She's a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute, Frankfurt, which is interested in African peace and security issues,
as well as legitimacy and authority debates about the Doherty in international relations.
Now, military coups became an alarming fixture in the years following Africa's independence from colonial rule.
Today, coup frequency has greatly declined in Africa, and many scholars Soiree, Tickle Cow, amongst others,
point to the African Union's post 20 to anti-coup regime is one of the factors that has resulted in the decline of coup frequency in Africa.
However, we know very little about the ways in which this anti-coup regime impacts politics in individual African states that have undergone coups.
And this is where with where it comes in, she's going to tell us about down what restoring constitutional government
actually looks like on the ground in individual states that have undergone coups.
So with that said, I will hand it over to you.
It's all yours. Thank you very much, miles, and thank you everyone else for joining.
I will share my presentation and I hope that it will work.
If not, you just give me a shout that should work now.
So, yeah, once again, thank you very much for the invitation to present my work here.
Here, here is now a virtual space.
I'm still in my office in Frankfurt, but I present my work at the Oxford University African Studies seminar,
and I'm really looking forward to our discussion after my talk.
Now, I would like to start my talk with this picture, which is actually also a starting point of the story of my book.
What you see on this picture is called the Lomé Declaration of the Organisation of African Unity over you.
The OAU was the continental organisation that worked for the African continent, and it is the predecessor of today's African Union.
Now this Lomé declaration was adopted by the summit of the Organisation of African Unity in the year 2000 in the city of Lomé.
That's my name. Now, the idea of this declaration was to make an end to Africa's long history of coup d'etats
and what the organisation of African unity called unconstitutional changes of government.
But is any attempt to reverse sitting government presidents by unconstitutional means?
I mean, this Lomé declaration,
African heads of state and government condemned coups as an anachronistic act and declared the unconstitutional takeover of governments unacceptable.
They also defined what what counts as unconstitutional change of government or importantly,
they mandated the continental organisation to work for the re-establishment
of constitutional order in situations where this order has been interrupted.
It is, as I call it, to end coup d'etats through diplomacy, mediation and, if necessary, sanctions.
Now, what you see on this picture is text on a piece of paper.
I want to use this talk to demonstrate that the Lomé declaration is much more than just text on a piece of paper,
namely that it is indeed that indeed serves to reconfigure power relations and political orders,
both within African qualities and within the international realm.
I structured my talk in five parts of first south by explaining my research interests and situate it a bit
within the existing literature and then my own approach or my own analytical perspective on this issue.
I then go on to explain what lectures my guess is the situation in Madagascar
just before the what came to be called unconstitutional change of government.
Oh, then go on and present some of my main findings.
That is, the rescue intervention in Madagascar was an effective process of ordering both in Madagascar and beyond.
I will then in the fourth part, I'll take a bit of a broader perspective and look at the effects of the anti-coup policy of
the African Union more generally beyond the individual case of Madagascar and trying to
answer the obviously pressing questions question of whether what I observe in this particular
case is also somehow generalisable to other situations of particular interventions.
And then I'll conclude. Now.
Let me start by saying a little bit about the African antique who bought.
Now, with the transformation of the Organisation of African Unity into the African Union in 2002, the antiquarian became binding continental law.
And it was since then implemented by a increasingly intrusive set of institutions at regional and subregional level.
Since 2004, and that's what you see on the on the map, on the slide since 2004,
this anti-coup norm has been invoked in 13 cases in an altogether 11 different African countries,
and you see the list of countries of the particular situations on the slide.
Now what we see is a relatively automated, almost sort of technical set of practises off that that starts after a situation
in a member state has been declared as unconstitutional change of government.
So this automatic is really something that is that's quite crucial in the way the African Union so far reacted to these situations.
Now, why are the declaration defines what counts as unconstitutional self-government?
It does not define what it means to re-establish constitutional order.
It is what aims are tied to the undoing of coups and on what grounds the African
Union would recognise a successful re-establishment of constitutional order.
Now, when we look at the existing literature, we see two broadly competing narratives about the African anti-coup norm and especially the
prospects of how how are the anti-coup norms will affect politics and life in African states.
On the one hand, you have what I call Afro optimists.
We see the anti-coup norm as an expression of a liberal, normative shift amongst African states towards democratic principles and human rights.
And their expectation would would be that the norm contributes to further consolidate illiberal norms and democratic values in Africa.
Every behind what I call Afro pessimists are pointing to the fact that actually many of those who adopted the
lamented expression did not actually meet the democratic or constitutional criteria enshrined in this article.
So, so the expectation there is that the then African president adopted the norm to maintain the grip on power and to support each other again,
in fairness. Now, in this case, it will be regime stability rather than democracy.
So that is the sort of expected outcome of the anti-coup regime.
Now, the problem with both these approaches is that they reflect the expectations of the respective scholars,
much more so than an empirical analysis of what the intellectual norm actually does on the ground as months and which said in the in the introduction.
So, in fact, until now, such an analysis of of the sort of empirical developments one scientific norm is invoked is still missing
from the from the literature and also actually maybe more importantly and most of the existing literature,
the normative assessment of the research as a given much more weight than the
voices and experiences of those who were actually affected by the African.
Sir, my own research. I therefore try to take a bit of a different route to this issue.
My aim was to sort of follow the African Union's anti-coup policy to the locals
in which it is acted and where its consequences can be studied empirically.
So I therefore started with a rather broad question namely, what does it mean to establish constitutional order?
But concretely,
I wanted to understand how the application of the African Union Anti War affects the reconfiguration of power relations and political orders.
And I did so by zooming into one particular case, namely the close to intervention in Madagascar that ran from 2009 to 2014.
Now, empirically, the book is based on several months of field research.
It's actually different sites that were crucial for them.
I'm doing the unconstitutional change of government in Madagascar.
So following the policy in this case actually meant going to a very different sites in my case.
This was obviously Metgasco spent several months and conduct field research,
but also the rules Addis Ababa, where the headquarters of the African Union.
And as to how broken into the headquarters of the Southern African Development Community and other subregional
organisation that was influential and in this regard to Johannesburg because South Africa played an important role.
And then obviously also to the context of Paris,
because France is a former colonial power and had an important role to play as well in the rebuilding of constitutional order in Madagascar.
Now, in all these cases, I conducted more than 100 interviews with Malagasy negotiating parties,
civil society representatives, translators, journalists, representatives of a regional or international organisations,
diplomats and support staff to the international mediators and his interview
spread and complemented by strategy papers from the Malagasy negotiating parties,
correspondences between them and the mediators. Official documents as well as I see newspaper reports.
Welcome to the second part, the trees make us.
And the situation in Madagascar in early 2009.
An early 2009 science of Malagasy is drawing a rather broad protest movement that was organised against then President Valimai.
The protest movement drew on very different segments of Malagasy society,
and it was led by the then mayor of Madagascar's island, the island's capital.
Sorry. And some are even so, as I demonstrate in the book, this evolving is my gosh, it is, as it came to be called, was a situation of multiple,
complex and overlapping experiences of and exposures to crisis, which went far beyond the mere dissatisfaction with a particular government in place.
It was as social anthropologist Lauren Hinson described it, a general crisis of confidence in the institutions of the state,
and it had an important dimension of socio economic exclusion and suffering to it.
This socio economic aspect mainly referred to question about acquisition and use and consequences of extractive industries and agro farming,
use poverty and unemployment to just give you an idea about this.
This sort of dimension to the crisis or two crises in general.
In March 2009 and driven by the protest movement,
the army arrested a man of the president and installed on threats when the area of 110 people is president of the transition.
Alabama was the president, 10, fled into exile to South Africa.
Now viewed from Addis Abeba from the headquarters of the African Union, this situation was an unconstitutional change of government.
And so she's my gosh became an issue for the African Union's Peace and Security Council.
In the choreography prescribed by the anti-coup norm,
the Peace and Security Council decided to suspend Madagascar's membership and demanded the immediate restoration of constitutional order.
At first,
there was great divergence amongst international and regional actors with regard to how to interpret the situation on the island and in particular,
so how to respond to it. Don't assume everyone aligned initially with the African Union a very strong,
very strict condemnation of the city of the of the situation as as unconstitutional changes.
But after a while, like most of international and regional actors actually converge on the demand for an inclusive and new position,
as they call it, leading to elections and a altogether speedy return to constitutional order, which was the second idea.
Now, what followed from this for almost five years of collective international efforts to re-establish
constitutional order on the island involved in these efforts was a large number of national,
regional and international actors, and I've tried to illustrate this in them and this figure, I think the numerous actors involved in this process.
So let me just say a few words about this and in particular, the centre.
You see the full Malagasy parties that were negotiating.
So that is already so the also president, but just president, if you want to call it that.
And then the two former presidents, did you write about Saffi, who were actually the only former presidents still alive at that time?
So amongst these who move answers are movements.
The the negotiations about the return to constitutional order were supposed to take place and then you had
four international mediators at the beginning from four different international or regional organisations.
After a while, I came to sample the former president of Mozambique became the lead mediator in the in the name of SADC,
the Southern African Development Community. So the three others step and step back.
But still, you have this and then regional organisations, obviously the African Union, SADC,
but also organisations like the Indian Ocean Commission or the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa,
and playing a role that had international and non-African regional organisations like the European
Union and the International Organisation of the United Nations played an important role.
World Bank and IMF, obviously, too.
And then bilateral partners Madagascar's main and international donors are France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States of America,
but also and Madagascar's neighbours, who and especially a later point, play an important diplomatic role the Seychelles and Mauritius.
So this is what I call in my book the intervention scenario that is the really multiplicity of actors involved in returning to constitutional.
Now, practically it is five years of re-establishing constitutional order.
Involved several rounds of mediation and negotiations amongst these four and Malagasy parties.
Initially, several agreements signed and Trump,
each from an international contact group to bring together all these various international actors targeted sanctions applied by the African Union,
as well as quite substantive international financial and technical support to organise transitional elections.
But somewhat surprisingly, re-establishing constitutional order turned out to be much more difficult than
maybe initially envisaged by the African Union when the Lomé Declaration,
I envisage this to be a process of a few months. And as I said, in the end, it took almost five years.
Reasons for this are. To a certain extent,
the resistance by Malagasy actors to sort of really follow suit on this demand to a speedy return to
constitutional order difficulties to bring Malagasy actors to actually agree on a transitional roadmap,
but also these conflicts within the international between or amongst the international actors on how to interpret and how to forge the situation.
So if you want Madagascar,
the case of Madagascar is really a sort of prime example of the politics involved and in returning a country to constitutional order.
It was early in late 2013 that transitional elections and with the inauguration of a new office, newly elected government,
the African Union's Peace and Security Council in early 2014 then declared that constitutional order had been successfully restored.
And this is sort of after the African Union at the end of this intervention.
Now I'm coming to the third part of the main part of my presentation.
I would like to present, as I said,
some of the some of the main findings of my study and I will concentrate on the findings with regard to Madagascar to the re-ordering of Madagascar.
People cannot undermine these efforts to restore constitutional order.
Actually did, as I mentioned at the beginning,
and I did so by reconstructing the concrete practises as well as the overall logic with which constitutional order was restored in Madagascar.
And as I said, I would now like to briefly summarise some of the insights with regard to Madagascar.
Go on now with regard to Madagascar,
the main sort of confusion on what this intervention actually did is that the rescue intervention ultimately serve to religious black,
religious to make the ideal of the liberal polity and to hinder more profound political transformation from taking place.
And I will now go on and explain what I mean with this, with this conclusion.
And from the very first day on the collective efforts to re-establish constitutional order ultimately
focussed on reinstalling an internationally recognisable government more or less democratic elections.
And this has had important consequences for which and whose crises became addressed or not during the transition.
In essence, this time, the transition constitutional order into a technocratic,
executive driven process with early aim was to organise elections as quickly as possible, so transition became almost an organisation of Connexions.
And politicise the situation in Madagascar that had led to it also boasts a prison men in the first place.
I demonstrate this in my book with regard to, amongst other things, two issues in particular, but the role of the executive during the transition,
which actually outperformed the competencies of any other president in the history of Madagascar.
A secondly show it with changes in the meaning of reconciliation,
which was increasingly reduced to enshrine these bargains rather than a collective process of healing and justice.
I also show that over the course of time,
the efforts to resolve the Malagasy political crisis increasingly moved away from negotiations amongst Malagasy actors
towards securing support for a roadmap to constitutional order that was already written by the international mediators,
and I would like to share a quote with you on that.
It is a quote one of my interviews from one of his great moments, but I doubt that he.
And he goes on and says every time he episodic, mediate drunken Chissano arrives here, he consults everyone.
But they have never been direct dialogues between the parties ever to enter the room.
They collect your ideas. The 11 entities enter one by one.
The 11 entities are 11 parties or 11 parties that were later on became the signatories of the office, right?
So the 11 parties enter one by one. It collects their ideas.
Afterwards, they do their own thing and then they say, Here are the results of the consultations or consultations are only four states.
It was already written. It's the end goal of the transition.
And what's happened since the elections for Madagascar's political elite?
The transition became a matter of political life or death of being in or being at.
Many Malagasy political actors, therefore, were confronted with this with a chance of either playing them or becoming politically excluded.
Now, this approach to resolving Latrice, my gosh, particularly benefited parts of the Malagasy political elite.
They're the main means in their hands. Was the setting up of political parties,
which became when their vehicles to inscribe themselves into the internationally demanded inclusive and consensual transition to constitutional order.
In 2011, shortly before the signing of this document, the roadmap that officially paved the way to transitional elections,
the number of registered political parties tripled to more than 300.
Half of the parties who actually signed up in the end have been established just months before.
Negotiation rounds of peace agreements became an opportunity to participate in the future institutions of the state,
and this opportunity was willingly responded to by large parts of the Malagasy political elite.
And I would like to share a cartoon with you that I think depicts the situation quite quite nicely.
It's a cartoon by Mummy Andrenosoma, who is one of the, I think,
most famous cartoonists in Madagascar and who has his pieces in several newspapers and.
And who actually had it was a great chronicler of the of the of the situation and the and the political situation just by by means of his cartoons.
So what you see on this on this cartoon is a an aircraft waiting there.
And I don't know how many, but really many people queuing up to still become to still be able to board the aircraft.
The aircraft is going through [INAUDIBLE], but on it, as we've become aware,
one of the meetings was supposed to take place to negotiate this roadmap and to sort of set a few final stones to add to it.
So what you see on this on this picture is a long queue of minor gases.
In this case, party leaders are both female queuing up and waiting to still get their seats on this on this aircraft.
And what you see is this great attraction that the opportunity of peace talks or or negotiations actually happened.
And you also see someone else shouting from within the aircraft.
It is probably someone from the mediation team who says, don't worry, those will not be able to embark today.
They will be admitted to the to the court, to the list of agreement so that they're at their agreement to will be there will also be said to.
So what you see, I think were this cartoon really visualise is, on the one hand,
this this great attraction that that the mediation or the the opportunity to participate actually had for the Malagasy particularly.
And then, on the other hand, the approach by the mediators to take as many as possible and on board and if any as possible,
the opportunity to present themselves as playing along.
At. International demand for an inclusive transition, so inclusivity really at its at its best.
Now, officially, this sort of spontaneous establishment of political parties that I mentioned.
And the willingness of many states to implement the international demand, a transition was presented as a solution.
I guess you might guess so, but I guess the driven solution and that was by the time.
So legitimation that the international mediators had fought for this great inclusion,
but who these parties actually work and who they represented was not an important question to the international interveners.
And I would like to share another quote with you, this time from media treasure, I can discern.
And one of his reports true to the summit, Acheson writes, the road map has garnered wide support from political parties,
most of them having expressed their willingness to be positive.
It is true that many may have been motivated by the possibility of having their members integrated into the transitional institutions,
but they argue that having the opportunity to participate in the process.
What was their sufficient incentive?
The point that I'm trying to make here is that this de-politicize transition was not an imposition from the outside,
but a process of actually ordering that is a Christian built on the end of the collaboration and agency of Malagasy actors,
as much as it was framed and shaped by the norms and practises of international and regional institutions.
Now, what this process ultimately ended up doing was, as I said at the beginning,
the read to mention of the ideal of the liberal polity and an institutional framework to politics based on,
though empirically unmet ideals of popular sovereignty and democratic participation.
And this idea of the liberal quality in fact, nourished the political struggle amongst the Malagasy political elite and placed
even more focus on the fight for access to the institutions of the state.
For instance, every accord a roadmap to end the crisis and to ever lodge a number of posts and transitional institutions.
The number of seats in the legislative institutions, for instance, rose from one hundred sixty two more than 500 during the transition.
So apart from organising elections,
the primary means to conflict resolution at work here was granting access to and inclusion into the institutions of the state.
Now, what did get lost in this technocratic transition, what were the blind spots of this approach?
I think the two main issues on the one is it's quite obvious that the office that went missing,
it's space to search and debate to find solutions in the first place, to problem at times or to politicise.
The transition, in fact, was never meant to be open ended process, but the end was already defined once.
But she's my gosh, became subject to the African Union's and Typekit regime, and this had quite profound consequences.
It also meant, and that is the second point,
that many issues relevant at the beginning of the crisis were left entirely unaddressed in the transition.
In particular, there is a striking mismatch between the socioeconomic dimension of crime in Madagascar and early 2009,
which I mentioned at the beginning and the obsession of the intervention with
formal political processes at the institutions of the of the liberal polity.
Now to at this point, the almost five years of post-war intervention left an important imprint in politics and order in Madagascar,
even though actually because much seemed to have stayed the same.
The intervention did not just re-establish constitutional order that is the rule of law,
it crucially sought to re legitimise the ideal of the or in fact,
the myth of the liberal polity and how all those who were in the position to find the moment to use it for their own benefit.
Now, the power of this intervention was not its substantive prescriptions, but it's usually.
The defective hindrance to more profound reforms and to debate, to politicise and to problem what was at stake and post-truth, I think it's.
Now, both this is not the effort to come up what the African Union bid or the African Union implement its anti-colonial instead,
and that's an important argument that I'm trying to make.
The reordering of Madagascar is the outcome of a collective transnational interaction in which
none of the actors involved was actually able to effectively dominate or steer the across.
With regard to the African Union in particular, I show in my book an ambiguous society of Free and coercion,
on the one hand, an absence and denial of the organisation's own involvement and responsibility for the situation.
On the other? Are you also showing an informational disconnect from what was actually going on on the ground and an
incapacity to engage the Malagasy actors due to a lack of legitimacy or cultural and linguistic knowledge?
But all of this, what I described, would not have been possible without the African Union's anti-communism,
which set the terms for how to handle elections and provided a legitimisation for that the
implication of the many international and regional actors in finding a solution to this crisis.
Now, turning back to the competing narratives in the literature that I mentioned at the beginning of my book.
What I just outlined clearly contradicts the gloomy expectations of a pessimist, namely that the anti-coup NA merely says regime stability.
This obviously was not the case in Madagascar,
but the weight of international sovereignty norms and the need for states to have an internationally recognisable
government explains a lot of the oppression and the deep politicisation that took place in Madagascar.
Afro optimists and 10 were definitely too positive about the democracy democratising effects of the turmoil because,
as I have argued, its application effectively hindered more profound political reforms.
But the ideals of popular sovereignty,
inclusion and participation are still crucial to understanding just how the situation in Madagascar was thought to be resolved.
So while none of these two narrative narratives captures the contradicting and ambiguous consequences the post-coup intervention had on Madagascar
a burst onto two important logics behind the collective efforts to re-establish constitutional order that were simultaneously at work.
And it will now turn to the second part of my expectations, namely that reordering the international.
So apart from reordering or not, the Madagascar quality,
the rescue intervention also contributed to reconfigure orders and power relations internationally,
and it continues to expand the reach of the international both in Madagascar and beyond.
So concretely, identify two processes that took place.
The first is. Identify new spaces of intervention of international intervention.
Many of the problems and issues that international into the Beatles identified during the transition,
but that were then postponed to a time after the official return to constitutional order.
Many of these issues were later on turned into future international aid and support projects and programmes scope.
Reconciliation, for instance, is one of the most famous case, I think security sector reform or, in fact, the diet's socio economic situation.
Opposed to intervention and the presence of many international and regional actors, in fact,
sharpened the international gaze for the problematic aspects of politics and society and international intervention,
something more enduring for the time, for the years to come.
The second mechanism that I identify is exploring new realms of action for international and regional organisations.
Several of the international and regional actors involved in re-establishing constitutional order in Madagascar, in fact,
use the intervention to explore new fields of competence based on the role of parties, in particular issue areas.
For instance, the organisation of the Indian Ocean Commission.
For the Indian Ocean Commission, the crisis in Madagascar was the starting point for more elaborate profile cooperation,
including also the promotion of democratic norms and confidence amongst its member states.
Well, the African Union to the situation in Madagascar became the laboratory for its new post-conflict reconstruction and development policy.
So these examples point to an expansion of the capacities and former priorities of international
and regional organisations that have a profound effect on the shape of the international,
much beyond the specific situation in Madagascar.
So although the second part now of my observations is much, much shorter, especially now in the presentation and the first part,
it is still my aim to stress that when we look at or when we are interested in understanding what post-war interventions really do,
that is kind of down that order, transforming or generating consequences.
It is not enough to just look at the pompous politicians that are officially targeted by these interventions,
but to really look at the broader international or transnational transformations that have taken place as a result of these interventions.
And with this, I'm coming to my fourth airport and a short one.
And that is the look beyond Madagascan.
Now, one crucial question is obviously how singular our general observations on the press corps intervention really are,
especially with regard to the outcomes that I observe.
Now, everyone looks at those at the other cases of rescue intervention under the African immigrants,
and one complains trying to catch them the way the EU and others react.
Such situations and I've brought you this table, which lists all the situations of post-war interventions since 2004.
What is the data from the Peace Security Council was established.
Family friendly institutional setting was and was in place that since then implements the African Union's action regime.
Now, what you see on this on this table is a pattern that revolves around the promotion like America,
stop of an inclusive transition leading to elections as quickly as possible,
and you see that here in the middle that with very few exceptions, this has been the dominant answer to undoing.
And unlike the Afro pessimists argument,
suggests that the U.S.A. crooner is not used to reinstate all the presidents or to mutually secure a grip on power.
You see that he's see that such situations did OK there, but there was exceptions.
They did happen. Nevertheless. But this is surely not the pattern.
One can also see if one, maybe not so much of its time, but if one studies the processes,
they want to see that the return to constitutional order in most countries was heavily contested,
in particular revolving around this question of how and what should be included in the road constitutional order.
So in the however defined transition and this and in these situations,
it's not least shown in the in the duration that re-establishing constitutional order.
On average was a little less than 20 months, so. Two years, which is an stark difference to what the innovative approach envisage such processes at.
Any time. So the argument that I'm making is that because the African Union treats quite unique situations in similar fashions,
it is likely that price interventions in other countries may have similar effects to those air times for Madagascar,
which is really decimating the ideal of the liberal polity through inclusive transitions and elections.
And by this providing new opportunities because of the political elite and deep politicising
the situation that had led to the unconstitutional change of government in the first place.
And with this, I would like to come to my conclusion.
I started my talk with this text, a piece of paper, which is what my declaration or the African Union's anti-coup law.
And it said that I wanted to show that it is more than just text on a piece of paper.
Maybe then you thought, well, this is a somewhat lame conclusion. Who would have expected this to be just takes on a piece of paper anyway?
But I think all too often the African Union is still considered to merely produce text to be a paper tiger.
Quite natural to not really having any effect.
This is also true for political science and international relations scholarship,
but still prefers studying the effects of global international organisations or Western states on politics and order in Africa,
but less so those of African regional institutions. I want to demonstrate with my research that this assumption is a great mistake.
I certainly do not want to diminish the impact of global international organisations
or Western states and their impact on politics and ordered evacuated.
But reducing our understanding of the international in Africa to such outside actors fails to reflect the crucial
institutional transformations admit to the rise of what I call an African international African international.
I mean a set of structured relations beyond the state based on the definition
and sedimentation of norms to govern particular issues of life like Britain's.
The African Union's and tycoon Ahmed is just one example demonstrating this transformation and their effects on African politics.
With the adoption of a Lomé declaration, the EU has become an important site for the definition of what counts as legitimate order in African states.
And this has allowed the promotion of a particular idea of political order to resolve conflicts within its member states.
Now, even though the effects of all this might not be as wished or hoped,
especially not if one takes the position of all those, like many Malagasy who had hoped for a more profound change to come.
But these effects are nevertheless tangible, and they have important consequences for politics and order and Africa.
That's what I was interested in studying or shaping them in the future.
And with this, I want to thank you for your attention, and I'm really looking forward now to our discussion.
And.