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
