Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt
the everyday possibilities of doing field research. On the other hand, my lack of Malagasy language skills also constrained the pool of interviewees, newspaper articles, and online discussions whose narratives finally entered this book, which would certainly have been different if such voices could have been considered. In this sense, there surely remains a certain elite bias in the accounts provided. However, since I started this research by following (and interviewing) those involved in re-establishing constitutional order in Madagascar, the analytical elite bias also bears an important insight: it only echoes the actual elite bias of these efforts in the first place.
Third, the final narrative presented in this book stems as much from the various sources consulted as it is of my own making. The explicitly iterative approach with which I analysed the data required a constant navigation between the puzzles currently debated in existing academic literature and the story that stems from the material itself (see Schwartz-Shea & Yanow 2012: 27). The ensuing chapters therefore necessarily deviate from my interviewees’ own stories, as they bridge and translate these stories into an academic discourse that has its own meanings, rules, and priorities. The result is hence a, not the, story of post-coup intervention in Madagascar. Yet it is a story that is based on a comprehensive set of consciously selected and diverse sources, triangulated and critically checked against existing accounts. So, this is not a plea for arbitrariness; quite the opposite. It is rather meant as an instruction to read the following chapters as an account that is as much assembled and subjective as it is reliable and comprehensive.
Outline of the book
This book is divided into seven chapters. Combining literature from IR, African studies, and peace and conflict research, Chapter 1 discusses how to think of the links between international standards of legitimate authority and the constitution of orders. From this, it develops two ‘conceptual resources’ (Howarth 2009: 311) for this book. First, inspired by the works of Michel Foucault (1982; 2004) and related contributions to IR, the chapter elaborates a perspective in which international organizations (IOs) such as the AU are conceived of as sites where principles defining what counts as legitimate order within states are formulated and institutionalized. This allows one to plot the emergence of particular knowledge regimes that determine what counts as legitimate order, and to see how these change over time, how they become institutionalized, and how they are enacted in specific IO practices such as mediation or election monitoring. This permits seeing the AU’s anti-coup norm as part of a much broader phenomenon and contributing to its theorization. The second conceptual resource developed in this chapter allows interventions to be construed as concrete instances of the enactment of the knowledge regimes in question. However, in line with critical peacebuilding and intervention research, interventions are conceptualized not as top-down enactments of a ‘pre-written script’, but as a ‘transboundary formation’ (Latham et al. 2001: 5), a transnational interactive space in which a variety of actors vie with one another to determine the ‘rules of the game’ – and thus also the outcome of the intervention. While itself drawing on key IR and peace and conflict literature, the chapter points out that both areas of study have largely ignored developments on the African continent, particularly those at regional level – an issue taken up again in the concluding chapter.
Chapter 2 reconstructs the contested making of the African anti-coup norm, from the preparatory work on the Lomé Declaration of 2000 to the negotiation of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, and beyond. By reconstructing developments over more than two decades, the chapter shows that the continental outlawing of coups was an incremental though contested expansion of the scope of ideas that define ‘good’ political order and their legalization (i.e. enshrinement in continental law). Moreover, the chapter also demonstrates that the idea to outlaw coups was intimately tied to a process of authorization (i.e. attributing a particular responsibility to the AU). Over time, I argue, this process in fact subverted a deeper engagement with the more general dilemmas and contradictions involved in the idea to prescribe and defend standards of legitimate authority through a continental organization.
Chapter 3 provides context for the events of March 2009, which led to the ouster of Madagascar’s President Ravalomanana. For this purpose, the chapter reconstructs the multiplicity of conflicts as experienced and expressed by various Malagasy social and political actors from both rural and urban settings, and shows that ‘la crise malgache’ was in fact a multifaceted and deep-rooted phenomenon occurring at a time when the legitimacy of the order then in place was very much in question. The chapter also acts as a foil against which the limitations of the international solutions ultimately proposed, and the parties and issues they excluded, are made visible.
Working on the assumption that interventions are a transnational space in which international, regional, national, and local actors come together to negotiate an outcome, Chapter 4 provides a detailed analysis of the protagonists of the post-coup intervention in Madagascar. On the one hand, the chapter scrutinizes the aims and strategies of key Malagasy players invited to take part in the re-establishment of constitutional order and shows how they came about as a result of the intervention. On the other hand, the chapter explores the various international and regional bodies that became involved in supporting Madagascar’s return to constitutional order. It analyses their mandates and interests, as well as how they organized their respective involvement in re-establishing constitutional order in Madagascar. A closer look is also taken at the individuals dispatched as mediators or special envoys to Madagascar. The chapter shows that at various levels, the intervention, rather than resolving conflict, in fact itself created conflicts, which meant that resolution became more elusive. Apart from conflicts among the various international actors – which other studies on the case of Madagascar have already stressed – the chapter specifically identifies conflicts between the Malagasy negotiating parties, on the one hand, and the various international actors, on the other, and shows the crucial (physical, institutional, and ideational) disconnect of the latter from what happened on the ground.
Chapter 5 reconstructs the logic underpinning the re-establishment of constitutional order in Madagascar, which ultimately shaped how and what kind of order was to emerge from almost five years of post-coup intervention. It does so in relation to: (1) the objects of intervention (i.e. the problems and issues considered relevant to resolve ‘la crise malgache’); and (2) the subjects of intervention (i.e. those actors given a particular role for resolving the crisis). The chapter’s detailed reconstruction of the logic of intervention sheds light on a gradual depoliticization of what it meant to re-establish constitutional order and resolve the crisis, ending in a technical transition driven by the president whose sole purpose was the holding of transitional elections. Although many more Malagasy political actors became included in this transition than initially planned, inclusion was based on rather arbitrary terms. Moreover, the chapter also demonstrates that this depoliticized solution was not a coincidence, but that it was sustained by a particular mode in which the various international actors approached the situation on the ground.
Following on from the analysis of the logic of intervention, Chapter 6 looks at the order-constituting effects of almost five years of post-coup intervention in Madagascar. It does so by tracing how the intervention reconfigured power relations both in and beyond Madagascar. With regard to the first, the chapter shows how the five years spent in re-establishing constitutional order served primarily to re-legitimate old power relations and the ideal of a liberal polity – however much at odds the latter was with the realities on the ground. Yet at the same time, the re-establishment of constitutional order also deepened the spaces for international intervention: problems identified but not addressed during the post-coup intervention were translated into development programmes and thus became the subject of new international aid and capacity-building projects. More revolutionary, however, were the changes that took place internationally. Citing the examples of, inter alia, the AU, SADC, and the Indian Ocean Commission (Commission de l’Océan Indien, COI), the chapter shows that the process of re-establishing constitutional order in Madagascar offered these organizations an opportunity to explore and institutionalize new norms and practices, which in many regards expanded their hitherto limited radius of responsibility and action. The chapter thus demonstrates that post-coup interventions are consequential and have order-constituting effects, in that they (re)produce power