Brooke N. Coe’s book Sovereignty in the South: Intrusive Regionalism in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia is a pioneering comparative-historical account of regional involvement in domestic affairs. It is also a book about ideational contestation and evolution. The protagonist here is the norm of non-interference, which Coe proposes has been “eroded,” “weakened,” and “circumscribed” (pp. 45, 9, 40) through the (uneven) legalization of a bouquet of regional activities, ranging from election monitoring to sanctions and military interventions. These practices come together in what Coe calls “intrusive regionalism,” a term coined by Amitav Acharya around the turn of the millennium but that has not been in extensive use (56 hits on Google Scholars as of June 18, 2020).

Coe’s book promises to change this, by presenting unprecedented comprehensive and systematic evidence of the trend and internal variance of intrusive regionalism across three regions. The insights into processes of constructing regional agency are relevant not only for comparative regionalism scholars but also merit a broad IR-audience, especially those with an interest in the emergence and contestation of normative authority. Thanks to an avoidance of unnecessary jargon and the generous use of empirical illustrations, the book will whet many readers’ appetites for intrusive regionalism and adjacent topics. Therefore, the book would also be suitable for IR classes at any level. It is impeccably structured and deals in a refreshingly straightforward way with basic concepts of international relations. By combining a bird’s-eye view of regional involvement in domestic affairs with more focused explorations of especially revealing cases, Coe’s book offers an empirical assessment at a quasi-encyclopaedic standard.

Sovereignty in the South also provokes thoughts about the argument’s empirical and theoretical limits. A first observation is that the practices subsumed under intrusive regionalism are not necessarily “intrusive” in an intuitive understanding of the word. An intruder is normally seen as an unwelcome guest, a trespasser, someone who appears unexpectedly, and whose presence is not wanted. Are regional organizations intruders in this sense in relation to their member states? Is the characteristic relationship not rather one in which member states give their principled consent to regional authority in a given set of situations?

These questions are relevant to assessing one of the book’s central claims: that intrusive regionalism is by and large a liberal development. This description could be challenged by the fact that much regional involvement in domestic affairs has served to protect incumbents, including illiberal ones. The doctrine against unconstitutional changes of government, on which institutionalized sanctions in Africa and Latin America are based, is inherently conservative in its targeting of change, and it has only slowly adapted to recognize the prospect of legitimate uprisings. Coe’s story focuses on the status of the norm of non-interference, seemingly suggesting that a minus score in the loyalty to this norm is automatically matched with a plus score in loyalty to liberal norms. Had the issue of who wins and who loses from regional activism been integrated into the analysis, the picture would likely have been more mixed. In this perspective, the issue is not how full the non-interference glass is, but rather what kind of drink it contains. What if it is a cocktail of colliding norms? After all, the situations that regional organizations address through their “intrusive” activities are rarely black and white but bring tricky normative balancing acts to the fore. One example is when popular protests against undemocratic governments escalate into a military coup.

Coe also refers to how intrusive regionalism, partly through its alleged liberal credentials, was justified as a regionalism of and for the people, especially in the African context (pp. 107ff.). Yet, the political leaders extensively quoted are almost exclusively men. The absence of women—and the absence of a discussion of the absence of women—is striking in view of this argument. Some more elaboration would also have been welcome on the labeling of the study’s empirical universe. Coe uses the label “the global south” or simply “the south,” but “the third world” and “the developing world” also appear occasionally. These are concepts whose associations carry a great deal of luggage. The global south emerged as a post–Cold War alternative to the latter notions and has come to signify those disadvantaged by global capitalism. However, there is a plurality of “Souths,” as Coe’s study itself showcases, which puts into question the suitability of one unifying concept.

In addition to establishing the trend of intrusive regionalism, Coe also seeks to explain its internal variance. For this endeavor, she turns to two classical independent variables: regime type and economic performance. Regime type mattered the most in Latin America, where regionalism became more intrusive as member states democratized. Coe also highlights how new democracies acted as normative forerunners in Africa and Southeast Asia. Poor economic performance is found to have been a catalyst for intrusive regionalism especially in Africa. In Southeast Asia, economic success e contrario hindered regionalism from taking on an intrusive character, and only with the financial crisis in 1997 were (small) steps taken toward more involvement in domestic matters.

The explanatory effort is highly convincing in its broad strokes, but leaves a couple of loose threads. For instance, the economic performance explanation builds on a mechanism of vulnerability leading to a rethinking of regionalism, but one could also argue that crisis is the real trigger of change. Situations of crisis are often formative moments in which traditional beliefs are confronted with dilemmas, which may lead to a rethinking of established ways of doing things. A focus on crisis would invite further recognition of the role of individual agents. Much of Coe’s story is driven by statements from individual norm entrepreneurs who have shaped the regional trajectories in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. This is excellent material, yet Coe argues that individual agency does not lend itself to theorization (p. 186). Is that so? To give one example, within the interpretivist approach to IR fronted by Mark Bevir and Oliver Daddow, individual agents, traditions, and dilemmas together help illuminate trajectories of continuity and change.

The spread and deepening of regionalism across the globe still tends to be treated as a fairly recent development, conventionally placed in the company of other phenomena linked to the paradigm shift at the end of the Cold War. A major contribution of Sovereignty in the South is how it unveils that 1989/1990 was not a tabula rasa for regionalism. This is not news, but it is rare to see historical precedents dealt with so thoroughly. Yet, reading this book in 2020, I contemplate what lessons can be drawn for transformations within international relations that are currently underway. To be fair, making prognoses for the future is beyond the book’s scope. Nonetheless, it is hard to ignore that the central assumption about liberalism’s appeal is less taken for granted today than when Coe started her study. Some of the countries highlighted as pioneers of value-driven regionalism—South Africa and the Philippines are two examples—today face huge legitimacy problems. The discussion of the EU also appears outdated. Not only has the EU failed to respond to migration in a way compatible with its own principles but also its handling of the coronavirus pandemic goes into the history books as another episode of closed borders and poor leadership. In addition, its long-drawn hesitancy to use sanctions against members underlines that intrusive regionalism does not neatly reflect the stage of advancement or predominant regime type within a regional project.

In sum, and to conclude, the troubled times that we live in raise some questions for researchers inspired to continue Coe’s research enterprise: Where does intrusive regionalism fit in the crisis of liberal world order? How much of the argument stands or falls with the status of liberal democracy? If the rethinking of non-interference was indeed driven by legitimation- and image-seeking, how does that logic fare in a world where versions of illiberal democracy are being openly promoted?