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 expected but did not occur illustrates otherwise obscured patterns of intervention behavior. The comparison of “cases” and “noncases” of humanitarian intervention also helps to identify or challenge interpretations of Security Council behavior.
To create a data set of cases of expected humanitarian intervention, I used the Political Terror Scale—a yearly report that measures physical integrity rights violations (murder, disappearance, and torture) by states against their domestic populations.49 The scale measures levels of political terror and violence in a particular year using a five-point ranking. The most severe score is a level 5, which denotes one of two situations: (1) a situation of political terror where murders, disappearances, and torture are a common part of life for the whole population and where leaders place no limits on the means or thoroughness with which they pursue their personal or ideological goals; or (2) a level of widespread terror so great that although it is only aimed at certain segments of the population it still constitutes a level 5 ranking.50 The scale’s coders draw data from the annual country reports of Amnesty International and the U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. I draw my data only from the scale’s codes for Amnesty International reports to protect the integrity of the data from conflict of interest, because the United States is a permanent member of the Security Council.
Compiling the data on all the states