sovereignty norms. Instead, ideas about human rights exist alongside sovereignty and nonintervention norms within the culture of the UN. Thus, decisions by the UNSC shape how both human rights norms and sovereignty norms are interpreted and applied over time.41
In contrast, rationalist approaches to international relations understand norms to be primarily regulative.42 These approaches posit that norms constrain or order behavior but do not shape actors and their identities. Norms, then, reflect rather than create national interests and are often conceived as reflecting the values and interests of powerful states that are then imposed on weaker states. In the realm of the United Nations, this suggests that UNSC decisions about humanitarian intervention reflect the combined total of individual members’ national interests and level of power more than any particular commitment to new norms of human rights. Rationalist scholars argue that humanitarian intervention is explained by the material interests of the five permanent members, the most powerful ones, who only engage in humanitarian intervention when their national interests are at stake. According to this approach, humanitarian intervention is a guise that provides ideological cover for otherwise nonhumanitarian motives.43
Though this approach is appealing for its simplicity and intuitiveness, when a strictly rationalist approach is applied on a case-by-case basis to conflicts characterized by mass atrocity, claims of purely material motivations for humanitarian intervention are not convincing. Material selfinterests, national security concerns, and geopolitical calculations seem to figure prominently in situations where Security Council humanitarian intervention has been absent but are largely lacking in situations where humanitarian intervention has occurred. Rationalist approaches partially explain cases where humanitarian intervention is absent, as in Rwanda and Darfur. For, example, lack of national and material interests in Rwanda by most powerful members of the Security Council resulted in a marginal and contingent commitment to the UN peacekeeping mission there. In contrast, France as a political and military ally of the perpetrator government had significant interests in the political outcome of UN involvement in Rwanda and intervened both in decision making and in the field in ways that benefited French national interests (see Chapter 5). In another example, China often shielded Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and his regime (and simultaneously Chinese oil interests) during council meetings on the situation in Darfur (see Chapter 7). Nonetheless, the influence of human rights norms was also present in both of these cases, as evidenced by the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal to prosecute perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda and the referral of the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Rationalist approaches with their emphasis on material power and interests cannot explain why powerful states would undertake elective military intervention at all. Humanitarian intervention is costly to intervening states, which typically pay a high cost in blood and treasure and become bound to some form of international administration for security protection indefinitely. This is why Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape consider humanitarian intervention “a costly international moral action—one that advances moral principle rather than selfish interest.”44 There is little tangible material benefit for humanitarian interventions in places like Somalia and Sierra Leone. So while Western powers lacked security interests in Rwanda and Darfur (where they did not intervene), they also lacked security interests in Somalia and Sierra Leone (where they did intervene). Even when humanitarian intervention occurs in places within the regional security interests of powerful permanent Security Council members as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, national security interest is not a compelling explanation. For example, while Bosnia was largely considered to be in the Western sphere of influence and the war there was considered a regional security threat, western European states were initially reluctant to intervene. Instead, non-Western states were the strongest and most consistent advocates for humanitarian intervention in Bosnia during Security Council meetings, and support for intervention was widespread throughout the international community (see Chapter 4).
These brief examples challenge the idea that humanitarian intervention is a tool used by the strong against the weak for selfish purposes. They preview what the chapters of this study show: material explanations of humanitarian intervention behavior, while important, are incomplete. Interests and material power matter to Security Council decision making, but interests are shaped by normative values, and power takes many forms—the power of ideas, the power to define norms, and the ability to tell a convincing story are just as important for shaping outcomes in Security Council decision making as material power. The emergence of human rights ideas in the UNSC demonstrates the power of ideas to reshape understandings of national interests and international security interests.45 The cases in this study bear this out—principled ideas and normative values shape UNSC decision making and are just as influential as power or interests. Yet little scholarly literature in international relations takes seriously the influence of norms in places of hard power like the United Nations Security Council or illustrates how discourse in international relations has real explanatory power. This book does so by surveying the major UN humanitarian interventions—both successes and failures—in order to show how discourse creates the conditions for military action in defense of human rights.
This book takes a decidedly social constructivist approach to the question of humanitarian intervention, one that focuses on the mutual constitution and coevolution of human rights norms and sovereignty norms. While attentive to the material interests of Security Council members and how they influence decisions, this study draws attention to the interaction of norms, interests, and power–and not competition between them, as is common in much international relations scholarship. The cases that follow illustrate how Security Council discourse creates and forecloses opportunities for humanitarian intervention in cases of armed conflict characterized by mass atrocity crimes. They also show how Security Council members struggle to reconcile sovereignty norms and human rights norms in the context of specific conflicts. My analysis demonstrates that human rights are increasingly linked to international peace and security and that normative ideas about human rights, sovereign authority, and state responsibilities to their populations shape council decision making about humanitarian intervention as much as material and geostrategic considerations. Thus, I also illustrate the ways that norms and interests interact and are mutually constituted throughout the debates that accompany each case.
Researching Humanitarian Intervention
A project of this character—one that seeks to generalize and explain how Security Council discourse creates the possibility of humanitarian intervention—is fraught with challenge. Political by design, the UNSC examines the question of humanitarian intervention on a case-by-case basis. The council maintains a strong resistance to standard-setting requirements and intends to avoid creating precedent or developing discernible patterns in behavior.46 In fact, political contingency is central to how the UNSC was designed to function. Thus, faced with tensions between legal and moral principles, as in situations of conflict characterized by mass atrocity crimes, political considerations ought to and often do weigh heavily on members of the Security Council when they are making decisions about humanitarian intervention.47 This project is attentive to the political contingency in each case of examination, yet specifically draws attention to important but overlooked patterns in discourse that map onto Security Council humanitarian intervention behavior. The project builds theory to explain how UNSC humanitarian intervention becomes possible in some cases of mass atrocity but not others, given a permissive normative environment.
I define humanitarian intervention as the use of military force by a group of states inside a sovereign state without the formal consent of its authorities for the purpose of preventing, halting, or punishing widespread and gross violations of the fundamental human rights of individuals.48 For the purposes of theory building, I selected my cases with variation in humanitarian intervention outcomes. Examining armed conflicts where UNSC humanitarian intervention has happened alongside similar situations where it might have been
