Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
the literature on AU and other regional organizations’ anti-coup policies I seek to contribute an in-depth case study on efforts to undo coups that adds a more nuanced account of the consequences of such policies. The particular perspective developed here pays attention to the politics and interactions of these engagements, which have hitherto remained largely ignored. This requires going beyond the ‘view from Addis’ and giving voice to those participating in and affected by these efforts. Focusing on different national and local actors, the book analyses the latter’s interactions with, and resistance to, the AU-led efforts to re-establish constitutional order. In so doing, the book garners first-hand empirical insights about how these efforts take place that often tell a different story from the one recounted in official policy documents.
Second, I integrate current developments on the African continent into theoretical debates, drawing on IR, African studies, and peace and conflict research literatures. I thereby seek to overcome the largely atheoretical way the AU and its practices and consequences have been treated so far (Edozie & Gottschalk 2014: xxix). On the one hand, drawing on these debates allows developing a different perspective on what the AU’s anti-coup norm and the resulting practices are – in short, theorizing them differently. On the other hand, I seek to show that current developments on the African continent do indeed bear insights that should be of relevance for a much broader audience than they currently seem to be, including for mainstream IR (see also Death 2013: 786). This links up with Amitav Acharya’s (2014) call for a global IR in which so far ignored non-Western experiences should serve to theorize a ‘multiplex world’.
Third, I seek to provide a reading of the consequences of post-coup interventions beyond the dominant binaries of failure/success or democracy promotion/regime protection. This will also offer another vantage point to articulate critique that is based neither on ideal policy statements nor on the analyst’s own implicit assumptions of what a ‘good order’ should look like. Rather, a critical interrogation of post-coup interventions, such as the one I demonstrate in this book, allows the consequences of AU norms and practices to be assessed not on the grounds of what they fail to do, but on the basis of what the intervention has actually done according to the narratives and experiences of those affected by it.
Methods and data
In order to develop a different account of what African post-coup interventions are and what they do, this book was based on a great variety of sources gathered in the course of multi-sited fieldwork between 2011 and 2014 in Madagascar, South Africa, at the SADC headquarters in Gaborone, Botswana, and at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (see generally Marcus 1995; Shore & Wright 1997: 15). This research strategy was underpinned by the principle of exposure – that is, the pool of empirical material evolved as part of the research and was assembled according to a logic favouring contradiction rather than convergence (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow 2012: 84). This followed the rationale that it is only through surprise and the ‘fine grain of empirical detail’ that new stories, including new theorizing, arise (Lobo-Guerrero 2013; Neal 2013: 43–44).
The empirical material consists of over 90 semi-structured interviews conducted (in French and English) with: international diplomats; officials from international and regional organizations; members of the mediators’ teams; Malagasy parties to the negotiations; representatives of Malagasy political parties, churches, civil society organizations, and the security forces; and Malagasy academics and journalists (Kvale 2011; Fujii 2018; see list of interviews in the annex). Where possible, the interviews were recorded and transcribed afterwards. In all cases, interviews were followed by thorough note-taking on the content, course, and context of the interview, which then also formed an important part of the data analysed. As the content of the interviews touched politically sensitive issues, all interviewees were guaranteed anonymity, so that when quoting from interviews, I use broad descriptions instead of the interviewees’ real names. Particularly during field research in Madagascar, accessing interviewees was fairly easy, and apart from one case interviewees were surprisingly open and willing to share their accounts of what happened in Madagascar in the aftermath of March 2009. The timing of most interviews – early 2014 – coincided with the official re-establishment of constitutional order, which was an opportune moment for many people involved and affected to reflect on how and to what extent ‘la crise malgache’ was resolved. As I elaborate in Chapter 6, this moment also brought up many of the contradictions that had shaped the process of re-establishing constitutional order in Madagascar, which once again underlined to what extent this process had been infused with politics. I therefore felt a certain eagerness on the part of many of my interviewees to share their experiences and evaluations of the processes concerned, often paired with a certain curiosity and appreciation that such knowledge now enters academic research and writing. While this situation translated into a great wealth of data, it also challenged me to constantly communicate and explain my position as a neutral researcher who tries to understand all sides but does not explicitly take sides with any of those involved in re-establishing constitutional order in Madagascar (see also Ansoms 2013).
The information culled from these interviews was complemented by data from primary documents such as letters, minutes of meetings, strategy papers, and internal reports – notably from the Malagasy parties to the negotiations and the international mediators. All these primary sources were augmented by and checked against media articles from three French-language Malagasy newspapers (Midi Madagasikara, L’Express de Madagascar, and Madagascar Tribune). In addition, this study also draws on primary documents on the historical evolution and institutionalization of the African anti-coup norm gathered at the OAU/AU archives in Addis Ababa.
Apart from bringing unique empirical material to the debate, the book thus demonstrates that research into the impact of AU norms and policies without solely relying on official documents and narratives is both feasible and instructive. However, the effort to base this book on a set of sources as diverse and comprehensive as possible does not eliminate a certain degree of selectivity. In fact, moving beyond a narrative of post-coup interventions merely based on official policy documents also requires acknowledging and indeed appreciating the specific circumstances and sense-making practices that shaped how this particular narrative came into being (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow 2012: 2). First, despite thorough planning and conscious strategies for how to select and contact interviewees, encounters during field research still also follow their own rules: who has how much time, who knows whom, who is willing to share personal diaries, and so on usually lies far beyond what is plannable and steerable, and yet this can have a profound effect on whose and what kind of stories become heard (Fujii 2018: Chapter 3). For instance, the great number of internal memoirs and letters between the mediators and the Malagasy negotiating parties that I received from interviewees opened entirely new perspectives to me on the processes that happened at and beyond the negotiating table; they also added a depth to my analysis that interviews as such would not have permitted. For me, to receive these documents was pure luck, and for this book it was crucial. However, it also meant that my knowledge about, for instance, the four mouvances – the main Malagasy parties negotiating the return to constitutional order – was not equal for each mouvance, since not all of them produced internal memoires or shared them with me.
Second, positionality obviously matters (Kvale 2011: 14; Fujii 2018: Chapter 2). As a white female researcher, my own background shaped the relationship to my interviewees and affected to whom I was able to talk and how. Language skills, for instance, played a crucial role both enabling and constraining what kinds of stories ended up in this book. On the one hand, many of my Malagasy interlocutors immediately noted that French was not my native language. In several instances, this encouraged interviewees to spontaneously express solidarity, stressing that we share a certain fate of having to operate with a (colonial) language that isn’t really ours (see generally Jackson 2013: 126). In some instances, this was also accompanied by very explicit statements of relief that I was not of French nationality, but from a country whose relationship to Madagascar is usually seen as positive and as serving the interests of the island. This gave the interview situation a sense of trust that shaped interviewees’ willingness to tell their account of what happened in Madagascar post-March 2009. However, it also reflects how present global power hierarchies are in a postcolonial