International Security: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (7 page)

Most significant, however, is the use of military force to enforce UNSC resolutions. Since the end of the Cold War the UNSC has, among others, authorized the use of military force in Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Rwanda, Libya,
and Mali. Such operations have coincided with the UNSC’s greater willingness to broaden its understanding of what constitutes a threat to international peace and security. Instead of emphasizing inter-state conflicts the UN increasingly feels compelled to respond to the challenges posed by failed states and the outbreak of various intra-state conflicts that have afflicted various parts of the world since the early 1990s. As highlighted in
Chapter 5
, such conflicts frequently involve diverse groups of participants, some of whom may have little desire to end the violence and who are therefore unlikely to be interested in providing consent for the presence of UN peacekeepers. However, irrespective of their specific nature, in general it is because such conflicts have the potential to spill across borders (rather than their humanitarian costs, for example) that has put them on the UNSC’s agenda as representing possible threats to international peace and security requiring action.

Several things are worth noting about peace enforcement missions. First, since peace enforcement entails taking sides through identifying an aggressor and guilty party, it not only challenges the UN’s traditional emphasis on impartiality, but is potentially more divisive. Unlike peacekeeping operations, which are generally uncontroversial given their foundation on gaining the respective parties’ consent, peace enforcement operations can easily raise political sensitivities within the UNSC over when the UN should be prepared to use force and for what cause. This is particularly so when the UNSC is divided due to different historical, geographic, or strategic ties in relation to particular conflicts. Despite this, though, the UN appears to be increasingly willing to support missions designed to preserve and spread liberal democratic forms of governance, as demonstrated, for example, in its support for interventions in Haiti and Sierra Leone in the 1990s in response to
coups d’état
initiated against democratically elected governments. In these cases the challenge to democracy was presented as threatening international peace and security. Indeed, the UN’s post-conflict peacebuilding
operations, which seek to stabilize countries to stop them slipping back into war, are also increasingly premised on promoting liberal democratic understandings of socio-economic development and good governance. While this reflects the influence of liberal democratic peace theory discussed in
Chapter 3
, for critics it also infringes established norms of sovereignty suggesting that the internal composition and organization of states should be for the state alone and not subject to international interference. Thus, while traditionally the UN limited its understanding of threats to international peace and security to violent conflicts between states, increasingly the suggestion is that such threats might also result from violent conflict and illiberal governance within them.

Finally, it is important to note that while the UN undertakes many peacekeeping missions itself, when it comes to peace enforcement it often prefers to authorize regional organizations, coalitions of the willing, and sometimes even individual states, to undertake such operations on its behalf. For instance, UN-authorized enforcement operations have been undertaken by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union, and NATO, while the 1991 war against Iraq was composed of a UN-authorized US-led multinational coalition. There are various logistical benefits from delegating out peace operations in this way. For instance, regional actors can often mobilize more quickly than the UN, which lacks standing forces and has to put contingents together on a case by case basis through time-consuming processes of seeking contributions from member states. Delegation can also reduce the problems of the UN being overwhelmed by missions and spreading itself too thinly, while it is also assumed that regional actors may be better placed to respond most effectively in their own neighbourhoods. However, outside the West regional organizations often lack sufficient capabilities, while there are also concerns that delegation can reinforce the position and interests of regional hegemons. Moreover, while the UN envisions a hierarchical relationship between itself and regional actors, regional actors have occasionally openly challenged the UN’s
authority and primacy. For example, owing to Russian and Chinese opposition within the UNSC, NATO’s peace enforcement operation in Kosovo in 1999, to help prevent humanitarian abuses being undertaken against Kosovan Albanians in the context of a struggle for Kosovan independence from Serbia, took place without an explicit UN mandate. In justifying NATO’s action, however, the then US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, suggested that given its democratic credentials NATO decisions on the use of force were more legitimate than those of the UNSC with its more mixed membership.

NATO’s operation in Kosovo is important in marking something of a turning point on debates concerning the grounds upon which the international community might legitimately intervene in other states’ affairs. Until this point, intervention and enforcement actions had usually been justified on grounds of preventing conflicts spilling over and impacting on international peace and security more broadly. With its intervention in Kosovo, however, NATO proclaimed ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses as themselves sufficient grounds for action. In this respect, NATO’s action in Kosovo needs to be seen in the context of the international community’s failure to respond effectively to both the Rwandan genocide and the widespread ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities endemic to the wars accompanying Yugoslavia’s break-up in the early 1990s. In the face of such morally repugnant actions the international community’s failure to respond effectively was felt as shameful by many and raised the question of the relative value attached to principles of sovereignty and non-intervention compared with those of human rights.

As noted, the UN Charter has traditionally been understood as prioritizing principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention. Such principles have a moral foundation premised on upholding
respect for different cultures, religions, and political and economic systems and are intended to thwart any imperial ambitions of territorial aggrandizement particular states might be harbouring. However, the Charter’s Preamble also includes a commitment ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person’. The question therefore arises as to what the UN should do in situations, as in Rwanda or Kosovo, when principles of non-intervention and human rights appear to conflict.

Although the Charter includes no mention of rights of humanitarian intervention, throughout the 1990s the question was increasingly being asked whether states, either unable to protect their citizens’ human rights or directly infringing them, might lose their rights to sovereignty. In Kosovo NATO decided the Serbian government had. Indeed, from within the UN Secretariat a rethinking of the nature of sovereignty had already begun, led by Francis Deng, the UN Secretary-General’s representative on internally displaced persons. In an influential book published in 1996 Deng argued that understandings of sovereignty should be broadened. Alongside the traditional emphasis on the possession of a territory, people to govern, and authority over those people, sovereignty should also be understood as including a responsibility to protect minimal standards of human rights, a responsibility for which governments could be held accountable by their citizens, but also by the international community. The suggestion was that states should only be allowed to claim the benefits of sovereignty(i.e. non-intervention) if this responsibility was being discharged. Failure to do so, however, would legitimize international intervention. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1999, ‘if we allow the United Nations to become the refuge of [the] ethnic cleanser or mass murderer, we will betray the very ideals that inspired the founding of the United Nations’.

The case supporting international interventions on humanitarian grounds was further developed by the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) on
The Responsibility to Protect
(popularly shortened to R2P). Sponsored by the Canadian government the R2P report shifted the emphasis from the international community having a ‘right’, to it having a ‘duty’ to intervene in situations when states were failing to protect human rights. Two things were particularly important about the report.

First, alongside a ‘responsibility to react’ to mass atrocities through the use of enforcement mechanisms, it also outlined a ‘responsibility to prevent’ and a ‘responsibility to rebuild’, indicating that the international community had significant responsibilities to stop humanitarian abuses in the first place and to prevent them from recurring through post-conflict rebuilding programmes. Prevention, for example, might include the promotion of good governance and attempts to properly regulate the arms trade.

Second, however, were debates sparked by the various thresholds the ICISS report outlined for legitimizing intervention in the first place. The general suggestion that intervention would be justified in situations of large-scale loss of life resulting from things like genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity was accepted. Controversial, however, was determining when such criteria had been reached. What, for example, constitutes large-scale loss of life and who decides? Indeed, one reason China and Russia vetoed a UN mandated intervention in Kosovo was because they did not think the situation was as dire as NATO claimed. Another was because in their view the point of last resort for using force (another of the ICISS criteria) had not been reached and alternative diplomatic avenues remained to be explored. NATO’s action in Kosovo and the ICISS report therefore raised the question of who has the legitimate right to make such decisions. Both NATO and the ICISS report suggested that, while
ideally it should be the UNSC, if the UNSC failed to act then this authority might be devolved to other actors—regional organizations, coalitions of the willing, and perhaps even individual states. For critics the report therefore created the possibility that states could arbitrarily invoke the R2P to pursue ulterior agendas. This was a specific concern of the post-colonial states with good historical grounds to be wary of the proclaimed humanitarian intentions of former colonial powers. However, it is notable that Russia also viewed NATO’s operation in Kosovo in similar terms, as a mechanism by which NATO might be able to expand into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.

Following much negotiation a heavily revised version of the R2P was endorsed at the 2005 World Summit. Important revisions included the omission of explicit reference to responsibilities to prevent, react, and rebuild, with an emphasis instead placed on helping states meet their human rights commitments, for instance, through providing early warning of impending situations, offering incentives to encourage reconciliation between conflicting parties, and providing assistance in areas of economic development and political reform. Most notably, authority for determining thresholds and launching an intervention was firmly placed within the UNSC’s remit.

Disagreements regarding the R2P, however, remain. Its most notable invocation since its adoption by the World Summit was in early 2011 when it was invoked by the UNSC in authorizing a NATO-led intervention in Libya in response to the Libyan government’s brutal crackdown against an uprising. Concerned that crimes against humanity had either been committed or were imminent unless action was taken, through Resolution 1973 the UNSC authorized the international community to take ‘all necessary measures’ in protecting civilians under threat of attack. The Resolution, however, also excluded the option of a foreign occupation of Libyan territory. Even so, the NATO-led alliance interpreted its remit more broadly than its critics. Beyond imposing
a no-fly zone and targeting the Libyan air force and its air defences, NATO also targeted Libya’s armed forces and its command facilities on the ground. To its critics, like Russia and China, NATO was not simply protecting civilians but was actively taking sides in a civil war in the hope of fostering regime change.

Beyond the specifics, however, the intervention in Libya also raised questions about the selectivity of the intervention. Why, for example, intervene in Libya and not other countries in the midst of the so-called ‘Arab spring’, where crackdowns were also taking place. The West’s refusal to countenance such action in key regional allies, like Egypt and Bahrain, raised obvious accusations of double standards and that the intervention was driven as much by a desire to advance strategic national interests, or even to settle old scores with Colonel Gaddafi, as by humanitarian concerns. Meanwhile, the fact that in undertaking its remit NATO bombings caused considerable civilian casualties also raised the more general issue of the potential contradictions concerning the use of force for humanitarian purposes. Ultimately, arguments justifying such collateral damage are premised on utilitarian calculations of preventing greater future harm. Such calculations, however, invariably entail trading the lives of some for those of others.