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Norm Emergence and Humanitarian Intervention
Abstract
Despite efforts by the UN in the past two decades, the world has seen numerous intrastate conflicts emerge. Immediate worldwide reporting of such atrocities, evoking empathy for the plight of others, has led to an unseen measure of objection to repressive treatment, and the excuse of sovereignty as a defense against inhumane actions is being challenged. The relevance and importance of this topic is reflected in the origins of humanitarian intervention and the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty's 2001 report titled The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the United Nations (UN) subsequent adoption of the report at the World Summit in 2005. This thesis uses the constructivist approach to norms and norm development to investigate whether a norm of humanitarian intervention has emerged in the international system that is shaping the behavior of states. It proposes that norms develop in a three-stage life cycle. I suggest that the norm of humanitarian intervention, since the end of the Cold War, has developed in a manner that was initially consistent with the norm-life cycle, but more recently has deviated from the life cycle. This thesis seeks to explain why this is the case and discuss the implications of the norm of humanitarian intervention for international society.
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This article explores an alternative approach to the analysis of patterns in International Relations. These patterns are not to be found in recurring cause-effect sequences, but in shared rules, drawn from the past, by which actions are constituted. The metatheoretical approach builds on the later work of Wittgenstein, and particularly his use of `language games'. The approach is applied to a cursory analysis of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The exercise is less explanatory in any complete sense than illustrative of the approach. The choice of context did, however, result from a number of questions that arose during the dramatic events of the summer of 1995. The first was how to understand the apparent inability of `the West' to act. The second was how to understand the change by the end of August 1995 towards more interventionary strategies thought originally to be unrealistic in this context.
In spite of the current preoccupations, in the United States and in the United Nations, with the wars on terrorism and the occupation in Iraq, humanitarian intervention remains an important policy option. Future debates and action are framed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, whose report entitled The Responsibility To Protect and an accompanying research volume were published in December 2001. Future humanitarian crises will arise in conjunction with the need for military force to protect human beings, and so four shortcomings of the report are evident. First, the report is not as forward-looking as the commissioners thought or as many opponents feared. Second, the concerns of the most vehement critics, especially developing countries, are misplaced because the problem is too little humanitarian intervention, not too much. Third, the purported danger that the concept of the responsibility to protect might become a Trojan Horse to be used by the great powers to intervene is fundamentally incorrect; rather, intervention by the USA in its pre-emptive or preventive war mode is the pressing concern. Fourth, the notion of reforming the UN Security Council is an illusion; the real challenge is to identify those humanitarian crises where Washington’s tactical multilateralism kicks in.
This article analyses the state of the transatlantic security relationship by comparing two recent key documents: the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) and the EU’s European Security Strategy (ESS). Deploying Robert Kagan’s caricature of differing strategic cultures between Europeans and Americans as an analytical foil, it assesses both documents with regard to how they define (i) realms of responsibility, (ii) threat assessments and (iii) tasks and instruments necessary to address these threats. Despite semantic overlaps and a sense of common commitment, the findings confirm divergent strategic thinking between European and US policymakers in all three areas. Although some of the differences run along well-known fault lines, the comparison reveals a mind gap that is significantly different from the one outlined by Kagan in one crucial aspect: it shows a US agenda guided by utopian thinking, and a European strategy that appears more realistic.
Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies; Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
The four books under review here offer insightful and penetrating analyses of the role of such factors as legitimacy, ideas, norms, culture, and identities in world politics. Martha Finnemore's The Purpose of Intervention demonstrates that great powers intervene in small states for reasons significantly different from those in the past. Neta Crawford's Argument and Change in World Politics chronicles arguments for and against Western imperialism over the past five centuries and contends that those arguments helped bring about the birth, long life, and death of Western formal empires. Mlada Bukovansky's Legitimacy and Power Politics examines the social, economic, and political forces at work in the American and French revolutions; she asserts that those events wrought changes in prevailing notions of what makes a state legitimate. Ted Hopf's Social Construction of International Politics analyzes discourses in Moscow in 1955 and 1999 and maintains that these discourses are an important cause of Soviet or Russian foreign policy attitudes in the two periods.
If Rwanda had been better understood at the outset of the 1994 genocide, would the world have responded differently? That the international community was afflicted with a “Somalia Syndrome,” suppressing the appetite for intervention in Rwanda, is not a new claim. What is new, however, is the effort this article makes to unravel the reasons for which two largely unrelated and distinct conflicts—Somalia and Rwanda—were perceived within many critical policy-making quarters around the international community as identical “African” conflict-types. It raises and explores the possibility that had Rwanda been perceived outside of this contorting “African” schema and its associated Somalia analogy, different policy responses could have been legitimized, opening the potential for a radically different international response.
In the Bangladesh crisis, two important objectives of international law appeared to be in conflict: that of peace and that of justice. The former objective is set out in the rules of the U.N. Charter against the use of force by states except in self-defense against an armed attack. The second is found in the provisions of the Charter and in various resolutions, declarations, and covenants pertaining to fundamental human rights and self determination.
Has the Kurdish crisis changed the rules of the game on non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states? No, writes James Mayall. The Western allies were forced to intervene to protect the Kurds because Western media attention to their plight threatened the political dividends they had secured from the Gulf War. But though the New World Order rhetoric promising new support for human rights is without substance, the Kurdish situation will stand as a precedent of a kind for international protection of oppressed national minorities, if a similar situation recurs. However, the principle of self-determination is still unwelcome in the International community.
The concept of human security, which emerged in the 1994 UNDP Development Report, is on its way to changing the practice and institutions of global governance. The underlying issues of human security—a focus on the individual, the waning of state sovereignty and the rise of new actors, the shift in our understanding of security, the need and risks of "saving strangers" through humanitarian intervention, the reform of the Security Council, the conduct of complex peace missions, and the adequate reaction to new threats—pose a challenge to international law. As a value-based and people-centered approach to security, human security will contribute to normative changes in the international legal order.
Although the currently dominant concept of humanitarian intervention has a long history, it is also distinctive in several crucial respects. This article analyzes its nature, historical specificity and presuppositions. It argues that the concept of humanitarian intervention is logically unstable in the sense that it both presupposes and seeks to go beyond the statist manner of thinking which has dominated political life for the past three centuries. The article exposes the incoherence of the statist paradigm and concludes by arguing that, although humanitarian intervention is justified under certain circumstances, it is too limited, too late and too superficial to be of lasting value, and needs to be embedded in and undertaken as part of a larger project of creating a just and non-statist global order.
Kenneth N. Waltz, former Ford Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, is a Research Associate of the Institute of War and Peace Studies and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University.
I am indebted to Karen Adams and Robert Rauchhaus for help on this article from its conception to its completion. For insightful and constructive criticisms I wish to thank Robert Art, Richard Betts, Barbara Farnham, Anne Fox, Robert Jervis, Warner Schilling, and Mark Sheetz.
1. For example, Richard Ned Lebow, "The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism," International Organization, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 249-277; Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, "Is Anybody Still a Realist?" International Security, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 1999), pp. 5-55; Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Paul Schroeder, "Historical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 108-148; and John A. Vasquez, "The Realist Paradigm and Degenerative vs. Progressive Research Programs: An Appraisal of Neotraditional Research on Waltz's Balancing Proposition," American Political Science Review, Vol. 91, No. 4 (December 1997), pp. 899-912.
2. Michael W. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Parts 1 and 2," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 12, Nos. 3 and 4 (Summer and Fall 1983); and Doyle, "Kant: Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151-1169.
3. Francis Fukuyama, "Liberal Democracy as a Global Phenomenon," Political Science and Politics, Vol. 24, No. 4 (1991), p. 662. Jack S. Levy, "Domestic Politics and War," in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 88.
4. Kenneth N. Waltz, "Kant, Liberalism, and War," American Political Science Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (June 1962). Subsequent Kant references are found in this work.
5. Ido Oren, "The Subjectivity of the 'Democratic' Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany," International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1995), pp. 157ff.; Christopher Layne, in the second half of Layne and Sean M. Lynn-Jones, Should America Spread Democracy? A Debate (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming), argues convincingly that Germany's democratic control of foreign and military policy was no weaker than France's or Britain's.
6. John M. Owen, "How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 87-125. Cf. his Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).
7. Christopher Layne, "Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 5-49.
8. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 254-256. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 24.
9. For example, Leopold von Ranke, Gerhard Ritter, and Otto Hintze. The American William Graham Sumner and many others shared their doubts.
10. Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law, trans. W. Hastie (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1887), p. 218.
11. John Mueller, "Is War Still Becoming Obsolete?" paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August-September 1991, pp. 55ff; cf. his Quiet Cataclysm: Reflections on the Recent Transformation of World Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
12. Edward Hallett Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1946), pp. 129-132.
13. Quoted in Anthony Lewis, "The Kissinger Doctrine," New York Times, February 27, 1975, p. 35; and see Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), chap. 17.
14. See, for example, Kenneth N. Waltz, "America as Model for the World? A Foreign Policy Perspective," PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 24, No. 4 (December 1991); and Mueller, "Is War Still Becoming Obsolete?" p. 5.
15. Quoted in Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 28 and n. 36.
16. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2," p. 337...
International Security 26.2 (2001) 87-102
Human security is the latest in a long line of neologisms -- including common security, global security, cooperative security, and comprehensive security -- that encourage pol-icymakers and scholars to think about international security as something more than the military defense of state interests and territory. Although definitions of human security vary, most formulations emphasize the welfare of ordinary people. Among the most vocal promoters of human security are the governments of Canada and Norway, which have taken the lead in establishing a "human security network" of states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that endorse the concept. The term has also begun to appear in academic works, and is the subject of new research projects at several major universities.
Some commentators argue that human security represents a new paradigm for scholars and practitioners alike. Despite these claims, however, it remains unclear whether the concept of human security can serve as a practical guide for academic research or governmental policymaking. As Daniel Deudney has written in another context, "Not all neologisms are equally plausible or useful." Two problems, in particular, limit the usefulness of the human security concept for students and practitioners of international politics. First, the concept lacks a precise definition. Human security is like "sustainable development"--everyone is for it, but few people have a clear idea of what it means. Existing definitions of human security tend to be extraordinarily expansive and vague, encompassing everything from physical security to psychological well-being, which provides policymakers with little guidance in the prioritization of competing policy goals and academics little sense of what, exactly, is to be studied.
Second, the most ardent backers of human security appear to have an interest in keeping the term expansive and vague. The idea of human security is the glue that holds together a jumbled coalition of "middle power" states, development agencies, and NGOs -- all of which seek to shift attention and resources away from conventional security issues and toward goals that have traditionally fallen under the rubric of international development. As a unifying concept for this coalition, human security is powerful precisely because it lacks precision and thereby encompasses the diverse perspectives and objectives of all the members of the coalition. The term, in short, appears to be slippery by design. Cultivated ambiguity renders human security an effective campaign slogan, but it also diminishes the concept's usefulness as a guide for academic research or policymaking.
This is not to say that human security is merely "hot air" or empty rhetoric. The political coalition that now uses human security as a rallying cry has chalked up significant accomplishments, including the signing of an anti- personnel land mines convention and the imminent creation of an international criminal court. The alliance of some states and advocacy groups has altered the landscape of international politics since the end of the Cold War, as Richard Price and others have shown. But to say that human security has served as an effective rallying cry is different from claiming that the concept offers a useful framework for analysis, as some of its proponents maintain. Campaign slogans can be consequential without being well defined. The impact of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society rhetoric, for example, was arguably significant -- serving as a focal point for political supporters of his reformist social agenda -- but the exact meaning of the term "great society" was obscure. Similarly, one can support the political goals of the human security coalition while recognizing that the idea of human security itself is a muddle.
This article proceeds as follows. First, I examine existing definitions of human security. Second, I explore the limits of human security as a practical guide for academic research and policymaking. Third, I examine recent efforts to narrow the definition of human security. Fourth, I consider ways in which the concept might, despite its limitations, make a contribution to the study of international relations and security.
The first major statement concerning human security appeared in the 1994 Human Development Report, an annual publication of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). "The concept of security," the report argues, "has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory...
NATO's military intervention against Serbia in March 1999 underscored the tensions between state sovereignty and the defence of human rights - two principles enshrined in the UN Charter. Since the early 1990s, a consensus has developed, buttressed by UN Security Council resolutions and the practices of UN member states, that massive human-rights violations can sometimes justify encroachment on a state's sovereignty. However, this emerging consensus has not yet crystallised into clear rules establishing a right of 'humanitarian intervention', nor is it accepted by important powers such as Russia and China. Therefore, NATO nations have been at a loss to justify their Kosovo campaign in terms of international law. Rather than claiming that the Kosovo intervention is an exception, not to be repeated, Alliance members should lead a drive to adjust international law by developing clear rules for humanitarian intervention.
How did rights become something that people are fighting for, and are willing to die for, in the international arena? This article seeks to answer this question through the lens of social constructivism, by exploring the constitutive impact of intersubjective ideas and norms— concepts of rights—on the social construction of wars. By doing so the article challenges realists' main focus on `Power' in interpreting human conflict, as well as the English School's writing on war and the use of force which is preoccupied with articulating normative theories rather than treating `normative structures' as scientific analytical tools in order to explain why and how norms (of a Hobbesian nature included) matter. To illustrate the theoretical claim, the article examines two distinct historical epochs: the medieval epoch, characterized by conceptions of divine rights and by institutionalized practices of crusade, and the late twentieth century, which witnessed the rise and institutionalization of human rights as an international norm along with the emergence of a new practice of humanitarian wars.
Constructivism is an approach to social analysis that deals with the role of human consciousness in social life. It asserts that human interaction is shaped primarily by ideational factors, not simply material ones; that the most important ideational factors are widely shared or "intersubjective" beliefs, which are not reducible to individuals; and that these shared beliefs construct the interests of purposive actors. In international relations, research in a constructivist mode has exploded over the past decade, creating new and potentially fruitful connections with long-standing interest in these issues in comparative politics. In this essay, we evaluate the empirical research program of constructivism in these two fields. We first lay out the basic tenets of constructivism and examine their implications for research methodology, concluding that constructivism's distinctiveness lies in its theoretical arguments, not in its empirical research strategies. The bulk of the essay explores specific constructivist literatures and debates in international relations and comparative politics.
This study explains the behavior of democratic states during wars of choice using an integrated decision model. Integrated models are an attractive choice for explaining multifaceted decisions, particularly when simpler, existing theories have an uneven or only partial ability to explain conflict behavior. To illustrate these points, this study assesses the behavior of key NATO members during the 1999 intervention in Kosovo. I compare the behavior of France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. with the expectations of theories of collective action, balance of threat neorealism, public opinion, and government institutional structures. As an alternative, I introduce a simple, integrated, decision-making model that incorporates the core concepts from the other explanations in a staged, conditional manner. The integrated model does a better job of explaining state behavior in Kosovo than do existing theories. The integrated model also is applicable to other conflicts. The results of this study, and the potential of integrated models, have implications for our thinking about foreign policy analysis, for behavior during military interventions and the fight against terrorism, and for future U.S. leadership of alliance and coalition war efforts.
When official representatives of more than 170 countries adopted the principle of the responsibility to protect (RP) at the September 2005 World Summit, Darfur was quickly identified as the test case for this new doctrine. The general verdict is that the international community has failed the test due to lack of political will. This article argues that the failure is real but that it is more fundamentally located within the doctrine of RP itself. Fulfilling the aspiration of RP demands an international protection capability that does not exist now and cannot be realistically expected. The critical weakness in RP is that the responsibility to react has been framed as coercive protection, which attempts to be a middle way between classic peacekeeping and outright military intervention that can be undertaken without the consent of the host government. Thus far, theoretical and practical attempts to create this intermediate space for coercive protection have failed to resolve basic strategic and operational issues. In addition, the very act of raising the prospect of external military intervention for human protection purposes changes and distorts the political process and can in fact make a resolution more difficult. Following an introductory section that provides background to the war in Darfur and international engagement, this article examines the debates over the RP that swirled around the Darfur crisis and operational concepts developed for the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) and its hybrid successor, the UN African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), especially during the Abuja peace negotiations. Three operational concepts are examined: ceasefire, disarmament and civilian protection. Unfortunately, the international policy priority o bringing UN troops to Darfur had an adverse impact on the Darfur peace talks without grappling with the central question of what international forces would do to resolve the crisis. Advocacy for the RP set an unrealistic ideal which became the enemy of achievable goals.
At the 2005 World Summit, the world‘s leaders committed themselves to the “responsibility to protect”, recognizing both that all states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and that the UN should help states to discharge this responsibility using either peaceful means or enforcement action. This declaration ostensibly marks an important milestone in the relationship between sovereignty and human rights but its critics argue that it will make little difference in practice to the world’s most threatened people. The purpose of this article is to ask how consensus was reached on the responsibility to protect, given continuing hostility to humanitarian intervention expressed by many (if not most) of the world‘s states and whether the consensus will contribute to avoiding future Kosovos (cases where the Security Council is deadlocked in the face of a humanitarian crises) and future Rwandas (cases where states lack the political will to intervene). It suggests that four key factors contributed to the consensus: pressure from proponents of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, its adoption by Kofi Annan and the UN’s High Level Panel, an emerging consensus in the African Union, and the American position. Whilst these four factors contributed to consensus, each altered the meaning of the responsibility to protect in important ways, creating a doctrine that many states can sign up to but that does little to prevent future Kosovos and Rwandas and may actually inhibit attempts to build a consensus around intervention in future cases.
What does the world's engagement with the unfolding crisis in Darfur tell us about the impact of the Iraq war on the norm of humanitarian intervention? Is a global consensus about a "responsibility to protect" more or less likely? There are at least three potential answers to these questions. Some argue that the merging of strategic interests and humanitarian goods amplified by the intervention in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the world's most powerful states will act to prevent or halt humanitarian crises. Others insist that the widespread perception that the United States and its allies "abused" humanitarian justifications to legitimate its invasion of Iraq has set back efforts to build a global consensus about humanitarian action. A third group argues that the "responsibility to protect" inhibits the potential for abuse and, as a result, consensus is likely to strengthen post-Iraq for precisely this reason. Through a detailed study of the international engagement with Darfur, I suggest that the latter two arguments have merit but need to be adjusted. I argue that the humanitarian intervention norm has changed in two subtle ways. First, while the strength of the norm itself has not changed, the credibility of the United States and U.K. as "norm carriers" has been significantly undermined. Second, while the "responsibility to protect" has been invoked to support international activism, it has also re-legitimated anti-interventionist arguments.
Amidst the general disappointment that accompanied last month’s world summit, there were several important rays of hope. One of these, and perhaps in the longer-term the most important, was the General Assembly’s (GA) endorsement of the ‘responsibility to protect’. One hundred and ninety one states committed themselves to the principle that the rule of non-intervention was not sacrosanct in cases where a government was committing genocide, mass killing and large- scale ethnic cleansing within its borders. Moreover, some state leaders boldly claimed that had such a declaration existed in 1994, this would have prevented the Rwandan genocide and the massacres a year later at Srebrenica. For example, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Jack Straw, stated in his speech to the Labour Party conference on 28 September that, ‘If this new responsibility had been in place a decade ago, thousands in Srebrenica and Rwanda would have been saved’. This paper seeks to critically reflect on this claim by considering how far the GA’s adoption of the responsibility to protect significantly changes the parameters shaping humanitarian intervention in contemporary international society. Here, I argue that the UN’s endorsement of this new norm fails to address the fundamental question of what should happen if the Security Council is unable or unwilling to authorise the use of force to prevent or end a humanitarian tragedy, and secondly, it fails to address the question of how this norm could be better implemented to save strangers in the future.
The connection between nation and state is far from settled, and though naturalized in ordinary political discourse, it is often regarded with circumspection by many social scientists. Can Charles Tilly’s application of Nettl’s idea of stateness to European state formation illuminate the nation/state relationship and if so, what does this reveal about the tension between national majorities and national minorities that produces civil strife, conflict, and even violence within states? This article explores the implications of the interplay between the international normative framework produced by European state formation that inevitably creates minorities in states on the one hand, and Tilly’s notion of stateness, on the other. How does the existence of minorities and the de facto privileging of national majorities within the state affect its ability to develop and sustain politically stable authoritative institutions?
The three volumes on human rights reviewed here constitute the first wave of in-depth case studies of human rights from a constructivist approach in international relations. By acknowledging the theoretical contributions of these works, identifying their shortcomings and engaging in critiques of the authors’ conceptions of identity and norms, this article provides direction for future studies on human rights through the constructivist framework.Foot, R. (2000) Rights Beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle Over Human Rights in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Risse, T., Ropp, S. C. and Sikkink, K. (eds) (1999) The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, D. C. (2001) The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.