All Necessary Measures

The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention

Carrie Walling

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812208474
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What prompts the United Nations Security Council to engage forcefully in some crises at high risk for genocide and ethnic cleansing but not others? In All Necessary Measures, Carrie Booth Walling identifies several systematic patterns in the stories that council members tell about conflicts and the policy solutions that result from them. Drawing on qualitative comparative case studies spanning two decades, including situations where the council has intervened to stop mass killing (Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Sierra Leone) as well as situations where it has not (Rwanda, Kosovo, and Sudan), Walling posits that the arguments council members make about the cause and character of conflict as well as the source of sovereign authority in target states have the potential to enable or constrain the use of military force in defense of human rights.At a moment when constructivist scholars in international relations are pushing beyond empirical claims for the value of norms and toward critical analysis of such norms, All Necessary Measures establishes discourse's real-world explanatory power. From her comparative chronology, Walling demonstrates that humanitarian intervention becomes possible when the majority of Security Council members come to a shared understanding of the conflict, perpetrators, and victims—and probable when the Council understands state sovereignty as complementary to human rights norms. By illuminating the relationship between national interests and the core values of Security Council members and how it influences decision-making, All Necessary Measures suggests when and where the Security Council is likely to intervene in the future.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• 1. Constructing Humanitarian Intervention
• 2. The Emergence of Human Rights Discourse in the Security Council: Domestic Repression in Iraq, 1990–1992
• 3. State Collapse in Somalia and the Emergence of Security Council Humanitarian Intervention
• 4. From Nonintervention to Humanitarian Intervention: Contested Stories About Sovereignty and Victimhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 5. The Perpetrator State and Security Council Inaction: The Case of Rwanda
• 6. International Law, Human Rights, and State Sovereignty: The Security Council Response to Killings in Kosovo
• 7. Complex Conflicts and Obstacles to Rescue in Darfur, Sudan
• 8. The Responsibility to Protect, Individual Criminal Accountability, and Humanitarian Intervention in Libya
• 9. Causal Stories, Human Rights, and the Evolution of Sovereignty
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments