jabri 2013; MacMillan 2013). All these efforts provide evidence that statehood has become defined on more substantive terms and is increasingly conditioned on internationally set standards. Even though these standards have rarely been criteria for effective exclusion from the society of states, they nevertheless provide the rationale for a variety of efforts to establish the conditions of possibility of their fulfilment.
In normative terms, scholars across different disciplines have since engaged in a lively debate as to how to interpret and assess these developments. While some see in the expansion of international legitimacy principles the global fulfilment of a liberal utopia (Franck 1992), others fear that we are witnessing a new version of the ‘standards of civilization’, which in the eighteenth century demarcated the boundaries of the society of (European) states and defined the external Other – the land of ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ – as an a-legal space and thus open to arbitrary and coercive intervention (Roth 1999; Paris 2002; Bowden 2004: 45; Jahn 2007a; Jahn 2007b).
In analytical terms, scholars have since been debating whether and how the expansive list of legitimacy principles affects sovereignty as such. In this regard, several authors have stressed that changing international principles of legitimate authority are transforming rather than replacing sovereignty, and with this the state, both as an idea and as an empirical fact (Hameiri 2010; Bartelson 2014; for an overview, see Deitelhoff & Zürn 2015). The liberal utopians might thus be mistaken in conflating the rise of individual rights with the decline of the state both as an idea and as an agent in international politics (see also Latham 1999: 49; Reus-Smit 2013). Empirically, this has raised the question of how exactly changing notions of legitimate authority contribute to the reorganization of state–society relations (see, for instance, Duffield 2001; Hameiri 2010; Jabri 2013). This book takes this question about the consequences of expanding international legitimacy principles as a starting point in order to investigate in an empirically open way how exactly the enactment of such principles affects and potentially reconfigures notions of statehood and order, as well as how to assess this normatively. As I will argue in the remainder of this section, the realization of international principles of legitimate authority is intimately tied to the role of IOs as locales for the definition and dissemination of such principles and their enactment in various practices of intervention. Understanding the effects of their enactment thus also requires seeing IOs in different analytical terms.
International organizations: producers, disseminators, and guarantors of legitimacy principles
The above-described expansion of international legitimacy principles has gone hand in hand with changes in the dominant actors that are involved in defining what counts as ‘good order’. In this sense, changing notions of legitimate authority also led to the expansion of authorities beyond the state, whose very existence came to be legitimated on the grounds of changing notions of legitimate statehood. IOs thus became the producers, disseminators, and guarantors of changing notions of legitimate authority (Clark 2005: 176; Sandholtz & Stiles 2008: 319). This is particularly true for regional organizations, which, despite great differences, have over the last decades developed a broad array of political norms that condition membership and prescribe a particular vision of good political order among their member states (Pevehouse 2005; McMahon & Baker 2006; Börzel & van Hüllen 2015). IOs therefore increasingly serve as ‘sites for the negotiation and formulation of universal categories and practices of rule’ (Neumann & Sending 2010: 136). As will be elaborated in this section, these categories and practices of rule provide the texture, the normative webbing, upon which IOs increasingly base their claims to authority. The expansion of international legitimacy principles thus also shaped the very form of the international. The analytical task is hence to inquire and delineate in better terms what this new form of the international amounts to and how it affects the changing relationships between states, societies, the individual, and the international.
In his account of the history of ‘international legitimacy’, Wight (1972) described how both the League of Nations and the UN were crucial arenas for the definition of principles of legitimate authority. The Charters of both organizations laid the grounds for interpreting under what conditions membership in the international society of states was rightfully granted, although actual political practice often diverged from prescriptive texts. Inis Claude (1966: 370) likewise observed that ‘a highly significant part of the political role of the United Nations’ was their role in ‘collective legitimization’ (i.e. the creation of an arena and audience for governments’ claims to legitimacy).
Since then, IOs have not only become an arena for state elites’ own claims to legitimacy, but the state itself has become an object of IO policies: either directly through setting standards and benchmarks for membership, or indirectly through reorganizing social, political, and economic relations by way of IO policies. International conflict resolution and the rebuilding of states after violent conflict, for instance, became a large area of IO activity and a field of expertise for IO professionals (Sending 2015). Gender mainstreaming, healthcare, and child protection were turned into missions of international social policy; election observation, anti-corruption campaigns, human rights monitoring, and capacity-building for civil servants became fields in which IOs are today involved in reorganizing state–society relations (for overviews, see Avant etal. 2010; Harman & Williams 2013).
For a long time, IR scholars conceived of IOs as merely the result of states’ interests. The power of IOs was the consequence of delegation by states, as there was no higher authority than that of the state (Mearsheimer 1995; Hurd 2014: 7). With a more recent interest in IR scholarship in the nature and consequences of international authority, this perspective has changed considerably (see generally Hooghe etal. 2017; Zürn 2018; Daase & Deitelhoff 2019). Yet even before that, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore (2004) famously challenged the long-held IR premise and redefined IOs not as the mere reflection of states’ interests and delegated authority, but as autonomous actors on their own terms. IOs, the two argued, have to be understood as what they are, namely bureaucracies, which grants them a particular authority over constituting social reality (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 9). The power of IOs, as with all bureaucracies, lies in their guidance by and production of impersonal