The Ethics of War and Peace Revisited

Moral Challenges in an Era of Contested and Fragmented Sovereignty

Daniel R. Brunstetter, Jean-Vincent Holeindre, Daniel R. Brunstetter, Jean-Vincent Holeindre

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781626165083
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do we frame decisions to use or abstain from military force? Who should do the killing? Do we need new paradigms to guide the use of force? And what does "victory" mean in contemporary conflict?

In many ways, these are timeless questions. But they should be revisited in light of changing circumstances in the twenty-first century. The post–Cold War, post-9/11 world is one of contested and fragmented sovereignty: contested because the norm of territorial integrity has shed some of its absolute nature, fragmented because some states do not control all of their territory and cannot defeat violent groups operating within their borders. Humanitarian intervention, preventive war, and just war are all framing mechanisms aimed at convincing domestic and international audiences to go to war—or not, as well as to decide who is justified in legally and ethically killing. The international group of scholars assembled in this book critically examine these frameworks to ask if they are flawed, and if so, how they can be improved. Finally, the volume contemplates what all the killing and dying is for if victory ultimately proves elusive.

PART I

What Frames Decisions to Intervene?

1

Assessing (and Learning from) the Record of Humanitarian Intervention in the Post–Cold War Era

AIDAN HEHIR

THE POST–COLD WAR ERA began with many enthusiastic predictions about the imminent “new world order.” One strand of this optimism held that the new era would be characterized by greater international enforcement of human rights and concomitantly more “humanitarian interventions.” As noted in the introduction to this book, this emerging disposition and agenda challenged preexisting notions of sovereign inviolability and appeared to herald a new form of “conditional sovereignty.”¹

Compared with the Cold War period, the number of interventions presented as “humanitarian” certainly increased after 1991. Nonetheless, this chapter argues that the record of intervention evidences four key lessons, which must temper appraisals of post–Cold War interventionism. First, intervention has occurred only when the intervening state had key national interests involved in the outcome of the situation. Second, the UN Security Council has not developed a sufficiently disinterested approach to intrastate conflicts; the respective narrow national interests of the council’s five permanent members (P5) continue to influence their responses, however grave the humanitarian crises. Third, states have demonstrated a marked unwillingness to deploy their troops in dangerous situations in the course of a “humanitarian intervention.” And fourth, the influence of moral advocacy on the behavior of states—democratic and otherwise—has been greatly exaggerated, and “global civil society” has not developed into the force many hoped.

Although these lessons are negative, the chapter will conclude by arguing that they collectively highlight the contours of what now needs to be done—specifically, in terms of UN reform—if the world is to genuinely become more responsive to intrastate humanitarian crises. This new agenda for reform is particularly pressing, I argue, as it can serve to reenergize those who have grown despondent of late due to a combination of the mixed record of intervention, the shift in the global distribution of power away from the West, and the waning belief in the irresistible spread of liberalism.

“THE GREAT ILLUSION”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the end of the Cold War led many to declare the imminence of a glorious new era for international politics, and specifically human rights. Famously, the dissolution of the Soviet Union constituted, according to some, “the end of history”;² and the beneficial effects of this triumph of liberalism would, many argued, be spread to all corners of the globe through the exponential acceleration of globalization.³ In the absence of both the threat of nuclear Armageddon and the East/West division at the Security Council, many heralded the unprecedented possibilities that now ostensibly opened up for the United Nations as the spearhead of this new change.⁴ This period, Michael Barnett notes, was characterized by a proliferation of reports and commissions, which “wax eloquent about the transformational possibilities for global politics and about the role of the UN as the prospective global deliverer.”⁵

There were certainly empirical grounds for this optimism; as the Soviet Union imploded, President George H. W. Bush spoke not of an era of US dominance but rather of one based on multilateralism, with the UN at its center: “Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order, . . . a world where the United Nations, freed from Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.”⁶ The UN-mandated liberation of Kuwait in 1991, coupled with Security Council Resolution 688 (which unprecedentedly described the plight of the Iraqi Kurds as a “threat to international peace and security”), stoked the optimism, as did the precipitous rise in UN peacekeeping missions; between 1988 and 1994, twenty new peacekeeping operations were deployed, compared with thirteen in the previous forty-three years.⁷ The UN-mandated Somalia intervention in 1992 constituted further evidence of a new, more proactive UN and also the increased importance of human security, impelled by the “explosion” in the number of human-rights-oriented nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that sought to promote the UN’s aspirational humanitarian aims.⁸

This belief in the imminence of a new era for the UN did not last, however, and has been described by Mats Berdal as “the great illusion.”⁹ The optimism dissipated in the face of a number of failed interventions and, indeed, failures to intervene. The operation in Somalia came to an abrupt end when the United States recalled its troops after seventeen Rangers were killed in Mogadishu in October 1993; the implosion of Yugoslavia dashed hopes that the “international community” was now capable of uniting to redress intrastate crises; the 1994 genocide in Rwanda dealt a near fatal blow to the idea of humanitarian intervention as states with the capacity to act willfully ignored the wanton slaughter; and peacekeeping itself lost its appeal as concerns about its efficacy grew. In July 1993 there were 78,444 “Blue Helmets” deployed globally; by November 1998 the number was 14,374.¹⁰ By the middle of the decade, the UN found itself facing an array of dire situations, which were “descending into chaos if not hell.”¹¹

THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT

Although the 1990s, therefore, did not witness the dawn of a new era, at the end of the decade NATO launched air strikes against Yugoslavia, thereby catalyzing renewed calls for, and interest in, humanitarian intervention. NATO’s “illegal but legitimate” action starkly illustrated the inadequacies of the existing system and impelled a new determination to amend the status quo. In the wake of Kosovo, Kofi Annan asked: “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?”¹² In response, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty was established, and in December 2001, it published its report The Responsibility to Protect. Vaunted as a means to ensure that there would be “no more Rwandas,” the report captured the attention of many scholars, NGOs, and policymakers and quickly became the dominant framework within which discussions of humanitarian intervention were framed; since 2001, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been recognized at the 2005 World Summit and repeatedly affirmed by the UN secretary-general, the UN General Assembly, and the UN Security Council.¹³

Although great contestation surrounds the efficacy of R2P, its content is relatively incontrovertible. It has not in any way altered international law or the institutional procedures of the many UN organs.¹⁴ Nor has it changed the competencies vested in the Security Council.¹⁵ It is best understood as a consolidation and restatement of the existing relationship between the state and its people, and between the state and the international community. It constitutes a means by which pressure to behave responsibly is leveraged and advocacy is focused; indicatively, according to Alex Bellamy, “It is a principle that frames how to think about the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities and respond to the outbreak of these crimes.”¹⁶

Since the eruption of the Arab Spring in late 2010, the efficacy of R2P has been keenly debated; though some heralded the intervention in Libya as evidence of R2P in practice,¹⁷ others argued that there was no evidence that R2P played any causal role in the decision to intervene.¹⁸ Of course, some have cited the disintegration of Libya since the intervention as evidence that humanitarian intervention simply does not work.¹⁹ The crises in Bahrain and, most particularly, in Syria have also been widely cited as evidence that the claims made about R2P were hyperbole and that, in fact, little has changed.

Rather than examine the record of R2P in the contemporary era, the following sections highlight trends in intervention, which emphasize the nature of the systemic flaws that have led to the inconsistent and often morally repugnant record of intervention. Identifying the sources of these flaws helps explain why the strategy underlying R2P cannot hope to achieve the aims it advances.

TRENDS IN THE RECORD OF INTERVENTION

Humanitarian intervention has, of course, a long—if decidedly mixed—history.²⁰ Identifying trends in this history is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, the intention here is to focus on the post–Cold War era; the systemic change in 1992 heralded a decidedly new context in which debates about intervention were framed and, as discussed above, expectations regarding humanitarian intervention were exponentially raised when bipolarity ended. In assessing this period, the following trends are most pertinent.

The Centrality of National Interests

Human rights are by definition universal in nature and transcend state sovereignty. The promotion of human rights, including calls for the forcible protection of these rights, thus stems from a global as opposed to national perspective. The record of intervention, however, demonstrates that though human rights may well be universal, the international system is very much state-based.

The international system, famously, differs from domestic systems in that there is no overarching power mandated to regulate the behavior of states. International bodies and international laws do exist, of course, but they are controlled by states, and states are the dominant actors internationally, leading to the common conceptualization of the international system as anarchical.

With respect to humanitarian intervention, this means the agents of intervention are states rather than “international” bodies. A humanitarian intervention occurs, therefore, only when states determine that it is in their interests to act. Of course, simply saying that “states act only in their national interests” tells us little; precisely what these interests are varies, and these interests are not, of course, immutable. In the post–Cold War era, it is clear that though states have increasingly felt compelled—for a variety of reasons—to expand their range of foreign policy interests, this has not led to the cultivation of a general disposition whereby the suffering of foreigners has come to be considered a primary national interest.

In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Ethics of War and Peace in a World of Contested and Fragmented Sovereignty
• Part I. What Frames Decisions to Intervene?
• Part II. Who Should Do the Fighting—and Who, Consequently, Bears the Risk of Dying?
• Part III. Do We Need New Ethical Frameworks?
• Part IV. Is Victory Really Enough?
• Conclusion: Toward the Future of the Ethics of War and Peace
• List of Contributors
• Index