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ОглавлениеNorms, intervention, and the making of orders
Research always implies a perspective. This chapter introduces the theoretical vantage point from which this book analyses the evolution of the idea and the practices of re-establishing constitutional order in African states. The chapter situates these engagements, what they are and what they do, within broader theoretical debates in IR, African studies, and peace and conflict research. The aim of this chapter is hence twofold. First, it introduces the ‘conceptual resources’ (Howarth 2009: 311) that underpin this book: (1) to think of IOs as sites for the definition and dissemination of knowledge regimes that define ‘good order’; and (2) to conceive of interventions as moments of actualization of such knowledge regimes that open up a transnational space of interaction in which orders are renegotiated and reconfigured. Second, the chapter links current developments on the African continent to broader theoretical debates. It thereby aims at overcoming the largely atheoretical approaches that have hitherto dominated the literature on the AU (Edozie & Gottschalk 2014: xxxv) and seeks to interpret the AU and its anti-coup policy as part of more general phenomena that are more broadly of interest to IR scholarship. In doing so, the chapter connects both to recent calls in IR for a more global study of international politics and to demands for a more theory-inspired engagement with politics in Africa as advanced in African studies.
As demanded by Amitav Acharya (2014), in order to truly become a discipline of global international studies, IR needs to engage more thoroughly with empirical and theoretical pluralism – ‘multiplexity’, in Acharya’s own terms. He argued that ‘regional worlds’, while in themselves highly diverse, may serve as a starting point in this endeavour. But according to Acharya, such a focus on regions should clearly transcend the hitherto established division of labour between the regional, often non-Western ‘periphery’ and the discipline’s ‘core’, where the former contributes the material while the latter provides the theory (Acharya 2014: 648; see also Comaroff & Comaroff 2011).1 He therefore pleads for a different approach to theorizing, aiming ‘to develop concepts and approaches from non-Western contexts on their own terms, and apply them not only locally, but also to other contexts, including the later global canvas’ (Acharya 2014: 650). ‘Regional worlds’, Acharya demands, should thus become objects for theorizing and concept development, rather than sites of allegedly atheoretical empiricism or experience-distant theory-testing.2
A lack of interest in theorizing experiences in and of the non-Western world has also been problematized from the other side. Rita Abrahamsen (2003), for instance, criticized African studies’ indifference towards their own theoretical and thus also political underpinnings (see also Bryceson 2012; Death 2015; Abrahamsen 2016: 129). She argues that theory, and in particular critical and postcolonial perspectives, are too often dismissed for their alleged practical irrelevance and their failure to generate tangible, policy-relevant knowledge. Theory here seems to be contrary to the practical demands that, for some, ought to drive academic engagements with the continent. In this view, poverty and injustice require practical, not theoretical, knowledge; theory and lived reality are two separate worlds. The dominant reading of the AU’s reactions to unconstitutional changes of government, as outlined in the introduction to this book, is reminiscent of this binary between knowledge that is allegedly relevant to policy and life, on the one hand, and theory, on the other.
This chapter seeks to overcome this binary and to stress that, as argued by Abrahamsen (2003: 190), it is exactly the endurance of poverty and injustice that requires a more thorough engagement with the links between power, discourse, political institutions, and dominant political practices (Gabay & Death 2014: 15). In this sense, policy is itself an inherently political enterprise whose impacts on the world need to be analysed in terms other than those policy employs to describe itself (Bacchi 2009: 7; Stepputat & Larsen 2015). The role of theorizing and the purpose of repositioning conceptual lenses is thus to allow for a different perspective on the assumptions underpinning and consequences emanating from currently dominant answers to very practical challenges – such as coups. Theorizing in this sense is not antithetical to, but part of a concern for, (political) practice in that it may serve to provide the terms for a redescription of existing forms of government, understood as a particular mode of regulating and governing problems (Foucault 1994). In James Tully’s (2002: 534) words, such a redescription of existing forms of government may serve to transform ‘the self-understanding of those subject to and struggling within it, enabling them to see its contingent conditions and the possibilities of governing themselves differently’. This is the explicitly critical approach this research is based upon. Its practical consequences will be taken up again in Chapter 7.
What, then, is the function of theory? It seeks to establish ‘an alternative set of relationships between dimensions of international social life’ (Reus-Smit 2004: 14) that are deemed relevant to seeing a given phenomenon in different lights. In this sense, the role of ‘conceptual resources’ (Howarth 2009: 311) is to guide our gaze towards particular aspects of an empirical phenomenon – here, processes of transnational order-making – and to render them visible and intelligible. The notion of ‘conceptual resources’ underlines that the theoretical vocabulary developed here is used in a constructive way. The rationale of this chapter is hence to explicate a certain perspective – a vantage point – whose merit should be judged by the community of readers in terms of its coherence and its contributions to seeing a particular social phenomenon at all, or differently than before.
The remainder of this chapter proceeds in three steps. It first integrates the idea and practices of outlawing coups into a body of literature that interrogates the links between international standards of legitimate authority and the constitution of orders. This has been a concern for IR and African studies alike. But the two disciplines addressed this question from rather different angles: while IR scholarship has mainly been concerned with the historical constitution of international order and changing membership criteria for ‘international society’, scholars in African studies mainly focused on the consequences of international state recognition for domestic order. This book seeks to integrate these two perspectives by scrutinizing the simultaneous making of orders in and beyond the state. To this end, the chapter second turns to recent IR scholarship on the role of IOs as sites for the definition and licensing of principles of legitimate authority and corresponding practices of intervention. Such a perspective raises the important question of how this affects the relationships between states, societies, the individual, and the international. Contemporary African experiences may contribute valuable insights to this debate. Third, the chapter proposes a heuristic for analysing reactions to coups not as policies or mediation, but as sites of transnational interaction and order-making. I suggest for this purpose the term ‘intervention’ in order to describe a transnational space of interaction between a variety of agents, interests, and rationalities that is shaped by both politics (i.e. conflict and negotiation) and power, and in which authorities, responsibilities, and subjectivities are reconfigured – hence in which orders are made.
Legitimate authority, the international, and the constitution of orders
The question of how to establish standards for legitimate authority – what counts as ‘good order’ – has been one of the centrepieces of political theory and philosophy. Indeed, as argued by Anne Orford (2011: 206), it has been its ‘core concern’. Generations of political theorists offer a variety of normative standards upon which to assess what is needed for an order to be considered legitimate: the capacity to provide security, recourse to established cultural norms, the rule of law, or the provision of justice and welfare, to name but a few. Max Weber (2006), for instance, identified his famous three ideal types of legitimate authority on the basis of their underlying principles of legitimacy: the characteristics of the ruler (charismatic rule), the fit to established cultural norms (traditional rule), or the rule-bound character (legal-rational rule). What Weber underlined with this distinction is that the terms of legitimate authority, the legitimacy principles, may change over time and depend on social context (Weber 2006: 218). What counts as legitimate authority is thus contingent, contextually and historically bound, and subject to interpretation. One might add that this also means that different principles of legitimacy may coexist at a given point in time and that indeed the core of politics is a struggle over which principles should prevail (Schlichte 2012). This book is not interested in establishing principles of legitimate authority or to assess their relative normative validity. Rather, it investigates the consequences of an increasingly internationalized effort to establish what counts as ‘good order’, as revealed when the perceived normalcy of ‘good order’ experiences a sudden rupture.
In a world in which the state has become the dominant form of political organization, the question of what counts as rightful authority is of concern not only for those subject to a particular system of rule or those seeking to establish their rule. It is also of importance for those deemed to recognize the state from without. As argued by Mlada Bukovansky (2002: 211), ‘an entity that deserves the name “state system”, even if it displays a degree of heterogeneity, enshrines certain modes of authority and order, privileging some forms of rule over others’. In this regard, Christian Reus-Smit (2001: 520) observed that what counts internationally as legitimate authority serves as ‘the dominant rationale that licenses the organization of power and authority into territorially defined sovereign units’. Thus, what counts internationally as legitimate order has tangible effects. Indeed, the state itself is one of the most overt examples for this. The globalization of the state as a form of political organization can be regarded as a very consequential effect of a particular international definition of ‘good order’, which henceforth became normalized as a dominant mode of political organization (Herbst 2000; Migdal & Schlichte 2005: 17).3 While over time, as will be elaborated below, statehood has become more substantially defined, the international still retains a crucial role in licensing the organization of authority within states. This constitutive link between international norms of legitimate authority and the formation of orders has also been a key concern for scholars in IR and African studies alike, yet the two disciplines approached this issue from rather different angles, as the remainder of this section will elaborate.
IR scholarship: sovereignty principles and international order
In IR, scholars traditionally studied the links between the international and statehood using the concept of sovereignty. But for a long time, the dominant realist perspective assumed sovereignty to be an ontological fact, a natural accompaniment of the state (Biersteker & Weber 1996: 2; Krasner 2001: 1; Agnew 2009). As a consequence, IR scholarship has largely ignored the question of how the principles underpinning notions of sovereignty contribute to the formation of orders as a relevant problematique for the study of international politics.
With the rise of (critical) constructivism in IR theory, another analytical perspective on sovereignty became possible.4 Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (1996: 1) called for an understanding of sovereignty as a social concept. This implies recognizing both how notions of sovereignty have been subject to changing meanings over time and how each of them had constituting effects on dominant forms of social and political organization (Biersteker & Weber 1996: 4; Murphy 1996). Sovereignty therefore defined what Reus-Smit (1999: 31) called the ‘moral purpose of the state’ based on hegemonic ‘reasons that historical agents hold for organizing their political life into centralized, autonomous political units’. What counted internationally as legitimate authority was thus not taken for granted, but regarded as being ‘presented, debated, and applied in the context of particular events in international history’ (Clark 2005: 1; for a critique, see Bartelson 2014).
For constructivists, ideas about sovereignty constituted rather than merely described the state (see also Murphy 1996: 87). This perspective allowed investigating how dominant notions of legitimate authority have changed over time, how different referents of what counts as good order entered the realm of international legitimacy principles, and how this enabled and constrained politics within states, constructed particular subjectivities, and empowered certain actors over others (for overviews, see Barkin 1998; Roth 1999). Analytically speaking, sovereignty thus became historicized and subject to concrete practices: a matter of making rather than an empirical fact. Such a perspective not only underlined the generally amenable and historically contingent meanings of sovereignty; it also revealed the constitutive linkages between dominant notions of sovereignty and the nature of international order itself. Evolving legitimacy principles defined both rightful membership and rightful conduct for the members of ‘international society’ and thus shaped the very nature of this society (Clark 2005: 5). Shifting notions of sovereignty and the normative structure of the international thus also structured what kinds of conduct were possible and legitimate among the actors of the international system. They served to define what was possible in international politics by establishing who was a legitimate participant and by providing the overall purposes, the rationale, for their conduct (Aalberts 2012). As summarized by Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin (1994: 128), changing principles of legitimate statehood ‘affect the ways in which states are constrained and enabled to act in their international relations’ and by way of consequence what was considered deviant behaviour or a threat to international order (see also Finnemore 2003).
Altogether, the critical constructivist thinking on sovereignty in IR introduced three fundamental tenets: first, that principles of legitimate statehood are subject to international definition; second, that such principles are historically contingent; and third, that changing notions of legitimate authority also define the particular form of international order. So, from an IR perspective, international norms of legitimate authority mainly affected the constitution of international order: they defined membership, set the conditions for state recognition, and prescribed certain rules of rightful conduct and, in case these were infringed, of conflict resolution. This order was largely considered as an international order in which states are the primary agents. In short, IR scholars were mainly concerned with the question of how the primary units of the international system (i.e. states) relate to that system and how constitutive principles shape their conduct (Aalberts 2012: 238). As will be elaborated further below, more recent IR scholarship also seeks to describe how changing notions of legitimate authority affect the ‘making of the international itself’ (Walters 2012: 7) and thus transcend the state-centric and inter-national imaginary of previous works. Scholars in African studies, in turn, have mainly focused on studying the domestic effects of changing international principles of legitimate authority.5
African studies: sovereignty and the struggle for domestic order
For scholars in African studies, the international principle of sovereignty has been a concern with tangible consequences for the very nature of the state itself. Here, sovereignty was not only a matter of law or power politics, but, as famously argued by Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg (1982), the very reason for which Africa’s so-called weak states persisted (see also Grovogui 2002). The authors distinguished de facto, positive sovereignty, the capacity of a government to exercise effective control over its territory, from de jure, negative sovereignty, which derives from external recognition and membership in IOs. External recognition and the internationally upheld principle of sovereignty was thus much more relevant for the constitution of African states than their de facto capacities to exercise the role and functions international sovereignty principles imagined them to exercise. Membership in IOs, the two authors argued, provides African states with the opportunity to ‘both influence and take advantage of international rules and ideologies concerning what is desirable and undesirable in the relations of states’ (Jackson & Rosberg 1982: 21). International recognition has thus become an ordering device with very powerful consequences for the persistence of a particular form of political organization: the state. As shown by Frederick Cooper (2008) with the example of the Mali Federation, on the eve of independence, the power of international principles of statehood also foreclosed other potential forms of political organization.
In contrast to IR, African studies thus mainly focused on the imprint of international legitimacy principles on the constitution of and struggle over the state itself – thus on domestic order (Cooper 2008: 186). In this sense, the external constitution of African states has been one of the core tenets for understanding both persistence and change in African politics (see, for instance, Clapham 1996; Bayart 2000; Englebert 2009). Christopher Clapham’s (1996) foundational book Africa and the International System interprets politics in Africa as interacting with and integrated into an international system that provides both normative and material incentives for the maintenance of order and the ‘politics of survival’ in which most African states and their leaders came to be entangled (see also Herbst 2000). Others provided a more nuanced account of individual agents and forms of agency that stem from the rents of international recognition. Jean-François Bayart’s (2000) theory of extraversion and Pierre Englebert’s (2009) account of the ‘legal command’ as a consequence of internationally recognized authority, for instance, reinterpret the imprint of the international from a more agency-based perspective. Both investigate how African actors – governments, rebel groups, ‘civil society’, and local authorities alike – make use of the rents that derive from international norms and recognition as rightful authority (see also Piccolino 2012; Fisher 2014). Here, Africans are not passive victims caged in their state because of dominant international principles of sovereignty. Rather, international norms are a vehicle for agency, despite their structuring (and thus constraining) effects. As particularly stressed by Bayart (2000: 255), more often than not, this agency comes with ambiguous consequences and thus defies an interpretation as the mere realization of external, postcolonial role expectations.
In short, tracing the consequences and investigating the transnational links that sustain orders on the continent is anything but a novelty in African studies (Death 2015: 5). Instead, international norms of legitimate authority – and their changing meanings – provide a crucial avenue for African studies scholars to understand political dynamics within African states, and there is a set body of literature that has for a long time taken this analytical path. Yet what often remains missing in these accounts is a more thorough engagement with the changing contours of ‘the international’ itself, particularly with the role of African actors therein. Despite Clapham’s (1996: 110) discussion of the OAU as sustaining a system of mutual recognition and preservation, what remains largely unaccounted for are African actors’ own contributions to providing and disseminating the international normative structures upon which domestic struggles over the state are fought out (an exception is van Walraven 1996). Thus, the international has often been depicted as if its nature and agents were self-explanatory, static, and above all external to the continent. African studies scholars’ sensitivity to local dynamics and agencies is not mirrored in a similar sensitivity vis-à-vis the nature and constitution of the international itself, described on the basis of current African experiences (see also Abrahamsen 2016).
Summary
In summary, scholars in both IR and African studies have been interested in understanding how international norms on legitimate authority affect the formation of orders. In IR, this has mainly been debated as historically changing legitimacy principles that defined rightful membership and conduct in the international society of states and thus constituted international order. African studies scholarship, in turn, has been more interested in understanding how international legitimacy principles affect both the very persistence of states and power struggles within them. Its focus has hence been on domestic order. In this sense, the two disciplines have been reproducing the (misleading) international/domestic divide and the dominant division of labour between IR and area studies, which attributes to IR an expertise about the ‘general’ (here, the international system) while the area specialist holds intimate knowledge of a particular case (here, a specific domestic context). Although much of African studies scholarship transgresses at least the international/domestic divide by conceiving the international as constantly present in the struggles in and about the state, there has been less interest so far in reading current developments in Africa as a ‘window on the contemporary world’ more generally (Abrahamsen 2016: 127) – that is, in delineating the actual nature of the international based on African experiences and identifying the role of African actors in making and enacting this international.6 This book aims at developing such a perspective and making it resonate with both disciplines. For this purpose, I will again turn to IR and recent scholarship on the role of IOs as sites and agents for the definition of international legitimacy principles, as discussed in the next section.
International organizations and the dissemination of legitimacy principles
When studying historically changing international principles for what counts as legitimate authority, critical constructivists have mainly focused on changing grounds upon which peoples were granted a right to a state. By contrast, this book is interested in the emergence and consequences of changing meanings of legitimate authority in existing states. As will be argued in this section, at least since the end of the Cold War, one can observe a general international trend towards legalizing, universalizing, and expanding (‘thickening’) the internationally disseminated meaning of legitimate authority. The African anti-coup norm is but one example of this trend. Second, this more recent ‘thickening’ of international norms of legitimate authority also expanded the powers and practices of IOs, which, like the AU, increasingly serve as sites to define what counts as ‘good order’. Together, both developments raise questions as to how this affects the relationship between states, societies, the individual, and the international, to which this book seeks to provide some answers based on an in-depth study of the post-coup intervention in Madagascar and the consequences of the AU’s anti-coup policy.
The expansion of international legitimacy principles
Already in the early 1970s, Martin Wight (1972: 2) observed that international principles of legitimate authority evolved from the mere recognition of allegiance to a matter of rights, a history in which the referents and scope of these rights gradually changed and expanded. Over time, what counts as legitimate authority has increasingly become legalized and couched in universalized terms.
While since the eighteenth century legitimate authority was thought to be based in ‘the people’, as opposed to the divine ruler, the global spread of liberal norms gradually enlarged the scope of who counted as ‘the people’ and what was required for the effective realization of the ideals of collective and individual self-determination. Historically, this is reflected in a gradual expansion of internationally enshrined rights: from a right to a state for people under colonial rule, to the effective protection of minorities in existing states, to the international guarantee of political and civil rights vis-à-vis the state (Roth 1999). One may therefore add to Wight’s observation cited above that international legitimacy principles also became much ‘thicker’ over time (Neumann & Sending 2007: 690; Bartelson 2014). Today, a government’s mere claim to ‘effective control’ alone does not suffice any more as a criterion for membership in the international society of states. In this sense, David Scott (2012: 197) diagnosed a ‘normative sea change’, a paradigm shift by which with the end of the Cold War legitimate authority became increasingly based on more substantive conditions. This paradigm shift is usually attributed to both the rise of international human rights principles and the spread of democracy as the international standard for recognizing legitimate authority. As argued by Clark (2005: 173), ‘[S]ince the end of the cold war, rightful membership has been expressed, not simply about states, but about certain types of state’ [emphasis in original]. More precisely, the shift introduced a new thinking by which the ‘internal political character of a regime ought to have a bearing on its standing in the international community of states’ (Scott 2012: 199). The internal make-up of states was thus opened up for more consequential international scrutiny and evaluation.
To be sure, international human rights norms such as political rights, internationally enshrined, for instance, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, did exist before. This new conditioning of statehood, however, addresses the state’s political order in its entirety and thus goes beyond the mere international enshrinement of individual rights (Sandholtz & Stiles 2008: 290; Scott 2012). Moreover, unlike before, today these rights are pursued in a much more consequential way. The rise of the idea of the responsibility to protect (R2P) – however one may assess its legal status and normative validity – is probably the most widely cited and hotly debated outcome of this ‘normative sea change’ (Bellamy 2014; Hofmann & Zimmermann 2019). The AU’s own Article 4(h), which allows for military intervention in cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, is another case in point (Mwanasali 2006; Wilén & Williams 2018). Much of the academic debate on the status and consequences of this apparent normative shift has been focused on questions relating to the legitimacy of the use of force in addressing the most severe infringements of these principles (for an overview, see Seybolt 2016). This book, in contrast, is interested in the more subtle ideas and corresponding practices that resulted from the rise and expansion of international norms of legitimate authority. In this sense, the expansive internationalization of what counts as legitimate authority is not only to be found in changing norms of military intervention and the use of force in cases of large-scale atrocities. It also gave rise to a great variety of international practices and the responsibilization of agents that affect state–society relations on a more subtle and more everyday basis. International mechanisms to promote good governance and democracy, the conditioning of development aid, election observation missions, international human rights monitoring, the expansion of international sanction schemes, and the internationalization of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and state reconstruction after violent conflicts are all fields in which expansive international ideas on what counts as legitimate authority affect how societies are (made fit to be) governed and how order in states is upheld and legitimated (Abrahamsen 2000; Jabri 2013; MacMillan 2013). All these efforts provide evidence that statehood has become defined on more substantive terms and is increasingly conditioned on internationally set standards. Even though these standards have rarely been criteria for effective exclusion from the society of states, they nevertheless provide the rationale for a variety of efforts to establish the conditions of possibility of their fulfilment.
In normative terms, scholars across different disciplines have since engaged in a lively debate as to how to interpret and assess these developments. While some see in the expansion of international legitimacy principles the global fulfilment of a liberal utopia (Franck 1992), others fear that we are witnessing a new version of the ‘standards of civilization’, which in the eighteenth century demarcated the boundaries of the society of (European) states and defined the external Other – the land of ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ – as an a-legal space and thus open to arbitrary and coercive intervention (Roth 1999; Paris 2002; Bowden 2004: 45; Jahn 2007a; Jahn 2007b).
In analytical terms, scholars have since been debating whether and how the expansive list of legitimacy principles affects sovereignty as such. In this regard, several authors have stressed that changing international principles of legitimate authority are transforming rather than replacing sovereignty, and with this the state, both as an idea and as an empirical fact (Hameiri 2010; Bartelson 2014; for an overview, see Deitelhoff & Zürn 2015). The liberal utopians might thus be mistaken in conflating the rise of individual rights with the decline of the state both as an idea and as an agent in international politics (see also Latham 1999: 49; Reus-Smit 2013). Empirically, this has raised the question of how exactly changing notions of legitimate authority contribute to the reorganization of state–society relations (see, for instance, Duffield 2001; Hameiri 2010; Jabri 2013). This book takes this question about the consequences of expanding international legitimacy principles as a starting point in order to investigate in an empirically open way how exactly the enactment of such principles affects and potentially reconfigures notions of statehood and order, as well as how to assess this normatively. As I will argue in the remainder of this section, the realization of international principles of legitimate authority is intimately tied to the role of IOs as locales for the definition and dissemination of such principles and their enactment in various practices of intervention. Understanding the effects of their enactment thus also requires seeing IOs in different analytical terms.
International organizations: producers, disseminators, and guarantors of legitimacy principles
The above-described expansion of international legitimacy principles has gone hand in hand with changes in the dominant actors that are involved in defining what counts as ‘good order’. In this sense, changing notions of legitimate authority also led to the expansion of authorities beyond the state, whose very existence came to be legitimated on the grounds of changing notions of legitimate statehood. IOs thus became the producers, disseminators, and guarantors of changing notions of legitimate authority (Clark 2005: 176; Sandholtz & Stiles 2008: 319). This is particularly true for regional organizations, which, despite great differences, have over the last decades developed a broad array of political norms that condition membership and prescribe a particular vision of good political order among their member states (Pevehouse 2005; McMahon & Baker 2006; Börzel & van Hüllen 2015). IOs therefore increasingly serve as ‘sites for the negotiation and formulation of universal categories and practices of rule’ (Neumann & Sending 2010: 136). As will be elaborated in this section, these categories and practices of rule provide the texture, the normative webbing, upon which IOs increasingly base their claims to authority. The expansion of international legitimacy principles thus also shaped the very form of the international. The analytical task is hence to inquire and delineate in better terms what this new form of the international amounts to and how it affects the changing relationships between states, societies, the individual, and the international.
In his account of the history of ‘international legitimacy’, Wight (1972) described how both the League of Nations and the UN were crucial arenas for the definition of principles of legitimate authority. The Charters of both organizations laid the grounds for interpreting under what conditions membership in the international society of states was rightfully granted, although actual political practice often diverged from prescriptive texts. Inis Claude (1966: 370) likewise observed that ‘a highly significant part of the political role of the United Nations’ was their role in ‘collective legitimization’ (i.e. the creation of an arena and audience for governments’ claims to legitimacy).
Since then, IOs have not only become an arena for state elites’ own claims to legitimacy, but the state itself has become an object of IO policies: either directly through setting standards and benchmarks for membership, or indirectly through reorganizing social, political, and economic relations by way of IO policies. International conflict resolution and the rebuilding of states after violent conflict, for instance, became a large area of IO activity and a field of expertise for IO professionals (Sending 2015). Gender mainstreaming, healthcare, and child protection were turned into missions of international social policy; election observation, anti-corruption campaigns, human rights monitoring, and capacity-building for civil servants became fields in which IOs are today involved in reorganizing state–society relations (for overviews, see Avant etal. 2010; Harman & Williams 2013).
For a long time, IR scholars conceived of IOs as merely the result of states’ interests. The power of IOs was the consequence of delegation by states, as there was no higher authority than that of the state (Mearsheimer 1995; Hurd 2014: 7). With a more recent interest in IR scholarship in the nature and consequences of international authority, this perspective has changed considerably (see generally Hooghe etal. 2017; Zürn 2018; Daase & Deitelhoff 2019). Yet even before that, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore (2004) famously challenged the long-held IR premise and redefined IOs not as the mere reflection of states’ interests and delegated authority, but as autonomous actors on their own terms. IOs, the two argued, have to be understood as what they are, namely bureaucracies, which grants them a particular authority over constituting social reality (Barnett & Finnemore 2004: 9). The power of IOs, as with all bureaucracies, lies in their guidance by and production of impersonal rules, which confer upon them the image of neutral and impartial guardians 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 idea and the definition of the purpose of the state. So, what such a perspective calls for is not scrutiny of power 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 resist and reappropriate international demands for reform, and thus divert the initial aims and purposes of interventions for their own purposes (see, for 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 at times failed) imposition of pre-written scripts upon passively receiving societies. They are, however, also more than merely clashes between ‘external’ and ‘local’ rationalities and interests (Björkdahl etal. 2016: 9). Interventions may be conceived of as sites of subjectification (i.e. the creation or becoming of agencies): they define international hierarchies, divisions of labour between different interveners, and institutional realms of action; they require negotiators of peace agreements and trustworthy military to secure elections; they constitute citizens who vote for post-conflict governments, party officials who represent the ‘popular will’, experts who accompany reconciliation efforts, culprits and victims who make reasonable efforts for ‘national reconciliation’. An intervention is thus not the mere clash of a priori defined interests, but rather the site at which interests and identities are constituted and redefined. The power of interventions thus lies in their role of opening possibilities for new subjectivities and power relations to emerge. In line with Michel Foucault’s above-described account of power, these processes of subjectification are both enabling and constraining at the same time: they empower and they subjugate. They open possibilities but at the same time set limits. They offer freedoms but tie them to responsibilities (Foucault 1982; Walters 2012). Moreover, not all actors are equally able to participate in the contest over delineating the scope of conflict. It will therefore be a matter of empirical inquiry to understand better how and by what means international interventions offer opportunities and who is able to seize them.
Third, I therefore conceive of interventions in terms of their constituting, ordering effects. Orders are ‘what is produced when groups and institutions attempt to establish reproducible boundaries to what they do in the world, involving specific people and places, social relations and practices, and mechanisms and methods (…)’ (Latham etal. 2001: 8–9). Interventions contribute to the redefinition of authorities, relationships, and hierarchies through the establishment of reproducible boundaries. They open possibilities, and these possibilities are neither a priori benign nor malign. The analytical gaze is thus shifted away from questions of success and failure – outcomes measured according to predefined standards or the analyst’s own normative expectations – towards understanding what it is that emerges from interventions (Björkdahl etal. 2016). This includes scrutinizing not only what interventions invent, but also what they sustain (see also Richmond & Mac Ginty 2015: 7). As evident from the interactive and relational approach to interventions, these ordering consequences are not confined to the locality of intervention. Rather, the link between ‘global, regional, national, and local forces through structures, networks, and discourses’ that make up a transboundary formation may have effects on all those involved, including those at distant places (Latham etal. 2001: 5; Ambrosetti & Buchet de Neuilly 2009; Heathershaw 2009: 174).
Fourth, the above-described subjectification and the ordering functions of interventions are always grounded in particular rationalities that render certain practices meaningful and that shape to a large extent what is possible in these engagements. It is hence a task for empirical inquiry to excavate these underlying rationalities that delineate the scope of politics. These can, for instance, be found in the definition where and with whom negotiations ought to take place, in how boundaries between the official and the non-official are set, and in how the inclusion of some actors rather than others is justified. In short, in order to understand the effects of post-coup engagements, it is not sufficient to describe the reorganization of relationships, to name the winners and the losers. Rather, what is necessary is to understand the underlying rationalities that make these particular reconfigurations possible and legitimate in the first place.
Translating these four arguments into a concrete analytical practice, Chapter 4 will look into the interactions between a variety of protagonists of the post-coup intervention in Madagascar and their struggles to define the scope of recognized conflict. Chapter 5 analyses the rationalities and logics underpinning the post-coup intervention. Chapter 6 finally reconstructs how the transboundary formation of post-coup intervention in Madagascar contributed to the reconfiguration of orders in and beyond the country in question by defining new and sedimenting old power relations through responsibilities and hierarchies.
