I chose to examine the three cases of Security Council humanitarian intervention from the set above—Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Somalia—and an equal number of cases from this set where the Security Council might have been expected to use humanitarian intervention but did not—Rwanda, Kosovo (Yugoslavia), and Darfur (Sudan).52 The conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda occurred simultaneously, and the practice of UNSC-authorized humanitarian intervention first emerged during this period (1991–95). The conflicts in Kosovo (Yugoslavia), Sierra Leone, and Darfur (Sudan) occurred in a later period (1996–2010)—a period marked by significant debate over whether the Security Council had a responsibility to stop ethnic cleansing.
These cases had useful attributes for both initial theory building and subsequent theory testing.53 The cases were characterized by human rights abuses of relatively equal severity across similar time frames but had different humanitarian intervention outcomes. Process tracing and discourse analysis revealed that these cases had significant variation in terms of characterization of the conflict by the UNSC and the source of sovereign authority in a target state. The cases of Bosnia and Darfur provided significant within-case variation over time. Most of the cases have intrinsic importance to the study of humanitarian intervention, including Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. All of the cases are data-rich and there is an abundance of primary documentation and secondary source literature for each. The cases also resemble current situations of policy concern, allowing for ease of testing these findings across an even broader set of cases. Finally, because of the severity of the human rights violations involved in Rwanda and Darfur and their geographic location in Africa, explaining the absence of Security Council humanitarian intervention in these particular cases creates a hard test for a theory of norm change and potential support for an alternative explanation of state interest.
In addition to the six cases drawn from the data set above, my study begins with an examination of the situation in Iraq (1991–92) and ends by testing my findings in the most recent case of humanitarian intervention as of this writing—in Libya (2011). First, the case of Iraq is groundbreaking for a study of Security Council humanitarian intervention. Resolution 688 defined the effects of the Iraqi regime’s human rights violations as a threat to international peace and security and was the first Security Council resolution that referenced human rights concerns in relation to Chapter VII, paving the way for eventual use of military force in defense of an internal humanitarian crisis with cross-border effects. Second, in 2011, the UNSC engaged in an unprecedented humanitarian intervention in Libya—the first in over a decade—discrediting the argument that humanitarian intervention during the 1990s was a temporary deviation in Council practice. Libya provides a useful test case for the theory advanced in this book: that Security Council discourse about the character of conflict and sovereign authority in target states creates and forecloses opportunities for humanitarian intervention. Importantly, the level of violence that preceded the humanitarian intervention in Libya was far lower than in the other cases of this study, which suggests a potential widening of the prospective cases of future humanitarian intervention.
The Role of Argument and Storytelling in the Security Council
Arguing, scholars have shown, has an impact on the practice of world politics, and the UNSC is a realm of political argumentation.54 Indeed the UNSC is the primary venue in international politics where authoritative decisions are made about what events constitute threats to international peace and security, the legitimate source of sovereign authority, and the purpose of military force. Because the Security Council is a political institution, the application of Charter principles is mediated by politics. The UNSC is a forum of “heated and unsystematic, but often principled debate about appropriate standards of international behavior and the extent and limits of the council’s authority to regulate that behavior.”55 The Security Council is also a quasi-legal institution with dense patterns of interactions—its decisions are binding on member states and it is vested with the authority to judge the legality of the use of military force in international affairs. Because it gains its authority through the legitimacy conferred on it by other UN members, the arguments and justifications that council members make about the topics on their agendas, particularly the use of force, not only are significant but also relate to particular international norms.56 Consequently, some arguments are more acceptable and credible than others during council debates. To be legitimate and persuasive, Security Council members and others appearing before the council frame their arguments according to the legal norms enshrined in the Charter of the UN or according to widely shared international moral norms. Arguments that appear prejudiced—generated purely by self-interest—are viewed skeptically and are often disqualified by other actors. These limitations on appropriate discourse impose some constraint on UNSC action: members will incur reputational costs if they act without a defensible position or advance arguments that do not reasonably justify their conduct in relationship to legal or moral norms.57
Members of the Security Council struggle over the power to define norms. Control over the interpretation of the norms and principles of the Charter, in particular, is markedly important. Thus, the effective framing of issues is essential.58 Framing involves creating a template that identifies a problem and offers a solution to it. An attractively framed argument viewed as legitimate by other members of the Security Council is more likely to be persuasive and gain necessary widespread support. Emotional appeals and narratives are just as important and sometimes more compelling than appeals to logic. Narratives identify some facts as more important than others. The influence of the agent advancing the narrative matters but so do the perceptions of those states that the narrative is directed toward.59 The discursive representation of conflicts and related human rights violations by Security Council members has the potential to create and foreclose opportunities for humanitarian intervention: “…. Discourses are understood to work to define and to enable, and also to silence and exclude, for example by limiting and restricting authorities to some groups, but not others, endorsing a certain common sense, but making other modes of categorizing and judging meaningless, impractical, inadequate or otherwise disqualified.”60 Classifying mass killing into categories like ethnic cleansing or genocide may make certain courses of action (such as humanitarian intervention) more possible than others like human rights abuses, civil war, or ethnic conflict.61 Early decisions in the naming and framing of conflicts may determine the range of possible policy outcomes.62 Yet actors cannot simply choose frames or stories—they are limited by existing legal and political norms; and their stories must resonate with their target audience in order to be persuasive.
When Security Council members face competing normative demands, like the tension between sovereignty and human rights, they argue about the cause of conflicts, the character of violence, sovereign authority in the target state, and how to interpret relevant norms. For this reason, I pay attention to the ways that council members justify their positions on the potential use of military force. In research for this study, I examined the public documents produced by the UNSC for each of my case studies. This includes transcripts of formal meetings, resolutions, presidential statements, and formal mission reports. The UNSC makes its decisions in formal meetings that are on the public record, but much of the actual decision making takes place in “informal consultations” that are off the record and held behind closed doors.63 In many cases, individual Security