Undoing Coups: The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar

Following a recent spate of military coup d’état in West Africa, there has emerged fresh interest in military coup d’état including this one: ‘Undoing Coups. The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar’ by Antonia Witt.

BOOK | Antonia Witt | The recent wave of military coups from Sudan to Guinea, and from Mali to Burkina Faso might have come as a surprise to many observers given the longstanding commitment of African regional organisations to a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ against unconstitutional changes of government. Deposed incumbents did not return to their presidential office in any of these cases, and while putschists faced sanctions by regional bodies, it seemed very difficult for either the African Union or ECOWAS to re-establish constitutional order.

Reading Antonia Witt’s excellent monograph might help to better grasp why and how regional organisations struggle to enforce their unconstitutional change of government (UCG) rules. In these recent coups and the ensuing negotiations two aspects are particularly striking, which also feature prominently among Witt’s key arguments: While African regional organisations might have developed an impressive set of legal norms about when an unconstitutional change of government occurs, it is less clear what would qualify as a return to constitutional rule, and how to assess the messy politics of transitional governments and electoral engineering in this regard. Second, what is considered legitimate in the eyes of regional authority holders (say 6 months or 4 years of transition, the actual degree of inclusiveness of electoral processes) is not fixed in some legal protocol but results from negotiations between domestic and regional actors, and ‘the international’ thus becomes a constitutive part of re-creating political order within African countries.

One of the many achievements of the book is to put emphasis on the fact that the international, or better transnational ordering mainly involves different African actors and organisations, and is not another instance of US–China rivalry or Bretton Woods conditionality. And indeed, moving beyond the practices in other parts of the world, African regional organisations have appropriated themselves the right to set standards of legitimate domestic political order within member states, and to take decisions, which do affect access to power, in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali or Madagascar.

The book which is based on Antonia Witt’s PhD thesis both advances an innovative theoretical argument about how we should study post-coup regional interventions and provides a rich case study of the regional interventions of AU and SADC (and other international actors) in Madagascar 2009–2014.

The starting point of the book is the assumption that previous analysis of UCG has mainly taken the top-down perspective of Regional Organisations, and analysed the consistency, success or failure of goals set at the headquarters.

Her own perspective, informed by critical IR and peace and conflict research, is to concentrate on the domestic level, to understand post-coup interventions as the outcome of interactions between different domestic political actors and different regional mediators, and thus as a social space, a ‘transboundary formation’, which opens up possibilities to redefine interests and identities, relationships and hierarchies in different localities, i.e. reordering both at the local and global level.

In line with this agenda, the book reconstructs how in the wake of the ‘coup’ by Rajoelina in 2009, the regional intervention was instrumental in defining who was a ‘stakeholder’ to the conflict, thus de facto creating four main negotiating parties. The book also introduces the complex interplay of different regional mediators, representing AU, SADC, UN, and the Organisation de la Francophonie (OIF), backed by an ad hoc group of main bilateral and multilateral ‘development partners’.

In a second step Witt deals with the ‘logic of intervention’, i.e. how, with, and for whom constitutional order was to be restored. The core argument presented here is that it was both in the interest of the main international and domestic elite actors to depoliticise the transition and to focus on the organisation of elections as an end in itself, as well as to keep the transition as short as possible, thereby avoiding a more inclusive process of representing different social and political interests, and a space for discussing the meaning of ‘transition’.

Regional intervention finally succeeded in imposing a return to constitutional order at the terms defined by the regional authorities, with an elected legitimate government, but as the result of an election that heavily restricted the choice of Malagasy voters. Witt’s main point here is that the intervention proved to be effective in many ways. It helped some Malagasy elites (more than others) to defend their interests and to strengthen a specific type of political order, and it empowered international actors in their role as regional providers of professional expertise, financial assistance, and regime legitimacy.

There are many reasons to read this excellent book, but I will concentrate here on one: While many authors argue that we need more research taking a bottom-up view on interventions, the book’s methodology allows the author to actually adopt such a perspective. Repeated rounds of data collection in Madagascar and at the headquarters of the organisations, numerous interviews, as well as archival work, help the author in reconstructing with detail the universe of local and international actors, and the very processes through which the restoration of constitutional order was negotiated. Some negotiators also shared personal notes and memoirs with the author, and the book is full of pertinent observations, which only this type of research can produce, shedding light on the empirical ambiguity of concepts such as ‘lack of capacity’. The book’s narrative, at the same time, remains concise and elegant, and always anchored in the broader theoretical argument. The author has certainly set a very high standard about how to study post-coup interventions empirically, which will be difficult to ignore in future research.

Witt’s book is thus a major contribution to our understanding of the complexity of African interventions. If there are limitations they result from the specific theoretical and methodological approach. The book’s highly welcome strong emphasis on African interveners does certainly not lead the author to ignore the impact that extra-African actors might have had on the intervention practices on the ground. In fact, they are part and parcel of the ‘international’, and the book alludes several times to the role of France or the United States behind the scenes. Yet, exactly because the author’s main aim is to reconstruct the complex interplay of so many different actors, there is no systematic assessment of the contribution of specific actors like France towards intervention outcomes. Interestingly, in Madagascar, the intervention’s outcome consisted very much in a confirmation of a somehow elitist and limited form of electoral democracy, with the coup maker’s ally being elected President in 2014. The regional intervention 2009–2014 might thus have indeed mostly consisted, in a retention, of an existing political order, one which, however, had been historically shaped through the interaction of domestic and international forces.