Book Review: Undoing Coups. The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar by Antonia Witt

Abstract

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 organizations 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 organizations 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 organizations 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 organizations, 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 organizations 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