territories, as well as absolute power to maintain order within their realms and to protect the state from external forces. Deemed above the law, sovereigns were exempt from moral scrutiny. From 1648 until the end of World War II, the sovereignty of the nation-state was defined in such a way that internal conflicts and their consequences were considered domestic matters outside the purview of the international community. However, another seventeenth-century principle of international law eventually established a framework for a more expansive understanding of national sovereignty. The notion that a state and its citizenry are bound by a social contract that carries reciprocal rights and responsibilities gradually superseded the view that sovereigns are beyond moral scrutiny. If the social contract requires citizens to relinquish some of their liberties in exchange for state protection, then the state bears a responsibility to ensure its citizens’ welfare by protecting their rights and liberties and maintaining peace and security within state borders.
The mass exterminations of European Jews and other populations during World War II challenged the principles of international law that had allowed such crimes to occur, and the impunity of national leaders was called into question. The Nuremberg trials (1945–49), which held key individuals in Nazi Germany’s political, economic, and military establishment accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity, led to increased scrutiny of national leaders. The postwar order witnessed an expansion of democratic values and institutions. Universal principles of human rights were enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights, comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966). In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), which required member nations “to prevent and to punish” genocide wherever and whenever it is found.3 Emergent human rights and humanitarian movements gave primacy to individual over states’ rights and emphasized the protection of minorities and other vulnerable members of society. National laws were no longer off limits to international investigation. Subject peoples in Europe’s African and Asian empires embraced universal human rights claims and demanded equal treatment under the law and national self-determination. In the 1950s and 1960s, their efforts culminated in widespread decolonization.
The establishment of the United Nations in 1945 further undermined the seventeenth-century notion that state sovereignty is absolute. Like the post–World War I League of Nations, the UN was founded to promote international peace and security. However, the UN’s mission, which was uniquely premised on respect for universal human rights and freedoms, led to a supplementary mandate. The UN was also charged with promoting “the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”4 Aware that conflicts were frequently rooted in material deprivation and in unequal distribution of power and resources, political and human rights leaders argued that the maintenance of international peace and security required governments to use their capacities to benefit all their citizens and that states should be held accountable for the protection of basic human rights within their borders.
The end of the Cold War brought additional challenges to the state sovereignty principle. The Soviet Union had disintegrated, and the United States and other Western powers no longer felt the same need for strongmen to protect their interests. Newly critical of their clients’ corrupt practices and human rights abuses, they withdrew their support from longstanding dictators and called for accountability in governance. These momentous political shifts provided opportunities for new ways of thinking, and a cadre of public intellectuals in the Global North and South began to argue for a fundamental reconceptualization of the premises of state sovereignty, one that harkened back to the social contract that sometimes had confounded sovereigns’ ability to wield their power with impunity. These thinkers charged that to legitimately claim sovereignty, a state must provide basic conditions for the well-being of its citizenry, including not only peace, security, and order, but also adequate food, clean water, clothing, shelter, health care, education, and employment. In some polities, dominant groups target populations who differ in race, ethnicity, or religion from those in power. In some cases, the state not only fails to protect vulnerable populations from gross human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, but is also complicit in perpetrating those crimes. According to the new paradigm, a state that is unable or unwilling to fulfill its foundational responsibilities forfeits the right to sovereignty over its territory and people—and its exemption from outside interference.
It was in this new context that the UN moved toward a broader definition of international responsibility for the protection of human rights. In June 1993, governmental and nongovernmental representatives from 171 nations met in Vienna at the UN-sponsored World Conference on Human Rights, where they endorsed the claim that “All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. . . . While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”5 In theory, a state’s failure to protect its citizens could warrant UN intervention.
After the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the splintering of states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and challenges to other states elsewhere produced millions of refugees and spawned untold numbers of armed insurgents who crossed borders and fomented instability. Because the UN’s purpose is to “maintain international peace and security,” and because massive human rights violations have ripple effects that affect entire regions, rectifying such wrongs increasingly was understood to be within the UN’s purview.6 However, UN actions did not keep pace with the expanded understanding of the organization’s jurisdiction. Prioritizing their own domestic and foreign policy agendas, permanent members of the Security Council opposed measures that might have thwarted the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur region in 2003–4. Continued pressure from nongovernmental organizations and human rights activists pushed the UN General Assembly to pass the 2005 R2P resolution, which allowed the international community to intervene if governments did not protect their citizens from gross human rights violations.7 Supported by 150 countries, the R2P resolution upended an understanding of state sovereignty that had been one of the fundamental tenets of international law since the seventeenth century. In theory, deference to “state sovereignty” no longer could be used as an expedient to allow ethnic cleansing, genocide, or other crimes against humanity to proceed unhindered.
Once again, the reality was far more complicated. New principles of international intervention had been endorsed, but enforcement remained problematic. Governments were reluctant to set precedents that might be used against them in the future, and powerful members of the Security Council rarely committed the resources or personnel necessary to implement the R2P resolution. If a culpable state opposed external involvement, outside powers ordinarily persisted only if their own interests were at stake. Action was likely solely in the case of weak states or those without powerful allies on the Security Council—that is, in states that could not effectively challenge foreign intervention.
As calls for multilateral diplomacy evolved into appeals for military intervention under the mantle of responsibility to protect, there was sharp disagreement over the motives of those intervening, the means they employed, and the nature of the outcomes, that is, whether intervention provided protection for civilians or only increased their insecurity. Some governments reacted to international scrutiny by invoking the old principle of national sovereignty. Others charged that international human rights laws were based on Western capitalist norms that give primacy to the rights of individuals over those of society and thus were not applicable to their cultures or conditions. They argued that Western claims regarding the universality of their human rights definitions were yet another example of cultural imperialism and neocolonialism. Still others claimed that humanitarian intervention was simply a guise for Western powers’ pursuit of their own economic or strategic objectives, and they warned that Western countries were attempting to recolonize the Global South. In countries and regions affected by conflict, governments and citizens were divided on the merits of outside
