Indeed, eleven of the sixteen situations on the 1992 Security Council agenda were characterized as intrastate conflicts. This represents nearly 70 percent of the situations on the 1992 Security Council agenda compared to only 27 percent at the start of the Iraq-Kuwait crisis in 1990.1 The Security Council was being called on to create the political conditions necessary to end conflict and no longer to simply observe and monitor peace agreements after conflicts had ended. In another example of this changed context, the Security Council recommended the admission of more new states as members of the United Nations between 1990 and 1992 than in the previous fifteen years; and nearly three-quarters were the result of the breakup of states.2 This represented the greatest spike in UN membership since the period of decolonization in the 1960s. In short, the UNSC faced a changing international context characterized by civil wars, gross human rights violations, and mass death, which demanded new and innovative responses at the very moment it had started to fulfill its original purpose—to maintain international peace between states.
The crisis in Somalia had to compete for Security Council attention with other internal crises on the council’s agenda, including Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, El Salvador, Liberia, Rwanda, and South Africa. In the competition for attention, some Security Council members and many African states complained that Somalia received scant attention and disproportionately fewer UN resources than the crisis in Bosnia. Indeed, the council met more than one hundred times to discuss the situation in Bosnia compared to less than twenty to discuss Somalia between 1992 and 1995. Nonetheless, humanitarian intervention happened in Somalia more than two years before the serious use of military force to defend Bosnian Muslims occurred in Bosnia. For reasons explained in this chapter, Security Council members decided that a robust military response to the Somalia crisis would demonstrate the international community’s resolve to respond to new post–Cold War security threats. The decision to authorize the use of military force under Chapter VII of the UN Charter was different from preceding UNSC justifications for the use of force, resulted in the enhanced legitimacy of human rights norms, and led to the emergence of a new Security Council practice—humanitarian intervention.3 The case of Somalia marked an important advance in the emerging idea that the international community in general, and the Security Council in particular, had a responsibility to respond to humanitarian crises caused by conflict in order to end human suffering. At the same time, it raised questions about the UN’s ability to do so effectively, with serious implications for subsequent cases.
Humanitarian intervention became possible because Security Council members were united around a causal story about the cause and character of the conflict and because Somalia was essentially deemed a failed state. The absence of a legitimate sovereign authority eliminated potential tensions between protecting humanitarian values including human rights, intervening militarily into a domestic humanitarian crisis, and protecting state sovereignty. Initially, members were divided between an inadvertent story about civil war and a complex story that also included armed banditry, gang violence, and interclan fighting. The Chapter VII authorization in December 1992 coincided with the complex story, in large part because of the absence of a legitimate state structure, the Security Council was forced to choose between responding to the humanitarian crisis or letting it continue unabated. The latter seemed like an impossible and unnecessary choice fresh off the victory in Iraq. Nonetheless, once military forces were on the ground and the UN became the target of hostilities, the causal story held by the council changed to an intentional story in June 1993. The use of enforcement action broadened and became more aggressive with the adoption of an intentional story in which specific clan factions were identified as perpetrators of gross human rights violations leveled against both Somali civilians and UN personnel.
During formal meetings, Security Council members debated whether or not its actions in Somalia should constitute a precedent for future council action. The council was divided between members who specifically sought to use the Somalia case to set new standards of response for the council and to serve as a warning to perpetrators in other places and those who emphasized that the conditions in Somalia were sui generis, warranting an exceptional and non-precedent-setting Security Council response. As later chapters illustrate, the Security Council response in Somalia did become a precedent, often cited by members in meetings on other conflicts. Yet it was exactly because the characteristics of the Somalia crisis were sufficiently different from other internal conflicts, namely that it lacked a legitimate government, that the UNSC was able to undertake early forcible military action there in defense of humanitarian principles when it was not prepared to elsewhere in the early 1990s.
The Somalia intervention, its successes and failures, helped to delineate the conditions under which the emerging practice of humanitarian intervention would and would not become possible in future conflicts. The most prominent of these factors include the importance of widespread agreement among council members on the causal story, and after Somalia around an intentional story and the degree to which new ideas about humanitarian intervention brought human rights norms into conflict with highly internalized norms of state sovereignty. The sequencing of Security Council decisions is also important with regard to humanitarian intervention. In the early stages of norm emergence, the factors required to trigger the application of a new norm against prevailing path-dependent behavior may be more numerous and significant than the conditions that are necessary when the norm has become more developed. As Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink write, “new norms never enter a normative vacuum but instead emerge in a highly contested normative space where they must compete with other norms and perceptions of interest.”4 When norm entrepreneurs seek to promote a new norm, they must do so within the standards of appropriateness already created by existing norms, even when those standards are exactly the behavior that is being contested.5 In Somalia, humanitarian intervention was possible because of Security Council unity and because the exercise of human rights norms and the emerging practice of humanitarian intervention did not significantly challenge existing sovereignty norms.
The Humanitarian Crisis in Somalia
The people of Somalia share the same ethnicity, language, religion, and culture but are distinguished by clan affiliation—that is, by their lineage and family custom. Clan and subclan loyalties are important to Somali identity and politics and have fostered a culture of decentralization.6 Their manipulation by power-seeking leaders has been a source of political and social instability since Somali independence in 1960. Initially, Major General Mohammed Siad Barre, who seized power in a 1969 coup, sought to erode the clan system and replace it with a form of “scientific socialism,” but he ultimately relied on clan loyalty to maintain his personal power.7 Three clans of the Darod clan-family—his own, his mother’s, and his son-in-law’s—largely controlled the Somali state, which exacerbated interclan tensions. Barre’s military support for Ogadeni revolutionary forces inside neighboring Ethiopia in 1977 and their crushing defeat caused an upsurge in interclan tensions as Ogadeni refugees crossed into Somalia and occupied Isaq pastoral lands.8 Barre survived a coup attempt the following year and tightened his grip on power but opposition to his rule continued to grow among disaffected clans, including the organized Isaq and Hawiye.9 Barre stayed in power by using divide-and-rule tactics internally and by externally supporting insurgent groups fighting in neighboring Ethiopia. In January 1991 the twenty-one-year dictatorship of Barre ended when he was forced from office by a Hawiye rebel group, the United Somali Congress (USC). By the time Barre was removed from power, the entire country was awash in small arms. Barre had maintained his rule by manipulating clan loyalties and fostering rivalries among them, then arming them to fight one another. He had outlawed opposition parties, suppressed civil society, and destroyed all independent institutions.10 Thus his removal created a political vacuum in which competing rebel groups and their factions vied for political control throughout the country. After 1991, Somalia was a state without a legitimate sovereign authority. The USC, which had removed Barre and controlled the capital city Mogadishu, splintered into two rival factions, one headed by Ali Mahdi Mohamed, a wealthy Somali businessman who declared himself the interim president of Somalia, and the second headed by General Mohamed Farah Aideed, the main military commander of the USC and Mahdi’s competitor for political power. By mid-November, full-scale war between the two factions of the USC
