All Necessary Measures. Carrie Booth Walling
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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.
Chapter 2
The Emergence of Human Rights Discourse in the Security Council: Domestic Repression in Iraq, 1990–1992
Between March and August 1988, the government of Iraq launched a series of lethal poison gas attacks against Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. Western media covered the effects of the chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja: “Ghastly scenes of bodies strewn along Halabja’s streets, families locked in an embrace of death, lifeless children, doll-like with blackened mouths, eyes, and nails, and the upended carcasses of domestic animals.”1 The international human rights organization Middle East Watch characterized the Iraqi attacks against its Kurdish population as genocide.2 The U.S. State Department publicly condemned Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a report concluding that there was “overwhelming