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,
