Undoing Coups. Antonia Witt

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.