Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
of the public good (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 3). Impersonal rules not only regulate or prescribe, but rather constitute social reality: ‘IOs, through their rules, create new categories of actors, form new interests for actors, define new shared international tasks, and disseminate new models of social organization around the globe’ (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 3). Fifteen years before, Nicholas Onuf and Frank Klink (1989: 158) already noted that the international realm is made up of different kinds of rules – instructions, directions, and commitments – which are all constitutive of social reality. These rules produce different kinds of authority, understood as figurations of sub- and superordination. The capacity of rule-making thus provides a heuristic inroad into understanding the ‘ruled character’ of the international realm and with it the emergence and character of authority beyond the state (Onuf & Klink 1989: 169).
Barnett and Finnemore (2004) thus introduced a new way to conceive of the power relationship between IOs and states. The innovation was that power was not only understood as power to regulate and command, but also as a power to constitute and produce social reality: to determine the conditions of possibility for agency, problems, and objects of (international) governance. This power derives from IOs’ capacity to define problems and responsibilities and to transform information into knowledge, and from their being perceived as representing universal moral principles that counter self-interested states (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 29). In all this, ‘IOs define problems for actors (by classifying them as such), specify which actors have responsibility for solving those problems, and use their authority to identify the right or appropriate kind of solution for the particular problem under consideration’ (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 34).
Moreover, by depicting IOs as bureaucracies, Barnett and Finnemore also highlighted the pathologies that come with bureaucratic rule. A crucial determinant of such pathologies is that rule-making is reflexive and expansive: IOs tend to create more rules and thus expand their missions (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 163). Driven by the desire to solve an ever-expanding array of problems, bureaucracies’ tendencies to compartmentalization, specialization, and routines more often than not turn out to be counterproductive (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 38). With this, the two authors not only laid the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of the kinds and locales of authorities that were emerging beyond the state, but also showed how this was indeed part of an expansive process that was ambiguous in its consequences. In contrast to the liberal hope that IOs represent an alternative to state particularism, Barnett and Finnemore warned that IOs’ expansion may lead to mission creep, forms of domination, and an ‘undemocratic liberalism’ that expands on claims of advancing the global good, but does so on an unaccountable and undemocratic basis (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 172).
However, because Barnett and Finnemore (2004: viii) focused on demonstrating the ontological autonomy of IOs, they conceived of IOs in contradistinction to the state. Like states, they were a priori existing entities with interests, defined by their nature as bureaucracies. The power of IOs was their capacity to shape the behaviour of states, either by ensuring compliance or by reshaping their interests. In this understanding, IO authority derives from their autonomy vis-à-vis the state, and it is exercised over states. IOs, though far from replacing states, were nevertheless imagined as state-like units.
In their critique of this account of IO authority, Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending (2010) argue that the authority of IOs derives from their function as sources of definitions of what states are, rather than being measured relative to their member states. Here, the power of IOs lies in their role as producers and implementers of standards for statehood and in how this constitutes both the state and international authority at the same time. On the one hand, IOs serve as locales for the definition of global standards and benchmarks of ‘good statehood’. On the other hand, IOs have developed the instruments and practices to actually reconfigure states, for instance through international state- and peacebuilding interventions, through security sector reform, or by reforming economies after violent conflicts.7
A similar understanding of the power of IOs also underpins Anne Orford’s (2011) work on the UN as an international executive authority and on the dissemination of principles of legitimate authority. Here, the UN’s power does not stem from providing prescriptive rules to member states. Rather, it is based on the gradual institutionalization and normalization of practices and purposes within the organization. In contrast to Barnett and Finnemore’s account, in Orford’s work the power the UN exercises is not exercised over member states through the definition of rules or the dissemination of knowledge, but is exercised over others (here, the Congolese, the East Timorese, etc.) through constituting the state and defining its overall purpose (Orford 2011: 201; see also Sending 2015: 130). In sum, Neumann and Sending (2010) and Orford (2011) underline that in order to grasp the power of IOs, the analytical gaze has to shift to much more subtle and fine-grained ways in which IO norms and practices serve to define new purposes and ends, change relationships, and recreate authorities, including their own (see also Merlingen & Ostrauskaite 2005; Merlingen 2011; Zanotti 2011; Sending 2015).
Both accounts thus move beyond describing IOs as mere makers of norms and constructors of social reality by shifting the focus towards the rationalities and relationships that constitute and sediment the growing authority of IOs. Like Barnett and Finnemore (2004), Neumann and Sending (2010) too stress that the formulation and dissemination of knowledge and norms results in an increasing institutionalization and sedimentation of IO authority. Yet by defining the purpose of statehood, IOs do not authoritatively change states’ interests, but rather produce statehood in the first place. IOs and states are therefore not tied together in a zero-sum power relationship, but rather in one of mutual constitution. In this sense, the task for empirical research is to ‘grasp how states are conceptualized within IOs if we are to understand the specific rationality by which IOs seek to govern and act on states’ (Neumann & Sending 2010: 149).
Both Neumann and Sending’s (2010) and Orford’s (2011) works draw on a conception of power as developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault (see also Merlingen 2003). In this part of his work, Foucault was interested in how power relations work and are reproduced not by prescription, submission, or the use of force, but by a form of power that ‘structure[s] the possible field of action of others’ (Foucault 1982: 790). In order to understand the workings of power, Foucault turned the analytical gaze away from the capacity of actors to act upon another’s will – which has been the predominant understanding of power (Guzzini 2005) – and towards the conditions of possibility that render this acting upon others possible (Walters 2012: 11). For Foucault, these conditions are to be found in the knowledge regimes, the purposes and ideals, as well as corresponding techniques and practices that render subjectification possible and hence constitute a particular relationship of power, be it between women and men, parents and children, or ‘ruler’ and ‘subjects’. Moreover, in his reconstruction of the emergence of the European state, Foucault described the latter by pointing to the various sites in which a particular knowledge–practice complex was enacted, gradually centralized, and expanded, and which in turn led to the sedimentation and normalization of both relationships of power and the institutions and locales in which these were inscribed (Foucault 2004; Walters 2012: Chapter 1).8
With this in mind, IOs can be conceived of as sites of particular knowledge–practice complexes defining how states should be governed. They are producers and disseminators of particular knowledge regimes, purposes, and ends (e.g. through collectively defined standards, benchmarks) and engage in concrete practices that are rationalized on the ground of such regimes (e.g. third-party mediation, international state-building efforts, international sanctions). Such knowledge regimes and their enactment in practice, in turn, contribute to altering or sedimenting relationships of power. Analytically, the aim of such a perspective is to investigate the underlying rationalities that sustain and the power relations that result from these knowledge–practice complexes (see also Merlingen 2003; Malmvig 2014). Thus, unlike in Barnett and Finnemore’s account, the power of IOs is not defined in terms of their capacity to act upon states: to prescribe, define, or even manipulate states’ interests. Rather, the power of IOs stems from the fact that their purpose and expansive roles are based on the