Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
shifts in the relationship between IOs and states, but a deeper understanding of how the formulation and enactment of international norms and expansive IO missions weave together and redefine the relationships between IOs, states, and the societies they are deemed to represent. Such a perspective is more open to grasping the nuanced changes in relationships that emerge from the expansive roles and engagements of IOs in creating and reorganizing states that apparently do not (yet) meet the collectively set standards (see also Hameiri 2010). Consequently, the analytical gaze is turned towards analysing the underlying rationalities that change and sustain relationships of power and that legitimate particular sets of practices. Also, more emphasis is placed on the empirical reconstruction of small-scale, allegedly mundane practices that turn such rationalities into effects (Merlingen 2003; Walters 2012: Chapter 2).
In this sense, Orford’s (2011) book, for instance, renders visible how the UN – through defining abstract benchmarks for statehood – normalizes a particular form of domestic political organization and thereby shapes the possibilities for political articulation in existing states. Indeed, historically and for the majority of the world’s population, the existence of the international system of states has always had this effect: ‘populations found themselves governed both by modern states of their own and by the overarching system of states within which their own states had been incorporated’ (Hindess 2005: 408–409). As argued above, for many scholars in African studies, this has long been the point of departure for describing political dynamics in African states. However, they have so far largely ignored the critical role played by IOs in this regard, particularly by African regional organizations. In turn, a crucial addendum to the critical constructivist perspectives in IR, as discussed in the preceding section of this chapter, is to consider the international not merely as a set of relationships between states, but rather as an emerging web of power relations between a variety of agents. IOs, including regional ones, play an important role therein, as they increasingly serve as ‘sites for the negotiation and formulation of universal categories and practices of rule’ (Neumann & Sending 2010: 136). Looking from this vantage point at the evolution of the idea and resulting practices of outlawing coups and re-establishing constitutional order in African states therefore allows scrutiny of how both the very idea and the concrete practices of ‘undoing’ coups contribute to reordering the state, societies, and the international, as well as giving more prominence to the role of African regional organizations as sources, agents, and products of such processes of reordering.
Intervention as transboundary formation: spaces of politics and power
The previous two sections established a theoretical vantage point that relates changing international norms of legitimate authority to the constitution of orders both within and beyond the state and explained the specific role occupied by IOs in this process. But how to describe the moments in which we can actually observe and analyse such order formation? Put differently, how to conceive of the processes, the agents, and their interactions that make orders? I propose the term ‘intervention’ in order to describe a transnational space of interaction between a variety of agents, interests, and rationalities that contributes to the sedimentation and reconfiguration of orders and that serves in the following as a theoretical vantage point to analyse the ordering effects of the AU’s anti-coup norm. For this purpose, I will draw on both historical sociology and works on the sociology of intervention as debated in peace and conflict research.
IR scholars have long conceived of interventions in terms of their ordering effects, yet mainly with regard to the system level and as an exception or challenge to the international order of sovereign states (see Bull 1984; Reus-Smit 2013). George Lawson and Luca Tardelli (2013: 1237–1238) questioned this focus from the perspective of historical sociology by noting that interventions have always fulfilled a simultaneous function of order maintenance and transformation both internationally and within the territorialized ‘units’ subject to intervention. From this perspective, interventions are ‘historically contingent social practices’ employed to coercively mediate ‘tensions between territorial and transnational forces’ (MacMillan 2013: 1044).9 Reus-Smit likewise suggested freeing the concept of intervention from its ‘sovereignty frame’ (Reus-Smit 2013: 1058) and conceiving of interventions as constitutive instances of ‘systematic configurations of political authority’ (Reus-Smit 2013: 1062). Seen from this angle, the international and the ‘domestic’, however constituted, appear as ‘interpenetrated and mutually constituted’ orders, as ‘overlapping and intersecting socio-spatial networks of power’ (Hobson, quoted in MacMillan 2013: 1043). A historical sociology of intervention thus allows taking into focus the connections between international ideational and material structures and the concrete reconfigurations of order in ‘domestic’ units, however constituted. Yet while providing a valuable understanding of intervention as transnational interaction with ordering effects, the above-described (re)conceptions of intervention still repeat much of IR’s structural bias and entail little instruction on how to analyse the actual processes and practices of intervention.
Understanding interventions as social space and practice
Such a process- and practice-based understanding of interventions can be found in a strand of critical state- and peacebuilding research that analyses the sociology of interventions on a more micro level (see generally Autesserre 2014b). Here, interventions are defined as social spaces of interaction between international, national, and local actors, different interests and legitimacies. This perspective emerged from a critique of both the ontology of contemporary interventions – primarily the so-called liberal peace as the normative-political underpinning of interventions – and what Roger Mac Ginty (2011: 4) called our own ‘antennae’ – that is, dominant ways to look at, record, and see interventions (for an overview, see Richmond & Mac Ginty 2015).
Scholars in this tradition thus conceptualized interventions as arenas in which a multiplicity of actors engage in negotiating an intervention’s purpose and effects (Hagmann & Péclard 2010).10 To take one work as an example: John Heathershaw (2009) analyses how in post-conflict Tajikistan, peace and legitimate order are the ambiguous result of a complex negotiation involving international norms and agents, local elites, and subordinates, as well as dominant local political cultures. What emerges from these interactions is neither the successful realization of international peacebuilding scripts nor their mere failure. Rather, peace and legitimate order in Tajikistan, as elsewhere, are the work of ‘contending discourses and practices of peace’ made and remade through interactions between internationals, elites, and what he calls subordinates (Heathershaw 2009: 1). In this strand of research, interventions are thus studied in terms of the politics and power struggles they engender between a variety of actors (i.e. their ‘messiness’) (Curtis 2012: 3). Such an understanding of interventions as social practices and a space of interaction thus allows rethinking: (1) the effects and outcomes of interventions; and (2) their primary agents.
With regard to the effects and outcomes, the concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘friction’ gained currency in describing what emerges from these interactions, neither in terms of success/failure nor as the mere effect of external stimuli, but as what these effects are in and of themselves (see Mac Ginty 2011; Millar etal. 2013; Björkdahl etal. 2016). What this perspective particularly renders visible is that international interventions often come with illiberal and unintended consequences: the reproduction of state violence and authoritarian governance systems (Heathershaw 2009: 174), the empowerment of sectarian and violent actors through their integration into peacebuilding efforts (Veit 2010: 234; Mac Ginty 2011: 203; Zanotti 2011: 124), the creation of ‘subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’ (Veit 2010: 17), or the diffusion of governmental responsibilities that leads to a decrease in accountability (Andersen 2012: 146). In short, ambiguous outcomes have become a common observation in this strand of literature, where such outcomes are not considered failures, but part of what interventions produce.
In parallel to the description of their hybrid consequences, a second issue, an intervention’s primary agents, came more into focus. This particularly refers to so-called ‘local’ agency in terms of which intervention scholars increasingly studied how local actors