Understanding International Response to Sudden Regime Change

More often than not, coups and revolutions catch the international community by surprise. Within a very short time, diplomatic missions, regional organizations and foreign aid donors must coordinate around a strategy towards an emerging, but unstable de-facto government. These strategies almost always include a plan for formal elections, despite evidence that such elections can lead to violence and may not actually foster long-term democratization. In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework to understand the reactions of international actors to sudden regime change and address the question: what explains the international preference for rapid and often violence-prone elections after sudden regime change? Based on a comprehensive review of extant case study evidence and primary documents, the paper argues that the priorities of international actors in the wake of coups and revolutions are dominated by three functional challenges: (1) The search for counterparts who can make credible political commitments. (2) The problem of gaining leverage over a de-facto government. (3) The challenge of forming international consensus around realistic political objectives. The paper highlights that the norms and institutional frameworks around which international actors have coordinated in the past have often been dominated by functional considerations rather than by political visions. This is particularly problematic when considering that the choices made by international actors in the early stages of a political transitional can have large consequences over the future political trajectory of de-facto governments and the amount of leverage international actors have in those contexts