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
