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Chapter 1

Constructing Humanitarian Intervention

It is important that when civilians in grave danger cry out, the international community, undaunted, is ready to respond.

—UN Security Council, 17 March 2011

On the evening of 17 March 2011, members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) met to discuss the deteriorating security situation in Libya. It was the fourth Security Council meeting on Libya in a month following the outbreak of violence between Colonel Muammar Qadhafi’s regime and the opponents to his rule. What started out in mid-February as peaceful protests against arbitrary arrest and extrajudicial killing by the government quickly deteriorated into an armed rebellion to overthrow Qadhafi and remove his regime from power. In the face of early rebel advances in the western region of the country, Qadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam Qadhafi had threatened that “rivers of blood will run through Libya” and casualties would increase from the dozens into the thousands if protesters refused to accept regime-initiated reforms.¹ Hours before the 17 March Security Council meeting, Colonel Qadhafi’s forces were poised to retake the rebel-held city of Benghazi. Qadhafi warned Benghazi’s residents that his forces would come that night and “they would show no mercy or compassion” to the opponents of his rule.² The Security Council, in United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, was contemplating the text of a draft resolution submitted by France, Lebanon, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (U.S.). The resolution proposed the creation of a nofly zone in the airspace of Libya and authorized member states to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack, including Benghazi. Proponents of the resolution, including the ambassador of the UK, argued that the Charter of the United Nations protected the rights and values that civilians in Libya were advocating for, and that the Security Council had a responsibility to protect civilians from the violence perpetrated against them by their own government: “The central purpose of the resolution is clear: to end the violence, to protect civilians and to allow the people of Libya to determine their own future, free from the tyranny of the Al-Qadhafi regime. The Libyan population wants the same rights and freedoms that people across the Middle East and North Africa are demanding and that are enshrined in the values of the United Nations Charter. Today’s resolution puts the weight of the Security Council squarely behind the Libyan people in defence of those values.”³ Ten Security Council members voted in favor of Resolution 1973, paving the way for a humanitarian intervention in Libya that was remarkable both for the expansive mandate provided by the resolution and for the swift adoption by the Security Council.

Humanitarian intervention in Libya marked an important evolution in an already remarkable shift in Security Council practice and state justifications for the use of military force that began in the 1990s. Faced with a mounting humanitarian crisis along the border of Iraq with Turkey and Iran in 1991, the Security Council permitted the creation of a no-fly zone to protect Iraqi Kurds and Shi’as from government attack because Saddam Hussein’s repression was causing a refugee crisis that was destabilizing the region and threatening the sovereignty of Iraq’s neighbors. By mid-decade, however, the UNSC began to justify its use of enforcement action under Chapter VII of the Charter by referring directly to human rights norms, rather than their effects on neighboring sovereign states.⁴

Humanitarian intervention had been impermissible during the Cold War as human rights were considered to be within the domestic jurisdiction of each state and beyond the purview of the UNSC. In the 1970s, the Security Council did not address internal situations of mass killing but instead criticized UN members that intervened militarily to halt the bloodshed in neighboring states, despite positive humanitarian motives or effects.⁵ For example, in 1979 when Vietnam intervened militarily in Cambodia, effectively ending the murderous regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam was condemned by the council for its intolerable breach of UN rules, despite its potential positive humanitarian effects. France’s ambassador to the Security Council argued that using military force, even against a detestable regime, was dangerous to international order: “The notion that because a regime is detestable foreign intervention is justified and forcible overthrow is legitimate is extremely dangerous. That could ultimately jeopardize the very maintenance of international law and order and make the continued existence of various regimes dependent on the judgment of their neighbors.”⁶ At that time, references to human rights were inappropriate and illegitimate for Security Council deliberation. International order took precedence over justice. In direct contrast, in the month leading up to the passage of Resolution 1973 on Libya, UNSC members, including states as diverse as Brazil, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Russian Federation, condemned Libyan authorities for their violations of international human rights. At least thirty references to human rights were made in the Security Council chamber and within the council’s public documents on Libya during that period.⁷ Indeed, the formal meeting records indicate that those members supporting the resolution did so primarily on the basis of the “Libyan authorities’ disrespect for their obligations under international humanitarian and international human rights law” and the threat this posed to international peace and security.⁸

More than three decades after the French statement criticizing the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia, the French minister for foreign affairs urged council members to quickly pass Resolution 1973, which would authorize all necessary measures to protect civilians from egregious violations of their human rights, in effect authorizing humanitarian intervention. “We do not have much time left. It is a matter of days, perhaps even hours. Every hour and day that goes by means a further clampdown and repression for the freedom-loving civilian population, in particular the people of Benghazi. Every hour and day that goes by increases the burden of responsibility on our shoulders. If we are careful not to act too late, the Security Council will have the distinction of having ensured that in Libya law prevails over force, democracy over dictatorship and freedom over oppression.”⁹ In 1979, the Security Council criticized illegal intervention against a rights-abusing regime. Humanitarian justifications were deemed inappropriate and illegitimate in the venue of the Security Council. In 1999, the Security Council declined to criticize or censure members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for another illegal intervention against a rights-abusing regime (to stop Serbian government led ethnic cleansing in Kosovo) precisely because it was humanitarian justification that, the council deemed, made the action legitimate. In 2011 in the case of Libya, the Security Council legally authorized its members to use military force against a sovereign state member of the UN because it was violating the human rights of its own population.

The UNSC is known as a realm of great-power politics and historically it did not consider human rights protection as a legitimate purpose of military force. How did the UNSC become concerned with human rights and willing to occasionally use military force to end or punish gross human rights violations in sovereign states without their consent? Humanitarian intervention by the UNSC signals that state observance of minimal human rights standards is an increasingly significant component of state responsibility within international society. As these examples illustrate, however, this has not always been the case. The legitimacy of humanitarian intervention and the authority of the Security Council to undertake it had to be actively socially constructed. This book’s purpose is to illustrate how the increasing legitimacy of human rights norms is changing the meaning of state sovereignty and the purpose of military force at the United Nations by examining Security Council behavior and justifications for that behavior. The central claim is that the arguments that international actors make about the cause and character of conflict and the source of sovereign authority matter: they shape the likelihood that military force will or will not be used in defense of international human rights.

Skeptics may protest that language has more potential to conceal than to reveal motive and that the primary determinant of humanitarian intervention is the selfish interests of powerful states. In this book, I challenge the claim that discourse is epiphenomenal in international relations. By using both a single historical narrative designed to compare evolution of norms over time and by examining a series of qualitative, comparative case studies, I demonstrate precisely how norms and discourse have real-world explanatory power. By tracking changes in discourse alongside changes in behavior, I demonstrate that Security Council members have mixed motives; that norms and strategic interests interact; and that shifting stories about human rights, sovereignty, and war alter humanitarian intervention policy at the UN. This survey of cases also shows that UNSC humanitarian intervention behavior does not map neatly onto a set of a priori interests of intervening states. Rather, humanitarian intervention is costly and imposes foreseen material costs on intervening states. It is through their interaction that norms and interests are mutually constituted and thus have the potential to evolve over time. As this study demonstrates, both human rights and sovereignty norms have coevolved such that a minimal conception of the former is now encapsulated in the latter. Power in the UNSC at the start of the twenty-first century is no longer simply about whose military can win but also about whose story can win.¹⁰

The United Nations and Military Force

The UNSC is charged with maintaining international peace and security and regulating state sovereignty. The UN Charter empowers it with the political and legal authority to identify aggression and to regulate the use of military force in international affairs in response to threats to, or breaches of, international peace. The Security Council has the sole legal responsibility to authorize enforcement measures against state members of the UN, including the use of military force under Chapter VII. The Charter preserves a state’s right of individual or collective self-defense in the event of an armed attack in Article 51 but even a state victim of attack must report its defensive actions to the council and defer to its authority and responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. The Security Council also has the power to recommend new members for admission to the UN. In effect, the Security Council regulates both international legal sovereignty (the mutual recognition between states) and Westphalian sovereignty (the state’s effective control over its people and territory without external interference).¹¹

The Security Council comprises fifteen members: the five permanent members of China, France, Russia, the UK, and the U.S.; and ten nonpermanent or rotating members that are elected on a regional basis for two-year terms. Currently five nonpermanent members are drawn from the regions of Africa and Asia, two from Latin America, two from western Europe, and one from eastern Europe.¹² Permanent members have veto power over any substantive resolution or decision that comes before the UNSC. This means that the UN cannot undertake any collective measures on international security without the consent or acquiescence of its permanent members. Although this prevents the UN from taking any action that might bring its most powerful members to the brink of war, it also allows permanent members to act as spoilers, preventing UN action in some cases of mass atrocity like Kosovo in 1999 and Syria in 2011–12. Despite the unequal power dynamic in the council, the five permanent members cannot act without the support of nonpermanent members. Decisions of the Security Council require nine affirmative votes and no permanent member veto—only then are they binding on all UN members (Article 25 of the Charter). The working methods of the UNSC allow nonmembers to participate in council meetings. Rule 37 of the Security Council’s Provisional Rules of Procedure permits any UN member that is not a member of the Security Council to participate in its formal meetings without a vote. Like the members of the council, nonmembers publicly justify their policy positions in formal meetings—they communicate directly with one another but also to domestic publics and third-party states. They do so to publicly register their views with external audiences but also to attempt to shape the debate and the policy options available for consideration. Rule 39 of the Provisional Rules of Procedure allows the Security Council to invite members of the Secretariat or other persons it deems competent to provide information and assistance when the council is examining issues within their competence.¹³ It has become common for special representatives to the secretary-general, the under-secretary-general for political affairs, and representatives from the offices of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Department of Humanitarian Affairs, among others, to brief the UNSC.

Since the end of the Cold War, the east-west rivalries that once divided the Security Council have diminished and relations among permanent members have improved considerably. There has been a significant reduction in the use of the veto and a culture of accommodation has developed among the five permanent members, whereby they seldom bring draft resolutions with permanent member opposition forward for public vote.¹⁴ The number of resolutions passed by the UNSC dramatically spiked at the end of the Cold War and has remained significantly high since. The same is true for Chapter VII resolutions, and most sanctions regimes and peacekeeping operations also were established in the post–Cold War period.¹⁵ Increasing UNSC action reflects both the altered political environment within the council among its members and dramatic change in international society. Not only has the number of armed conflicts increased—peaking in the early 1990s with only a minor decline in the subsequent decade—the character of these conflicts has changed from primarily interstate to intrastate.¹⁶ Changes in Security Council behavior and the council’s justifications for that behavior suggest that the meaning of sovereignty and the purpose of military force have shifted since the end of the Cold War and continue to evolve. These changes have not occurred without contestation, however. Severe disagreement on the source of sovereign authority and the character of violence in target states as well as the appropriate military response have seriously strained relations among permanent members and can temporarily block Security Council action, as the chapters on Kosovo and Libya will demonstrate.

In contemporary international politics, the Charter of the United Nations provides the normative framework through which contestation over the legitimate use of force occurs, and the Security Council is the forum in which that debate takes place. According to the Charter, there are only two legal justifications for the use of military force: self-defense (protected by Article 51) and with the authorization of the UNSC under Chapter VII. Historically, other resort to military force was considered aggression because protecting state sovereignty was considered the heart of the legal regime of the UN. Article 2 affirms the sovereign equality of states, proscribes the threat or use of military force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states, and prohibits the UN from interfering in matters that fall within the domestic jurisdiction of states. Nonetheless, the core principles and purposes of the UN outlined in the preamble and Chapter 1 of the Charter include the achievement of international cooperation in solving international humanitarian problems and the reaffirmation of fundamental human rights, in addition to the prevention of war and maintenance of international peace and security. Changes in the international political and normative context since 1989 have prompted debate within the Security Council about other purposes for which military force should be used. Originally, different organs were created to achieve the UN’s diverse purposes. The Charter tasks the UNSC with maintaining international peace and security and regulating sovereignty, whereas the encouragement and monitoring of human rights was assigned to the Economic and Social Council and its Commission on Human Rights, which was replaced by the Human Rights Council in 2006. A strict separation of responsibility was largely maintained between the two bodies until 1991, when the subject of human rights entered the UNSC for the first time during the Gulf War. This sparked rancorous debate among council members: China and India argued that addressing human rights concerns was not within the competency of the council and therefore inappropriate, citing the division of labor created by the Charter.¹⁷ Despite these concerns, the UNSC passed Resolution 688 with ten affirmative votes, defining the transborder effects of human rights violations in Iraq as a threat to international peace and security and bringing human rights concerns within the purview of the Security Council for the first time. Human rights concerns that pertain to international peace and security have continued to be a legitimate subject of Security Council deliberation ever since.

The United Nations, Human Rights, and Sovereignty

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 and has been essential to “establishing the contours of the contemporary consensus on internationally recognized human rights.”¹⁸ Indeed the Universal Declaration was created to define more clearly and completely what the drafters of the Charter meant when they referenced human rights in the preamble and identified promoting human rights as a purpose of the UN. Contemporary human rights norms are generally accepted to be the rights of individuals that are codified in the Universal Declaration and the United Nations’ other human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which together with the Universal Declaration make up what is commonly termed the International Bill of Human Rights. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (or the Genocide Convention) is also cited by members of the UNSC as providing both the humanitarian and human rights justification for the use of force. Martha Finnemore argues that contemporary beliefs about human rights at the domestic and international level have transformed understandings of the legitimate use of military force to include responding to humanitarian crises and stopping mass atrocities.¹⁹ Only since the early 1990s has humanitarian intervention become a legitimate response to human rights violations reaching the gravity of crimes against humanity or genocide in sovereign states.

Sovereignty, in addition to being well defined in the Charter, is considered to be the grundnorm of international society.²⁰ According to Robert Jackson, sovereignty is “a legal institution that authenticates a political order based on independent states whose governments are the principal authorities both domestically and internationally.”²¹ The core notion of sovereignty has been enduring but its practices are “periodically renovated” to respond to historical changes in circumstances.²² Daniel Philpott conceptualizes sovereignty in terms of “revolutions” or periods of conceptual change where notions of authority are revised in significant ways, despite the permanence of the institution.²³ Because sovereignty is a social construct rather than a material condition, Bruce Cronin argues, it is the “subject of interpretation and re-interpretation by the participants in the nation-state system.”²⁴

While sovereignty became an institutionalized political norm in the twentieth century, in practice there remained a significant tension over whether sovereignty should be determined on a territorial basis—where historical borders are sacrosanct even when they do not match the demographic facts of the state within those borders—or based on the political desire for self-rule of a distinctive group of people.²⁵ Indeed this unresolved tension about what constitutes legitimate statehood is often a cause of the massive human rights violations that elicit humanitarian interventions. Internationally sanctioned military intervention as a response of the international community to state-led ethnic cleansing represents a revision in sovereignty—one that demands more stringent guarantees of individual rights within a state.²⁶ This revolution in sovereignty reemphasizes the nation-state as the primary actor in international politics rather than displaces it because it problematizes legitimate state authority over people and borders rather than that state authority itself.

The meaning of sovereignty derives from the international community of sovereign states because state sovereignty requires mutual recognition. Members of the broader global system of states have consistently placed constraints on sovereign independence. Despite enduring commitment to state sovereignty as a principle, in practice, the revocation, temporary suspension, or violation of sovereignty rights has regularly occurred in the international society of states.²⁷ Since the end of the Cold War, however, the revocation or temporary suspension of sovereignty has been justified on the basis of violations of fundamental human rights and international humanitarian law. Indeed the current and past three secretaries-general of the United Nations—Ban Ki-Moon (2007–present), Kofi Annan (1997–2006), Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992–1996), and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (1982–1991)—have all recognized that “the evolution of international human rights standards and support for their implementation has now reached the stage where norms of non-intervention, and the related deference to sovereignty rights, no longer apply to the same extent in the face of severe human rights or humanitarian abuses.”²⁸ This contradicts the practice throughout much of the UN’s history, during which it regarded the state’s treatment of its own population to be within the domestic jurisdiction of states. The balance between these two normative values has shifted in response to several factors at the end of the twentieth century, including the end of the Cold War, an increase in intrastate conflict and a dramatic rise in mass atrocity crimes, the growth of the human rights movement and the growing legitimacy of human rights norms, and revolutions in information technology including the emergence of the twenty-four-hour news media and internet communications.²⁹ The chapters that follow illustrate how sovereignty norms and human rights norms are mutually constituted and coevolving at the United Nations and trace that process across two decades of decisions.

As international human rights norms become increasingly legitimate and widespread, gross violations of human rights have been defined as threats to international peace and security; and militarily stopping ethnic cleansing has become legitimate. In cases of armed conflict characterized by mass atrocity, these two core norms have the potential to come into conflict with one another: the protection of state sovereignty and the protection of international human rights. When human rights violations are defined as a threat to international peace and security, Security Council members may face competing normative claims. Protecting state sovereignty has traditionally demanded a policy of nonintervention in domestic affairs; whereas, protecting human rights norms introduces the possibility of the use of military force to stop violence occurring within the borders of sovereign states. Unless these two sets of norms can be conceptually reconciled, council members must act in a complex normative environment characterized by multiple and often competing normative claims about the appropriate response to mass violence.³⁰

The perceived inability of the UNSC to appropriately respond to this ethical dilemma prompted Secretary-General Kofi Annan to demand that the UN reconsider how it responds to the political, human rights, and humanitarian crises affecting much of the world. Annan’s 1999 annual report to the General Assembly was largely motivated by the twin failures of Rwanda and Kosovo. In 1994, the UNSC failed to protect the Tutsi population during the Rwandan genocide and in 1999 NATO intervened militarily to protect Kosovo’s Albanian population from ethnic cleansing without the required Security Council authorization. Annan challenged the UN “to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights—wherever they may take place—should not be allowed to stand.”³¹ He argued that two concepts of sovereignty were developing at the UN: state sovereignty and individual sovereignty: “State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined by the forces of globalization and international cooperation. The State is now widely understood to be the servant of its people, and not vice versa. At the same time, individual sovereignty—and by this I mean the human rights and fundamental freedoms of each and every individual as enshrined in our Charter—has been enhanced by a renewed consciousness of the right of every individual to control his or her own destiny.”³² Annan recognized that these parallel developments did not provide easy interpretation but that the answers could be found in the Charter. The failures to reconcile sovereignty and human rights were not caused by deficiencies in the Charter, he reasoned, but by the difficulties its members had in applying its core principles to a new era in which traditional notions of sovereignty “did not do justice to the aspirations of people to attain their fundamental freedoms.”³³ Sovereignty and human rights were often in tension throughout the 1990s, as they had been traditionally, but Annan suggested that conceptually they did not need to be.

In 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) released a groundbreaking report, The Responsibility to Protect, in direct response to the secretary-general’s challenge. At its core, the responsibility to protect embodies the idea that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from catastrophic harm and violations of fundamental human rights but that when they are unable or unwilling to do so, the international community must share in the fulfillment of that responsibility.³⁴ Sovereignty, when conceived as responsibility, incorporates a minimal conception of human rights, easing the tension between the two norms in the worst circumstances—large-scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing caused by state commission or omission.³⁵ Responsibility to protect seeks to create normative coherence between sovereignty norms and human rights norms by conceptualizing the former to incorporate the latter. The cases in this book, however, illustrate that throughout the 1990s, the UNSC largely conceived of sovereignty and human rights in opposition. Humanitarian intervention by the Security Council generally occurred where the perceived tension between sovereignty norms and human rights norms could be eliminated—in cases where the perpetrators of mass atrocity were nonstate actors or state actors without recognized sovereignty. In cases where the perpetrators were sovereign state members of the UN—as in Rwanda and Kosovo—humanitarian intervention by the Security Council was not forthcoming.

In 2005, a limited version of the responsibility-to-protect principle was officially endorsed by the membership of the UN in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome document. These paragraphs affirm that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.³⁶ They also affirm that the international community, acting through the UN, has a responsibility “to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter” in responding to these same crimes. Only when these measures fail and state authorities “manifestly fail to protect their populations” will the UNSC consider collective action under Chapter VII on a “case by case basis.”³⁷ Later the responsibility to protect was reaffirmed by the Security Council in a series of thematic and case-specific resolutions. Despite these and subsequent affirmations of responsibility to protect both in formal documents and the public discourse of the council, in practice, perceived conflict between sovereignty norms and human rights norms continued to bar humanitarian intervention until March 2011. It was groundbreaking when the UNSC authorized the use of “all necessary measures” under Chapter VII to protect civilians and civilian protected areas in Libya, marking the first time that it authorized humanitarian intervention against a state perpetrator, and justifying it using responsibility-to-protect language.

Evolving Norms and Changing Practices in International Relations

While norms of sovereignty and human rights have been a central concern of the UN since its founding, their conceptual meaning has changed over time. Social constructivists argue that norms—standards of appropriate behavior for an actor with a given identity—are derived from shared moral, causal, or factual belief.³⁸ Norms are both regulative and constitutive because they restrain and enable actors while also shaping their identities and interests. Norms, then, are not simply given. They must be actively created, diffused, and internalized, and they evolve over time, sometimes strengthening and sometimes weakening. Persuasion or norm advocacy by norm entrepreneurs is central to the effective emergence of new norms or alterations in an existing norm’s meaning. Successful new norms are typically legitimized by proponents’ peers, receive the support of prominent states, and are adjacent or linked to existing norms; this link to existing norms has to be actively constructed by proponents.³⁹ Social constructivists argue that humanitarian intervention has become possible as human rights norms have become increasingly legitimate and widely held beliefs in international society.⁴⁰ In short, the legitimacy of human rights creates a permissive normative environment for the practice of humanitarian intervention. The emergence of new ideas about humanitarian intervention, however, did not displace sovereignty norms. Instead, ideas about human rights exist alongside sovereignty and nonintervention norms within the culture of the UN. Thus, decisions by the UNSC shape how both human rights norms and sovereignty norms are interpreted and applied over time.⁴¹

In contrast, rationalist approaches to international relations understand norms to be primarily regulative.⁴² These approaches posit that norms constrain or order behavior but do not shape actors and their identities. Norms, then, reflect rather than create national interests and are often conceived as reflecting the values and interests of powerful states that are then imposed on weaker states. In the realm of the United Nations, this suggests that UNSC decisions about humanitarian intervention reflect the combined total of individual members’ national interests and level of power more than any particular commitment to new norms of human rights. Rationalist scholars argue that humanitarian intervention is explained by the material interests of the five permanent members, the most powerful ones, who only engage in humanitarian intervention when their national interests are at stake. According to this approach, humanitarian intervention is a guise that provides ideological cover for otherwise nonhumanitarian motives.⁴³

Though this approach is appealing for its simplicity and intuitiveness, when a strictly rationalist approach is applied on a case-by-case basis to conflicts characterized by mass atrocity, claims of purely material motivations for humanitarian intervention are not convincing. Material selfinterests, national security concerns, and geopolitical calculations seem to figure prominently in situations where Security Council humanitarian intervention has been absent but are largely lacking in situations where humanitarian intervention has occurred. Rationalist approaches partially explain cases where humanitarian intervention is absent, as in Rwanda and Darfur. For, example, lack of national and material interests in Rwanda by most powerful members of the Security Council resulted in a marginal and contingent commitment to the UN peacekeeping mission there. In contrast, France as a political and military ally of the perpetrator government had significant interests in the political outcome of UN involvement in Rwanda and intervened both in decision making and in the field in ways that benefited French national interests (see Chapter 5). In another example, China often shielded Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and his regime (and simultaneously Chinese oil interests) during council meetings on the situation in Darfur (see Chapter 7). Nonetheless, the influence of human rights norms was also present in both of these cases, as evidenced by the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal to prosecute perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda and the referral of the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Rationalist approaches with their emphasis on material power and interests cannot explain why powerful states would undertake elective military intervention at all. Humanitarian intervention is costly to intervening states, which typically pay a high cost in blood and treasure and become bound to some form of international administration for security protection indefinitely. This is why Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape consider humanitarian intervention “a costly international moral action—one that advances moral principle rather than selfish interest.”⁴⁴ There is little tangible material benefit for humanitarian interventions in places like Somalia and Sierra Leone. So while Western powers lacked security interests in Rwanda and Darfur (where they did not intervene), they also lacked security interests in Somalia and Sierra Leone (where they did intervene). Even when humanitarian intervention occurs in places within the regional security interests of powerful permanent Security Council members as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, national security interest is not a compelling explanation. For example, while Bosnia was largely considered to be in the Western sphere of influence and the war there was considered a regional security threat, western European states were initially reluctant to intervene. Instead, non-Western states were the strongest and most consistent advocates for humanitarian intervention in Bosnia during Security Council meetings, and support for intervention was widespread throughout the international community (see Chapter 4).

These brief examples challenge the idea that humanitarian intervention is a tool used by the strong against the weak for selfish purposes. They preview what the chapters of this study show: material explanations of humanitarian intervention behavior, while important, are incomplete. Interests and material power matter to Security Council decision making, but interests are shaped by normative values, and power takes many forms—the power of ideas, the power to define norms, and the ability to tell a convincing story are just as important for shaping outcomes in Security Council decision making as material power. The emergence of human rights ideas in the UNSC demonstrates the power of ideas to reshape understandings of national interests and international security interests.⁴⁵ The cases in this study bear this out—principled ideas and normative values shape UNSC decision making and are just as influential as power or interests. Yet little scholarly literature in international relations takes seriously the influence of norms in places of hard power like the United Nations Security Council or illustrates how discourse in international relations has real explanatory power. This book does so by surveying the major UN humanitarian interventions—both successes and failures—in order to show how discourse creates the conditions for military action in defense of human rights.

This book takes a decidedly social constructivist approach to the question of humanitarian intervention, one that focuses on the mutual constitution and coevolution of human rights norms and sovereignty norms. While attentive to the material interests of Security Council members and how they influence decisions, this study draws attention to the interaction of norms, interests, and power–and not competition between them, as is common in much international relations scholarship. The cases that follow illustrate how Security Council discourse creates and forecloses opportunities for humanitarian intervention in cases of armed conflict characterized by mass atrocity crimes. They also show how Security Council members struggle to reconcile sovereignty norms and human rights norms in the context of specific conflicts. My analysis demonstrates that human rights are increasingly linked to international peace and security and that normative ideas about human rights, sovereign authority, and state responsibilities to their populations shape council decision making about humanitarian intervention as much as material and geostrategic considerations. Thus, I also illustrate the ways that norms and interests interact and are mutually constituted throughout the debates that accompany each case.

Researching Humanitarian Intervention

A project of this character—one that seeks to generalize and explain how Security Council discourse creates the possibility of humanitarian intervention—is fraught with challenge. Political by design, the UNSC examines the question of humanitarian intervention on a case-by-case basis. The council maintains a strong resistance to standard-setting requirements and intends to avoid creating precedent or developing discernible patterns in behavior.⁴⁶ In fact, political contingency is central to how the UNSC was designed to function. Thus, faced with tensions between legal and moral principles, as in situations of conflict characterized by mass atrocity crimes, political considerations ought to and often do weigh heavily on members of the Security Council when they are making decisions about humanitarian intervention.⁴⁷ This project is attentive to the political contingency in each case of examination, yet specifically draws attention to important but overlooked patterns in discourse that map onto Security Council humanitarian intervention behavior. The project builds theory to explain how UNSC humanitarian intervention becomes possible in some cases of mass atrocity but not others, given a permissive normative environment.

I define humanitarian intervention as the use of military force by a group of states inside a sovereign state without the formal consent of its authorities for the purpose of preventing, halting, or punishing widespread and gross violations of the fundamental human rights of individuals.⁴⁸ For the purposes of theory building, I selected my cases with variation in humanitarian intervention outcomes. Examining armed conflicts where UNSC humanitarian intervention has happened alongside similar situations where it might have been expected but did not occur illustrates otherwise obscured patterns of intervention behavior. The comparison of “cases” and “noncases” of humanitarian intervention also helps to identify or challenge interpretations of Security Council behavior.

To create a data set of cases of expected humanitarian intervention, I used the Political Terror Scale—a yearly report that measures physical integrity rights violations (murder, disappearance, and torture) by states against their domestic populations.⁴⁹ The scale measures levels of political terror and violence in a particular year using a five-point ranking. The most severe score is a level 5, which denotes one of two situations: (1) a situation of political terror where murders, disappearances, and torture are a common part of life for the whole population and where leaders place no limits on the means or thoroughness with which they pursue their personal or ideological goals; or (2) a level of widespread terror so great that although it is only aimed at certain segments of the population it still constitutes a level 5 ranking.⁵⁰ The scale’s coders draw data from the annual country reports of Amnesty International and the U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. I draw my data only from the scale’s codes for Amnesty International reports to protect the integrity of the data from conflict of interest, because the United States is a permanent member of the Security Council.

Compiling the data on all the states between 1989 and 2010 that received a level 5 ranking of political terror for two or more consecutive years on these reports resulted in 26 states.⁵¹ Because humanitarian intervention is an elective use of force and must have a reasonable prospect for success, interveners will not mount an elective military intervention against a nuclear state, reducing the complete set of possible cases of expected humanitarian intervention between 1989 and 2010 to 22 states including: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Liberia, Myanmar, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). As this sample alone makes clear, despite the increasing legitimacy of humanitarian intervention, its occurrence is rare. Cases of Security Council humanitarian intervention from this set include only Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. Several other cases, including Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan have hosted large peacekeeping operations but the involvement of the UNSC falls short of humanitarian intervention.

I chose to examine the three cases of Security Council humanitarian intervention from the set above—Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Somalia—and an equal number of cases from this set where the Security Council might have been expected to use humanitarian intervention but did not—Rwanda, Kosovo (Yugoslavia), and Darfur (Sudan).⁵² The conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda occurred simultaneously, and the practice of UNSC-authorized humanitarian intervention first emerged during this period (1991–95). The conflicts in Kosovo (Yugoslavia), Sierra Leone, and Darfur (Sudan) occurred in a later period (1996–2010)—a period marked by significant debate over whether the Security Council had a responsibility to stop ethnic cleansing.

These cases had useful attributes for both initial theory building and subsequent theory testing.⁵³ The cases were characterized by human rights abuses of relatively equal severity across similar time frames but had different humanitarian intervention outcomes. Process tracing and discourse analysis revealed that these cases had significant variation in terms of characterization of the conflict by the UNSC and the source of sovereign authority in a target state. The cases of Bosnia and Darfur provided significant within-case variation over time. Most of the cases have intrinsic importance to the study of humanitarian intervention, including Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. All of the cases are data-rich and there is an abundance of primary documentation and secondary source literature for each. The cases also resemble current situations of policy concern, allowing for ease of testing these findings across an even broader set of cases. Finally, because of the severity of the human rights violations involved in Rwanda and Darfur and their geographic location in Africa, explaining the absence of Security Council humanitarian intervention in these particular cases creates a hard test for a theory of norm change and potential support for an alternative explanation of state interest.

In addition to the six cases drawn from the data set above, my study begins with an examination of the situation in Iraq (1991–92) and ends by testing my findings in the most recent case of humanitarian intervention as of this writing—in Libya (2011). First, the case of Iraq is groundbreaking for a study of Security Council humanitarian intervention. Resolution 688 defined the effects of the Iraqi regime’s human rights violations as a threat to international peace and security and was the first Security Council resolution that referenced human rights concerns in relation to Chapter VII, paving the way for eventual use of military force in defense of an internal humanitarian crisis with cross-border effects. Second, in 2011, the UNSC engaged in an unprecedented humanitarian intervention in Libya—the first in over a decade—discrediting the argument that humanitarian intervention during the 1990s was a temporary deviation in Council practice. Libya provides a useful test case for the theory advanced in this book: that Security Council discourse about the character of conflict and sovereign authority in target states creates and forecloses opportunities for humanitarian intervention. Importantly, the level of violence that preceded the humanitarian intervention in Libya was far lower than in the other cases of this study, which suggests a potential widening of the prospective cases of future humanitarian intervention.

The Role of Argument and Storytelling in the Security Council

Arguing, scholars have shown, has an impact on the practice of world politics, and the UNSC is a realm of political argumentation.⁵⁴ Indeed the UNSC is the primary venue in international politics where authoritative decisions are made about what events constitute threats to international peace and security, the legitimate source of sovereign authority, and the purpose of military force. Because the Security Council is a political institution, the application of Charter principles is mediated by politics. The UNSC is a forum of “heated and unsystematic, but often principled debate about appropriate standards of international behavior and the extent and limits of the council’s authority to regulate that behavior.”⁵⁵ The Security Council is also a quasi-legal institution with dense patterns of interactions—its decisions are binding on member states and it is vested with the authority to judge the legality of the use of military force in international affairs. Because it gains its authority through the legitimacy conferred on it by other UN members, the arguments and justifications that council members make about the topics on their agendas, particularly the use of force, not only are significant but also relate to particular international norms.⁵⁶ Consequently, some arguments are more acceptable and credible than others during council debates. To be legitimate and persuasive, Security Council members and others appearing before the council frame their arguments according to the legal norms enshrined in the Charter of the UN or according to widely shared international moral norms. Arguments that appear prejudiced—generated purely by self-interest—are viewed skeptically and are often disqualified by other actors. These limitations on appropriate discourse impose some constraint on UNSC action: members will incur reputational costs if they act without a defensible position or advance arguments that do not reasonably justify their conduct in relationship to legal or moral norms.⁵⁷

Members of the Security Council struggle over the power to define norms. Control over the interpretation of the norms and principles of the Charter, in particular, is markedly important. Thus, the effective framing of issues is essential.⁵⁸ Framing involves creating a template that identifies a problem and offers a solution to it. An attractively framed argument viewed as legitimate by other members of the Security Council is more likely to be persuasive and gain necessary widespread support. Emotional appeals and narratives are just as important and sometimes more compelling than appeals to logic. Narratives identify some facts as more important than others. The influence of the agent advancing the narrative matters but so do the perceptions of those states that the narrative is directed toward.⁵⁹ The discursive representation of conflicts and related human rights violations by Security Council members has the potential to create and foreclose opportunities for humanitarian intervention: “…. Discourses are understood to work to define and to enable, and also to silence and exclude, for example by limiting and restricting authorities to some groups, but not others, endorsing a certain common sense, but making other modes of categorizing and judging meaningless, impractical, inadequate or otherwise disqualified.”⁶⁰ Classifying mass killing into categories like ethnic cleansing or genocide may make certain courses of action (such as humanitarian intervention) more possible than others like human rights abuses, civil war, or ethnic conflict.⁶¹ Early decisions in the naming and framing of conflicts may determine the range of possible policy outcomes.⁶² Yet actors cannot simply choose frames or stories—they are limited by existing legal and political norms; and their stories must resonate with their target audience in order to be persuasive.

When Security Council members face competing normative demands, like the tension between sovereignty and human rights, they argue about the cause of conflicts, the character of violence, sovereign authority in the target state, and how to interpret relevant norms. For this reason, I pay attention to the ways that council members justify their positions on the potential use of military force. In research for this study, I examined the public documents produced by the UNSC for each of my case studies. This includes transcripts of formal meetings, resolutions, presidential statements, and formal mission reports. The UNSC makes its decisions in formal meetings that are on the public record, but much of the actual decision making takes place in “informal consultations” that are off the record and held behind closed doors.⁶³ In many cases, individual Security Council members have already decided how they will vote, and they often prepare the text of their formal statements in advance. In many cases, proposed resolutions that do not have the support or acquiescence of permanent members never make it to the council chamber. Nonetheless, formal meeting records remain the most useful documents for identifying how individual states characterize conflicts and the violence that accompanies them as well as their justifications for the decisions about the use of military force. Despite the pro forma character of official proceedings, the public statements made by Security Council members offer revealing justifications for decisions precisely because they are scripted in advance and for public consumption. Security Council members take considerable care to select the words that they deem appropriate and they argue about the language used in resolutions and presidential statements because they are in the public record.

Security Council Resolutions are meticulously negotiated documents because they are binding on all member states of the United Nations. The way that council members vote and their justifications for that vote illustrate the degree to which the resolution is supported by each state, making the resolution a useful measure of areas of Security Council agreement, or lack thereof. Presidential statements are advisory rather than binding but they are consensus documents, as are the formal mission reports of the UNSC. This means that the content and wording of each of these texts has received the unanimous approval of council members before being publicly issued. I examine two types of evidence found in these documents: Security Council decisions about the use of military force in cases of mass atrocity; and debates about, and justifications for, humanitarian intervention or its absence across the entire set of cases. By analyzing these texts and comparing them to actual Security Council behavior, I demonstrate how the discourse of Security Council members produces opportunities for humanitarian intervention. Finnemore asserts that “when states justify their interventions, they draw on and articulate shared values and expectations that other decision makers and other publics in other states hold. Justification is literally an attempt to connect one’s actions with standards of justice, or perhaps more generically, with standards of appropriate and acceptable behavior.”⁶⁴ The arguments of council members and their justifications for humanitarian intervention provide clues about the normative context in which decisions about humanitarian intervention are made in addition to illustrating how the practice is discursively constructed as legitimate.

A Theory of Causal Stories

Security Council texts rely on formulaic presentations, therefore it is easy to identify systematic patterns of problem definition and the policy solutions that flow from them. Through a method of content analysis that carefully examines Security Council discourse, I generated a typology of causal stories that explains how council members struggle to control interpretations of conflicts and how the narratives they advance open and foreclose the possibility of using military force in defense of human rights. These frames, which I call causal stories—a concept that I borrow from public policy scholar Deborah Stone⁶⁵—are created, changed, and contested in the UNSC. They compete against alternatives until one becomes predominant. The predominant causal story has direct implications for Security Council decision making about the use of military force.

In order to trace the emergence and diffusion of Security Council stories, I analyze the signification processes of its members using predication analysis, which focuses specifically on the “language practices of predication—the verbs, adverbs and adjectives that attach to particular nouns.”⁶⁶ I study how predications construct nouns like conflict, war, and human rights violations as a particular type of conflict, war, and human rights violation. For example, Security Council deliberations alternately describe the situation in Darfur as an “ethnic conflict,” “tribal war,” or “genocide.” The fighting is characterized by “civilian casualties,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “chaos.” I create a list of the predications that are attached to threats to international peace and security that the Security Council constructs—wars, conflicts, and human rights violations—and clarify the relationships between them; both what distinguishes how these subjects are constructed and how these constructions are related to each other.⁶⁷

Policy debate, including the deliberations among Security Council members, presumes that to solve a political problem, it is necessary to find its root cause or causes.⁶⁸ Causal arguments, then, are at the heart of problem definition in international politics. “Causal theories,” Stone argues, “like other modes of problem definition, are efforts to control interpretations and images of difficulties. Political actors create causal stories to describe harms and difficulties, to attribute them to actions of other individuals and organizations, and thereby to invoke government power to stop the harm. Like other forms of symbolic representation, causal stories can be emotionally compelling; they are stories of innocence and guilt, victims and oppressors, suffering and evil.”⁶⁹ Through their statements, Security Council members are telling stories to one another, domestic publics, and third-party states about the conflicts on their agenda. These stories describe the causes and character of conflicts and attribute blame for human rights violations. Research across the eight cases examined in this study reveals that Security Council members regularly articulate three types of stories that explain the cause of conflicts characterized by mass atrocity crimes: intentional, inadvertent, and complex (see Table 1.1). They are called causal stories not because they have a direct causal link to subsequent council action (though discourse makes certain courses of action more likely than others) but because they are stories about causation—about the cause of conflict and the character of violence within that conflict.

Intentional causal stories explain situations where “action was willfully taken by human beings in order to bring about the consequences that actually happened.”⁷⁰ They identify a specific actor or actors as responsible for knowingly and willingly causing harm to others, making it a story of perpetrators and victims. Intentional stories are the most effective type of story for changing perceptions of harm from the realm of fate to the realm of political agency because they identify a plausible candidate to take responsibility for the problem.⁷¹ When applied to situations of conflict, intentional stories detail systematic repression where conflict is largely one-sided and premeditated. These stories characterize human rights violations as deliberate, targeted, and widespread because perpetrators are conceived of as having direct control over their actions. There are three constituent elements of an intentional story when applied to conflict situations: identification of an intentional perpetrator, characterization of the violence as deliberate and naming it in a way that demonstrates this intentional character, and identification of a targeted victim group. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and aggression display characteristics of an intentional story, particularly when they identify perpetrators and name victims. Because violence is characterized as both deliberate and systematic, the policy implications of an intentional story focus on interdiction of violence and protection from harm because there is a perpetrator that can be stopped or a single point of leverage to address the problem. Punishment and accountability are also likely because the harms imposed are perceived as flagrant violations of widely accepted international legal norms. The intentional causal story corresponds to a specific normative script in international relations—that of international law and specifically international humanitarian law and international human rights law.⁷² The norms of justice and accountability anchor the intentional story and give rise to interpretations of state sovereignty that privilege a minimal level of state responsibility for human rights.

Table 1.1. Discourse Analysis of Security Council Records

Inadvertent causal stories recount situations where purposeful action has foreseen but unintended consequences. In situations of conflict, inadvertent stories describe situations where two or more parties are involved in a cycle of violence and reprisal in which deaths can be predicted but are not the purpose of the conflict. There is a perceived moral equivalency between parties to the conflict who are mutually culpable for human rights violations that are expected, as collateral damage, but result from indiscriminate action or acts of omission on the part of the parties, rather than being deliberate.⁷³ The constituent elements of an inadvertent story include multiple responsible parties are perceived to be morally equivalent, deaths associated with the fighting are predictable but unintended, and responsibility for those deaths is diffuse. Inadvertent stories are typically depicted discursively as civil war or ethnic conflict, terms that carry connotations of shared responsibility but diffuse culpability. In situations of gross human rights violations, inadvertent stories foster policy recommendations for the protection of civilians. Most Security Council action in these instances incorporates efforts at palliation of the harm, assistance to the parties in ending the conflict, or observation and monitoring of human rights violations or the humanitarian crisis. The underlying normative script is the sovereign equality of states and nonintervention in their domestic affairs. This suggests that council members should be neutral and impartial in their dealings with the parties to the conflict, particularly if they are states.

As Deborah Stone observes, “Complex causal stories are not very useful for solving problems in politics precisely because they do not offer a single locus of control … or a point of leverage to fix the problem.”⁷⁴ Rather, complex stories describe multiple sources of causation (structural or social) or situations where harms result from complex systems of interaction or complicated institutional or historical patterns. Complex stories lack an identifiable actor that exerts control over the entire system or web of interactions that produce the harm. In absence of control there can be no purpose and thus no responsibility for the harms that result.⁷⁵ When applied to situations of conflict, complex stories describe multifaceted, complicated, and tragic situations in which multiple and often fragmenting groups are responsible. The accompanying violence results from a combination of both structural factors—beyond the realm of individual human control—and political decision making. Thus there is evidence of both collateral damage and intentional harm. Indeed, complex causal stories have unclear boundaries, often incorporating characteristics associated with the competing intentional and inadvertent causal stories at the same time. Complex conflicts are described as confusing, chaotic, or tragic. The policy implications of violence that lacks a single point for interdiction take two forms: (1) appeals for an end to violence, including strong verbal condemnation of cease-fire violations and human rights violations and the use of good offices to broker the conflict’s peaceful resolution; and (2) observation, documentation of, and reporting on the violence, including mass atrocities and cease-fire violations. The complex story privileges the status quo—its underlying normative script is one about respect for international order and for a traditional Westphalian conception of sovereignty in which the state has control over its people and territory and is free from external interference in its domestic decision making.

Causal stories are powerful because they can lead to actions that protect the existing social order or upend it. By identifying causal agents they also assign responsibility for problems and with it the possibility of punishment, and at the same time they legitimize and empower other agents to fix the problems.⁷⁶ Causal stories are not necessarily right or wrong, nor are they mutually exclusive. Though they impute “true cause,” political conflicts over causal stories extend beyond competing empirical claims—they are literally fights to control the policy agenda and to assign responsibility.⁷⁷ In the Security Council, members are fighting for the power to define threats to international peace and security and assign responsibility for conflicts as well as to control the interpretation of relevant norms like those of sovereignty and human rights. Security Council texts show that the stories articulated by members change over time and that the members regularly argue about how to characterize conflict. Tracing the emergence and diffusion of causal stories—who articulates them, under what circumstances, and the direction of diffusion—reveals important factors that mediate this contestation process. By comparing points of disjuncture and agreement in council deliberations against conditions on the ground, I identify patterns that explain why one story eventually predominates. The most important factors are the prominence of a story’s proponents, including their visibility and material and normative power; and the story’s consistency with expert testimony, media imagery, and forensic evidence. A causal story can be considered successful when it resonates with the domestic populations of states and when it becomes a dominant belief or guiding assumption of Security Council members.

The predominant story shapes Security Council decision making, and each story type has a different propensity to trigger the use of military force. The discursive representation of a conflict as intentional creates opportunities for humanitarian intervention while its discursive representation as either inadvertent or complex forecloses such opportunities. Each characterization of the conflict and its attendant human rights violations appeals to preexisting normative scripts and has specific policy implications. Intentional stories identify a perpetrator(s) who intentionally and often systematically inflicts harm on a specific group of victims. Because this perpetrator can be identified and stopped, thus preventing atrocities from continuing, an intentional story is more likely than its alternatives to foster the use of military force. According to senior UN officials, support for humanitarian operations can be garnered in the Security Council only if it can be clearly shown that “a good guy–bad guy situation” exists.⁷⁸ Likewise, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, argues that complex stories are ineffective at prompting UNSC humanitarian intervention: “Conflict situations that seem like chaos do not invite humanitarian intervention. Intervention needs a clear bad guy who is going to be stopped…. While you could say at a certain point that even chaos deserves intervention, it is both politically and pragmatically more difficult. Politically, because it is easier to mobilize political support if there is a clear bad guy and you can stand up and say we are going to stop this bad guy; practically, because no international body wants to be in the middle of chaos.”⁷⁹ Politically, rendering a cause complex is one of the most effective ways for actors to avoid action, blame, or reform.⁸⁰ Inadvertent stories, like complex stories, are unlikely to create opportunities for humanitarian intervention because the violence is understood as a foreseen by-product of the fighting and not the purpose of it. There are multiple culpable parties and they share moral responsibility rendering responsibility diffuse. When contestation persists among members about the appropriate causal story, the result will be inaction. In sum, the Security Council decision-making patterns in the cases of this study show that the Security Council is unlikely to engage in humanitarian intervention in absence of its widespread acceptance of, or acquiescence to, an intentional story with an identified, intentional perpetrator that can be stopped from inflicting harm on its targeted population.

Security Council members not only tell stories about the cause and character of conflict and their associated human rights violations, they also tell stories about sovereignty. Sovereignty stories vary by the status of sovereign authority in the target state, the actor that is the referent for sovereignty, and the norm’s theoretical underpinnings. Council members regularly tell three types of stories about sovereign authority in conflict states: (1) sovereign authority is legitimate, (2) sovereign authority is illegitimate, or (3) sovereign authority is lacking, either because it is contested, has been temporarily suspended, or is absent. In many cases, the target state itself is the referent for Security Council stories about sovereignty but in others the referent can be third-party states as in the case of Iraq, deposed governments as in that of Sierra Leone, or the people living within the territory of the target state as in those of Somalia and Libya. Finally, Security Council stories about sovereignty are grounded within different theoretical or conceptual aspects of sovereignty, including Westphalian sovereignty, international legal sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and sovereignty as responsibility. Despite these variations, what is consistent across the cases examined here is that humanitarian intervention only occurs in situations when sovereignty is discursively constructed by the Security Council as consistent with, and complementary to, the promotion of human rights.

Humanitarian intervention is likely where sovereign authority in the target state is discursively constructed as lacking or where the referent of sovereignty would benefit from human rights protection. Humanitarian intervention also becomes possible where the existing governing authorities are deemed illegitimate and sovereign authority is conceptually transferred to the people of that state. In such cases, the council can advance human rights and promote sovereignty at the same time. In contrast, when the status of sovereign authority is uncontested and the governing authorities are deemed legitimate by the Security Council, the promotion of human rights through humanitarian intervention has the potential to bring sovereignty norms and human rights norms into direct conflict. In situations of contestation between norms, the stronger, more internalized norm (state sovereignty) wins over the weaker, less developed norm (human rights). Yet the tension between human rights norms and sovereignty norms can be eliminated when Security Council members discursively construct them as complementary by appealing to different theoretical underpinnings like popular sovereignty and the idea of sovereignty as responsibility associated with the responsibility to protect. Security Council stories about sovereignty are evolving across time, particularly in the way that they address human rights violations committed by perpetrator states. In short, sovereignty norms and human rights norms are mutually constituted.

Organization of the Book

Approaching these conflicts on a case-by-case basis, I illustrate how discourse shapes the likelihood that the UNSC will engage in humanitarian intervention. I also examine the interaction between sovereignty norms and human rights norms as well as how norms and interests are mutually constitutive in each case. What results is a distinct pattern linking problem definition, articulated through the medium of causal stories, to UNSC humanitarian intervention decisions. These cases also detail a twenty-year evolution in the international norms of sovereignty and human rights. Each chapter tells an important part of this broader story yet also explores the contours, contingencies, and nuances of each individual case. Chapter 2 details important precursors to humanitarian intervention: passage of Security Council Resolution 688, which defined the consequences of Iraqi human rights violations as a threat to international peace and security, and the subsequent enforcement of a no-fly zone over Iraqi territory to protect civilians. Iraq is a necessary starting point for a study on the coevolution of human rights norms and sovereignty norms because it is the site of several important UNSC innovations: the emergence of human rights discourse in formal deliberations, the definition of a humanitarian crisis as a security threat, passage of a Security Council resolution explicitly dictating how a UN member-state should treat its domestic population, and the temporary suspension of the sovereignty of a member-state over a portion of its territory for humanitarian purposes. It is in Iraq that the goals of UN military force start to change in response to powerful human rights claims made in the UNSC.

In Somalia, the Security Council used humanitarian intervention to respond to a humanitarian crisis within the boundaries of an essentially failed state. Importantly, it did so with little attention to cross-border effects. Chapter 3 examines how an internal humanitarian catastrophe was defined as a threat to international peace and security and how the United Nations Operation in Somalia II became the first peacekeeping mission authorized to undertake enforcement action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Chapter 4 examines the war in Bosnia and demonstrates how human rights norms transformed understandings of international peace and security and state sovereignty in the UNSC, eventually leading to humanitarian intervention. The Security Council debates about the appropriate response to the war in Bosnia reflected widespread international concerns about how to resolve situations of contested state sovereignty, the obligations of the UNSC in cases of intrastate war, and how to reconcile the promotion of human rights with state sovereignty when the two come into conflict.

Chapter 5 examines the Security Council’s decision to reduce the presence of UN peacekeeping personnel during the genocide in Rwanda, rather than authorize humanitarian intervention to stop it. In Rwanda, a state member of the United Nations perpetrated systematic human rights violations against its own people. When drawn into direct conflict with one another, sovereignty norms can become a blocking mechanism to the protection of human rights norms. The chapter on Rwanda introduces a perverse finding: when the state is deemed perpetrator, humanitarian intervention is less likely to follow. At stake in the Security Council debate over the killing in Kosovo four years later was clarifying the limits of state authority over populations and territory in an era marked by the increasing legitimacy of human rights norms. Chapter 6 shows that permanent members of the UNSC disagreed on the character of the conflict and what constituted the sovereign responsibilities of the state. Permanent members adopted irreconcilable causal stories, which stymied UNSC action. Humanitarian intervention by NATO, in the absence of Security Council authorization, provoked an intense dispute among council members about the meaning of sovereignty, the relationship between human rights and international security, and the legitimate authority and purpose for the use of force. Comparing the council’s response to events in Kosovo with its response to mass atrocity in Sierra Leone underscores the importance of council stories about the cause and character of conflict and the source of sovereign authority to the council’s humanitarian intervention decisions. Despite different humanitarian intervention outcomes, both illustrate the increasing importance of human rights norms within the Security Council.

The conflict in Darfur, the subject of Chapter 7, has been characterized by both significant contestation between Security Council members over the cause and character of the conflict and widespread agreement over the sovereign authority of President Omar al-Bashir’s regime. Both factors precluded UNSC humanitarian intervention. Nonetheless, Security Council members, some motivated by responsibility to protect, adopted alternative policy measures to promote human rights when the use of military force was blocked, including the controversial referral of the Darfur case to the International Criminal Court—the first time the Security Council exercised its authority under Article 16 of the Rome Statute. In Chapter 8, I test my theory about Security Council stories—both causal stories and stories about sovereign authority—against the recent humanitarian intervention in Libya. The Libyan intervention marks a significant evolution in the council’s response to mass atrocities—it represents the first time that the UNSC adopted an intentional story in the face of gross human rights violations committed by a perpetrator state member of the UN. The international normative context has changed such that it is now easier to justify humanitarian intervention than to justify failure to respond to mass atrocities. In Chapter 9, I argue that Security Council discourse provides important clues about how council members make decisions about humanitarian intervention. The adoption of particular causal stories by the council leads to different humanitarian intervention outcomes. Contestation between competing causal stories is mediated by the relationship between sovereignty norms and human rights norms, the material and normative power of causal story proponents, and fit between causal stories and expertise. Humanitarian intervention is a legitimate military action in the contemporary permissive normative environment. Humanitarian intervention does not become possible for the Security Council, however, unless most council members are unified in support of an intentional story in which they identify a perpetrator that is deliberately and systematically harming a specified victim group; and they can discursively construct the promotion of human rights as consistent with state sovereignty.