Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
instance, Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond & Mitchell 2011; Björkdahl & Höglund 2013; Millar etal. 2013). This emphasis on local agency and the frictions that result from it stems from the observation that interventions are not solely what interveners do (Mac Ginty 2011: 2).
However, as a consequence, accounts of ‘resistance’ and ‘frictions’ sometimes tend to provide only a caricature of international interveners, and thus harbour the danger of a priori rationalizing and exaggerating ‘local’ agency (see also Chandler 2013; Björkdahl etal. 2016). Moreover, the ideational sources of contemporary interventions are often assumed to be ‘Western’, thus implicitly turning the local arena of interventions into a struggle of ‘Western’ versus ‘non-Western’ ideals, discourses, and agents (Richmond & Mitchell 2011; Kühn 2012: 399; for a critique, see Sabaratnam 2013). In fact, international norms and policy scripts are often taken as monolithic instructions rather than as in themselves hybrid and contradictory texts. This undermines the interactive and relational character of interventions, which the authors otherwise stress and which would require a similar focus and fine-grained analysis of international agency in interventions. As shown in Heathershaw’s above-cited study, international interveners are not simply implementing what headquarters mandate(d) them to do. Instead, those sent to intervention arenas are torn between a formal commitment to an idealized mandate and its rather technical implementation, because what they face in reality on the ground is not an ‘empty shell’ (Lemay-Hébert 2011).11 Heathershaw (2009: 57) thus concluded that the role of international interveners is ‘not that of a third party, nor that of a powerful and relatively homogeneous agent, but that of a dispersed range of actors, each under the influence of discourses beyond their individual control’.
But in order to grasp this ‘dispersed range of actors’, the analytical gaze also has to go beyond the ‘local’ as a site of intervention. Alex Veit and Klaus Schlichte (2012: 168), for instance, suggested studying intervening organizations as ‘coupled arenas’ (i.e. different power figurations at different levels of an organization that shape the knowledge and practices with which interventions are ultimately carried out). Different offices of an organization – such as the headquarters and field offices – but also different sections within a bureaucracy often function according to different rationalities and purposes. They nevertheless all interact with and affect the ‘localized’ intervention (see also Zanotti 2011: ix; Williams 2018). As concluded by Alex Veit (2010: 256) in his work on intervention as indirect rule in Ituri, we still know fairly little about ‘how the international community on the ground is interlinked and interdependent with forces in other arenas’.
In a nutshell, the turn in state- and peacebuilding research to the ‘local’ may have actually confined rather than broadened the analytical gaze by reifying the distinction between the ‘local’ and the ‘external’ (see also Chandler 2013: 32). A focus on local agency and resistance harbours the danger of caricaturing both the underpinning norms and the international agents in contemporary intervention efforts and of spatially localizing interventions that are in fact a very transnational situation. Against this background, I will suggest an understanding of interventions as a transboundary formation in order to do justice to both the relational/social and the transnational character of interventions, in which a variety of actors interact in order to define what kind of order is to emerge, and how.
Post-coup interventions as transboundary formation
In order to analyse post-coup interventions, I conceive of these situations as what Robert Latham etal. (2001) described by the term ‘transboundary formation’. Transboundary formations ‘link global, regional, national, and local forces through structures, networks, and discourses (…) [and they] play a major role in creating, transforming, and destroying forms of order and authority’ (Latham etal. 2001: 5).
The idea of transboundary formations explicitly breaks with prevalent analytical boundaries between ‘the global’, ‘the national’, and ‘the local’, and offers a perspective that cuts across such allegedly distinct social spaces.12 According to the critique of Latham etal. (2001: 6), this division is often based on an essentialized understanding of social space as neatly separated and located at different ‘levels’ (the global, the regional, the local). Moreover, the ‘local’ is either conceived of as subject to global stimuli (international norms, structural adjustment programmes, global capitalism, etc.) or as the theatre of their failure. Instead, Ronald Kassimir and Robert Latham (2001: 269) argued that the concept of transboundary formations attempts to offer ‘a more rigorous theorizing of globalization and at the same time a more sophisticated analysis of what constitutes local order and authority’. Such a perspective requires a more thorough engagement with the ‘structures and relations that emerge through the intersection of social phenomena’, which means that the effects of these engagements are neither the mere result of an external intentionality nor described in binary terms of success/failure (Latham etal. 2001: 6). Such a thorough engagement with the intersections of social phenomena should expose ‘the rich kernels of specific junctures joining diverse structures, actors, ideas, practices, and institutions with varying ranges in a common social and political frame’ (Latham etal. 2001: 6). Reactions to coups in Africa, I argue, create such a frame, and it is the aim of this book to describe one instance of such ‘rich kernels’ and their consequences for the reconfiguration of orders.
Thus, an intervention is not the practice of a particular actor, but rather a social space, a moment of collision and interaction of a variety of forces and logics. I will therefore speak of post-coup engagements as intervention, not to define what the AU, SADC, or UN do, but to describe the social space of transnational interaction that is opened at the moment of the AU PSC’s demand for a ‘speedy return to constitutional order’ (OAU 2000a: 3). This, as will be elaborated below, is both a space of politics – the struggle over the rules of the game – and one of power, in which the ‘possible field of action’ (Foucault 1982: 790) is structured for a variety of actors and in which orders are (re)created, legitimated, and contested.
The conception of interventions as transboundary formations thus seeks to combine the more systemic perspective of historical sociology and the practice-oriented critical sociology of intervention by merging but also refocusing them through a transboundary perspective. What, then, does it mean to think of interventions as transboundary formations and as sites of both politics and power? I summarize my answer in four steps.
First, interventions are sites of politics (i.e. the struggle over competing attempts to define what the ‘problem’ is that ought to be resolved). If politics is about conflict, then interventions open an arena to define the scope of conflict (Schattschneider 1960: 7), to delineate the ‘appropriate and legitimate range of controversy’ (Shapiro 1981: 210). In this struggle, it will be decided which issues, which problems, and which conflicts are included in or excluded from the ‘political universe’ (Schattschneider 1960: 62). International diplomats, bureaucrats in headquarters, local elites, party officials, civil society actors, traditional authorities, and church leaders, mediators, and peacebuilding experts all engage in defining the terms of the intervention (Curtis 2012: 3). Like policies and any other object of government, the objects, subjects, and purposes of interventions are neither given nor inevitable. They are negotiated and the outcome of a struggle between competing problem constructions. This is a consequence of the fact that interventions are by definition limited: where to draw the boundary is thus both contested and momentous (Latham 2001: 81).
One important aspect of these interactions is that they do not necessarily take place in a single locality. Rather, interventions span a web of interaction between actors that are often not located in the same physical terrain. The intervention is a web that connects these otherwise distant places, different rationalities and values, different purposes (Behrends etal. 2014: 15; Williams 2018). All these actors thus contribute norms, discourses, justifications, and sometimes even tangible values to the interactions and shape the ‘possible field of action’ (Foucault 1982: 790), and hence the scope of possibility and the consequences of the intervention.
Second, interventions are sites of interaction and emergence rather than the attempted (and