however, the revocation or temporary suspension of sovereignty has been justified on the basis of violations of fundamental human rights and international humanitarian law. Indeed the current and past three secretaries-general of the United Nations—Ban Ki-Moon (2007–present), Kofi Annan (1997–2006), Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992–1996), and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (1982–1991)—have all recognized that “the evolution of international human rights standards and support for their implementation has now reached the stage where norms of non-intervention, and the related deference to sovereignty rights, no longer apply to the same extent in the face of severe human rights or humanitarian abuses.”28 This contradicts the practice throughout much of the UN’s history, during which it regarded the state’s treatment of its own population to be within the domestic jurisdiction of states. The balance between these two normative values has shifted in response to several factors at the end of the twentieth century, including the end of the Cold War, an increase in intrastate conflict and a dramatic rise in mass atrocity crimes, the growth of the human rights movement and the growing legitimacy of human rights norms, and revolutions in information technology including the emergence of the twenty-four-hour news media and internet communications.29 The chapters that follow illustrate how sovereignty norms and human rights norms are mutually constituted and coevolving at the United Nations and trace that process across two decades of decisions.
As international human rights norms become increasingly legitimate and widespread, gross violations of human rights have been defined as threats to international peace and security; and militarily stopping ethnic cleansing has become legitimate. In cases of armed conflict characterized by mass atrocity, these two core norms have the potential to come into conflict with one another: the protection of state sovereignty and the protection of international human rights. When human rights violations are defined as a threat to international peace and security, Security Council members may face competing normative claims. Protecting state sovereignty has traditionally demanded a policy of nonintervention in domestic affairs; whereas, protecting human rights norms introduces the possibility of the use of military force to stop violence occurring within the borders of sovereign states. Unless these two sets of norms can be conceptually reconciled, council members must act in a complex normative environment characterized by multiple and often competing normative claims about the appropriate response to mass violence.30
The perceived inability of the UNSC to appropriately respond to this ethical dilemma prompted Secretary-General Kofi Annan to demand that the UN reconsider how it responds to the political, human rights, and humanitarian crises affecting much of the world. Annan’s 1999 annual report to the General Assembly was largely motivated by the twin failures of Rwanda and Kosovo. In 1994, the UNSC failed to protect the Tutsi population during the Rwandan genocide and in 1999 NATO intervened militarily to protect Kosovo’s Albanian population from ethnic cleansing without the required Security Council authorization. Annan challenged the UN “to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights—wherever they may take place—should not be allowed to stand.”31 He argued that two concepts of sovereignty were developing at the UN: state sovereignty and individual sovereignty: “State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined by the forces of globalization and international cooperation. The State is now widely understood to be the servant of its people, and not vice versa. At the same time, individual sovereignty—and by this I mean the human rights and fundamental freedoms of each and every individual as enshrined in our Charter—has been enhanced by a renewed consciousness of the right of every individual to control his or her own destiny.”32 Annan recognized that these parallel developments did not provide easy interpretation but that the answers could be found in the Charter. The failures to reconcile sovereignty and human rights were not caused by deficiencies in the Charter, he reasoned, but by the difficulties its members had in applying its core principles to a new era in which traditional notions of sovereignty “did not do justice to the aspirations of people to attain their fundamental freedoms.”33 Sovereignty and human rights were often in tension throughout the 1990s, as they had been traditionally, but Annan suggested that conceptually they did not need to be.
In 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) released a groundbreaking report, The Responsibility to Protect, in direct response to the secretary-general’s challenge. At its core, the responsibility to protect embodies the idea that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from catastrophic harm and violations of fundamental human rights but that when they are unable or unwilling to do so, the international community must share in the fulfillment of that responsibility.34 Sovereignty, when conceived as responsibility, incorporates a minimal conception of human rights, easing the tension between the two norms in the worst circumstances—large-scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing caused by state commission or omission.35 Responsibility to protect seeks to create normative coherence between sovereignty norms and human rights norms by conceptualizing the former to incorporate the latter. The cases in this book, however, illustrate that throughout the 1990s, the UNSC largely conceived of sovereignty and human rights in opposition. Humanitarian intervention by the Security Council generally occurred where the perceived tension between sovereignty norms and human rights norms could be eliminated—in cases where the perpetrators of mass atrocity were nonstate actors or state actors without recognized sovereignty. In cases where the perpetrators were sovereign state members of the UN—as in Rwanda and Kosovo—humanitarian intervention by the Security Council was not forthcoming.
In 2005, a limited version of the responsibility-to-protect principle was officially endorsed by the membership of the UN in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome document. These paragraphs affirm that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.36 They also affirm that the international community, acting through the UN, has a responsibility “to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter” in responding to these same crimes. Only when these measures fail and state authorities “manifestly fail to protect their populations” will the UNSC consider collective action under Chapter VII on a “case by case basis.”37 Later the responsibility to protect was reaffirmed by the Security Council in a series of thematic and case-specific resolutions. Despite these and subsequent affirmations of responsibility to protect both in formal documents and the public discourse of the council, in practice, perceived conflict between sovereignty norms and human rights norms continued to bar humanitarian intervention until March 2011. It was groundbreaking when the UNSC authorized the use of “all necessary measures” under Chapter VII to protect civilians and civilian protected areas in Libya, marking the first time that it authorized humanitarian intervention against a state perpetrator, and justifying it using responsibility-to-protect language.
Evolving Norms and Changing Practices in International Relations
While norms of sovereignty and human rights have been a central concern of the UN since its founding, their conceptual meaning has changed over time. Social constructivists argue that norms—standards of appropriate behavior for an actor with a given identity—are derived from shared moral, causal, or factual belief.38 Norms are both regulative and constitutive because they restrain and enable actors while also shaping their identities and interests. Norms, then, are not simply given. They must be actively created, diffused, and internalized, and they evolve over time, sometimes strengthening and sometimes weakening. Persuasion or norm advocacy by norm entrepreneurs is central to the effective emergence of new norms or alterations in an existing norm’s meaning. Successful new norms are typically legitimized by proponents’ peers, receive the support of prominent states, and are adjacent or linked to existing norms; this link to existing norms has to be actively constructed by proponents.39 Social constructivists argue that humanitarian intervention has become possible as human rights norms have become increasingly legitimate and widely held beliefs in international society.40 In short, the legitimacy of human rights creates a permissive normative environment for the practice of humanitarian intervention. The emergence of new ideas about humanitarian intervention,
