Human Security Discourse & Humanitarian Intervention
From sovereignty as authority to sovereignty as responsibility
This analysis seeks to evaluate whether the contemporary adoption of a Human Security Discourse (HSD) by actors in the realm of International Relations (IR) has succeeded in redefining the sovereign prerogative of non-intervention.
The underlying query is steered towards understanding how the HSD has been utilized to re-conceptualize the principle of sovereignty and justify intervention in the affairs of states for the purpose of protecting individual human beings from large-scale threats to their security.
Employing a constructivist and critical framework of analysis, this analysis endeavours to contextualize the adoption of the HSD for interventionist purposes.
It proposes an evaluation of the relevance of norms in shaping the behaviour of agents in IR and searches to deconstruct the latent interests inherent in the promotion of human security.
The overarching critical assessment will be to argue that the necessity to place the security of the individual above that of the state has become an accepted normative paradigm but one that has become difficult to operationalize in an international society that is arguably still driven by the logic of realpolitik.
Humanized security
The emergence of a discourse advocating the adoption of a human-centred approach to security emanates from the accruing necessity to place the well-being and security of individual citizens at the forefront of international policymaking.
Rooted in the recognition that the security of individuals is not a necessary corollary of state security and that the state itself has become a principle perpetrator of insecurity, the concept of human security has overtime gained (and lost) momentum as a policy-oriented paradigm searching to undermine a centuries-old prerogative of state sovereignty: non-intervention.
Following a relentless history of violent human atrocities executed within the confines of states, the Westphalian sovereign right that guarantees freedom from external intervention has come under serious scrutiny with the demise of the Cold War.
The 1990s witnessed a series of events that ‘shocked the conscience’ of an increasingly interdependent global community that has become unprecedentedly sensitive and responsive to human suffering across territorial boundaries (Evans 2008).
The inaction towards the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica marked a dramatic watershed in a decade that has been dubbed as the ‘age of humanitarian emergencies’ (Väyrynen 1996).
With the aid of globalizing forces and advances in communications technology, human suffering has become de-territorialized as vivid images of anthropogenic violence and despair have gained global visibility.
Consequently, actors across the spectrum of international politics have manifested the moral imperative to ‘save strangers’ (Wheeler 2000) as an emerging interventionist norm. This norm is grounded on a discourse advancing the ideal of an indivisible human community and the common responsibility to safeguard individuals from mass atrocities as an ‘irrevocable universal concern’ (Axworthy 2001:20).
Formalized by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 1994, the concept of human security has been adapted into a discourse or narrative searching to generate a widespread endorsement of the need to place the individual as the primary referent of security policy.
The HSD has found its relevance in the urging necessity to devote greater consideration to the security of individuals in an era where threats arising from aggression between states have largely been replaced by threats arising from aggression within states.
Subsequently, individuals, rather than states, have become the principal victims of insecurity. This has spawned a widespread appraisal for human security as a policy paradigm seeking to address the insecurities faced by individuals and communities across states.
Following the numerous humanitarian catastrophes that have taken place over the past two decades — from the 1992 Mogadishu debacle to the bombing of civilians in Benghazi and Misrata in 2011 — the HSD has found its power in constituting an emerging normative principle advancing the moral imperative to protect individuals and communities from large-scale threats to their security.
The now internationally embraced (and contested) norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) epitomizes the institutionalization of the HSD into the realm of international policymaking. The R2P seeks to legitimize an intervention in the internal affairs of states when they are unable or unwilling to protect their own citizens from mass atrocities.
Emanating from an underlying reformulation of ‘sovereignty as authority’ to ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ (Deng et al. 1996), the R2P posits that the legitimate sovereignty of a state becomes contingent upon its ability to protect its citizens from ‘avoidable catastrophes’ (ICISS 2001:viii).
With the formal endorsement of the R2P during the 2005 United Nations (U.N.) World Summit, states have agreed to act collectively to safeguard populations from ‘genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ (U.N. 2005b:para. 138) thereby laying the ground, albeit apprehensively, to justifying intervention for humanitarian purposes.
Humanitarian intervention has thus gained contemporary popularity as a practice rooted in the ideals of human security that have fundamentally searched to condition the legitimacy of sovereign prerogatives upon the ability to protect individuals and communities from large-scale threats to their lives.
Framework of analysis
The principal aim of this analysis is to evaluate whether the practice of security is undergoing a genuine transformation as a result of the promotion of the Human Security Discourse — where ‘discourse’ will refer to any form of communication that serves to promote human security.
It will critically question whether the HSD and its subsequent operationalization into the R2P has truly succeeded in emasculating a principle of international law that grants states full discretion of action within their jurisdiction and freedom from external intervention.
Although endorsed by all members of the U.N., the R2P has not become a principle of customary international law. It does not yet put members of the so-called international community under the obligation to safeguard individuals under instances of humanitarian emergency — or face sanctions otherwise.
Whilst states no longer operate in a principle-free international vacuum in which there are no limits to a sovereign state’s freedom of action against its population — especially in terms of human rights abuses (see Weiss 2007; U.N. 2005a), intervention for allegedly humanitarian purposes remains an issue of great controversy given the historically incessant violation of the non-intervention norm by powerful states.
Crucially, the intervention-authorizing body, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), remains an unrepresentative and undemocratic organism with the capacity to de-legitimize interventions even when there is widespread consensus over the existence of a humanitarian emergency.
As such, whether an intervention takes place or not (theoretically) relies solely on the unanimous approval of the five permanent members of the UNSC — conditioning the protection of people in grave danger to the discretion of the ‘veto powers’.
Criticisms have subsequently arisen regarding the selectivity with which interventions have been legitimized by the UNSC which has, in turn, generated substantial wariness on the power to co-opt the HSD for (self-serving) strategic purposes.
For this reason, it is crucial to take a critical stance and seek to contextualize the promotion of human security through discourse as it suffers from the danger of being utilized to justify interventions for ostensible (as opposed to genuine) humanitarian ends.
This analysis will primarily explore the context under which human security emerged as a concept and its subsequent adoption into a discourse in the realm of international politics.
Secondly, it will outline how this discourse has sought to reformulate the principle of sovereignty to justify intervention for humanitarian purposes and evaluate whether the R2P has established itself as a new guiding norm that guarantees the active involvement of international (military) actors to protect gravely imperiled individuals.
Thirdly, it will offer a critical evaluation of the discursive promotion of human security and use constructivist theory to evaluate whether international society has undergone a fundamental change from its traditionally ‘pluralist’ nature to a more ‘solidarist’ character — and question whether the conduct of states is increasingly being guided by normative principles of cosmopolitanism and the need to override sovereign prerogatives for humanitarian purposes.
It will conclude by suggesting that the protection of gravely imperiled individuals across borders is not yet guaranteed by international law but rather by the presence of strategic interests that emanate from the inherent power disparities in international relations.
As a result, although the need to prioritize the security of individual citizens above that of the state has gained international recognition, the instances under which the international community is willing to override the non-interventionist norm and mobilize resources to ‘save strangers’ arguably remains strongly dependent on the strategic gains reaped from intervening rather than from the selfless act of saving lives.
Beyond statist security
Emerging during the Cold War and dominated by the realist paradigm, the theory and practice of security was solely concerned with the security of states.
Derived from Hobbesian thought, it was asserted that there was no security in the absence of authority and that the locus of security had to rely in the sovereign state.
Following Morgenthau’s thesis that international politics is a ‘struggle for power’ (1948) concomitant with Waltz‟s ‘ordering principle’ of anarchy (Waltz 1979), the international system was seen as a competitive and insecure space in which self-help states had to mobilize resources to remain safe from the threats emerging from the ‘capabilities and offensive intentions’ (Walt 1985:9) of allegedly competing states.
Security scholars and policymakers alike were thus inclined to show preference towards the security of the state as the sole referent object of security policy — a reality justified by the historically international conflictive nature of the international system.
However, with the end of the Cold War came a rising tide of intra-state conflicts accompanied by the emergence of not only ‘failed’ but also ‘oppressive’ states whereby the state had become a principal facilitator and perpetrator of insecurity.
Consequently, citizens became the primary victims of insecurities — generating a rallying cry for policies to be tailored to their security needs — ones that have become increasingly decoupled from that of the state.
With the evident reality that ‘a secure state untroubled by contested territorial boundaries could still be inhabited by insecure people’ (Thomas & Tow 2002: 178), it has become somewhat of a truism that ‘the most deadly threats to people throughout the world come from within their own state’ (Heinze 2009:36).
As a result, the need to re-orient the theory and practice of security from the state to the individual has become of paramount importance. In a post-Cold War era characterized by rising transnational threats, the protection of borders has become obsolete relative to the necessity to protect individual human beings within and across those borders (Oberleitner 2005).
Acknowledging this, the UNDP sought to provide a re-conceptualization of security in which threats at the individual level have become ‘institutionalized in the practice of security’ (Macdonald 2002:78). As such, the 1994 Human Development Report (HDR) entitled New Dimensions of Security (UNDP 1994) formalized the concept of human security by arguing that security had ‘for too long been interpreted narrowly’ to the extent that the ‘legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives were forgotten’ (UNDP 1994:22).
The traditional security framework had simply neglected the fact that for the vast majority of people, threats arose not from military invasion by foreign states but from ‘hunger, disease, political repression and environmental hazards’ (UNDP 1994:22).
For this reason, human security has searched to generate a paradigm shift in the theory and practice of security by questioning the state-centric approach and taking the security of the individual as its point of reference.
Despite the fact that human security is a multidimensional concept combining a ‘broad’ developmental aspect of freedom (Sen, 1999) from threats such as famine, hunger and disease, our interest is in the more ‘narrow’ aspect of freedom from anthropogenic threats such as political violence, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The instances where these threats are state-sponsored are of critical concern. When a state is a principal facilitator or perpetrator of violence and insecurity, its legitimate authority to exercise power and control becomes questionable. This is, at least, by the standards of the supposed social contract (assuming it exists) allowing citizens to claim rights of protection from public authorities deemed to behave recklessly.
Under the assumption that the function of the state is to provide a minimum of security to its population, whenever a state (whether democratic or not) systematically fails to provide a public good as essential as security, it is more than plausible to assert that this constitutes a basic violation of citizen rights.
If we consider the security of individuals to be superior to the security of the ruling authority, whenever a state fails to provide security to its citizens or is the principal agent of insecurity, the legitimacy and sovereignty of the authority in question should be dismissed.
Since its inception, human security has been viewed as a normative paradigm that essentially predicates a moral necessity to ‘re-orient security in line with internationally recognized standards of human rights and governance’ (Newman 2010:78).
Human security has thus searched to be integrated into international policymaking practices by reviving the inherent right of individuals to personal security as enshrined in the U.N. Charter (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR 1948), the Genocide Convention (1948) and the two International Covenants on Human Rights (1966).
Of crucial importance is the consideration that these international conventions institutionalized the protection of individual rights as legal obligations that set ‘clear limits on how governments could treat their people’ (Wheeler 2000:1).
The problem was, however, that the normative international endeavours of the human rights regime was largely undermined by the Cold War politics that prioritized international order over justice. Actions to intervene for the purpose of protecting gravely imperilled individuals was largely condemned as a violation of the ‘sacrosanct’ norms of sovereignty and non-intervention, as demonstrated by the international disapproval of the interventions in East Pakistan (1971), Uganda (1979) and Cambodia (1979).
This led to the realization that there was a tremendous gap between the normative humanitarian commitments and the Westphalian principles that ‘allowed governments to abuse human rights with virtual impunity’ (Wheeler 2000:1).
The 1990s however witnessed a radical normative shift from ‘a culture of sovereign impunity to a culture of national and international accountability’ (ICISS 2001:14). In this context, the concept of human security gained strength as a result of a heightened exposure to images of human suffering across the globe.
As cases of widespread human atrocities multiplied, so did the media coverage of them that ultimately catalyzed demands from agents of global civil society to pressure governments in taking international action to protect individuals. This was particularly intensified following the Rwandan Genocide, the Srebrenica massacre and the controversy over the intervention in Kosovo and Libya.
As a result, a series of actors across the spectrum of international politics have advanced a discourse grounded on the human security ideals regarding the imperative to protect gravely endangered individuals irrespective of territorial and political boundaries.
By labelling it as a ‘universal concern’ that is ‘relevant to people everywhere’, the 1994 Human Development Report asserted that human security was ‘interdependent’ such that ‘when the security of people is endangered anywhere in the world, all nations are likely to get involved’ (UNDP 1994:22).
This has become crucial to our understanding of the ‘utility of human security’ (Thomas & Tow 2002) in the sense that it seeks to internationalize the concern for the security of human beings regardless of state borders and outdated sovereign prerogatives.
The human security discourse
Following a speech delivered in 1998 claiming that ‘ensuring human security is, in the broadest sense, the U.N.’s cardinal mission’, in his address to the 54th UN General Assembly in September 1999, Kofi Annan proposed a new international agenda devoted to addressing ‘the prospects for human security and intervention in the next century’ (Annan, 1999a:para. 3).
As Secretary General, Mr. Annan capitalized on the global reach of his advocacy and initiated a discourse that has sought to voice the reality that a ‘great number of peoples need more than just words of sympathy from the international community, they need a real and sustained commitment to help end their cycles of violence and launch them on a safe passage to prosperity’ (Ibid 1999a:para.12).
He endorsed ‘the universally recognized imperative of effectively halting gross and systematic violations of human rights with grave humanitarian consequences’ (Ibid 1999a:para.14) thereby claiming the necessity for the so-called international community to act collectively to safeguard individuals from humanitarian tragedies.
Shortly after Annan’s speech, Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s prominent foreign minister at the time and ardent promoter of the human security agenda declared:
“Human security is, in essence, an effort to construct a global society where the safety of the individual is at the centre of international priorities and a motivating force for international action; where international human rights standards and the rule of law are advanced and woven into a coherent web protecting the individual; where those who violate these standards are held fully accountable; and where our global, regional and bilateral institutions — present and future — are built and equipped to enhance and enforce these standards.”
Axworthy presented the safety of the individual as an international priority requiring international action and demanded accountability towards those who violate international human rights standards. His leadership led to the adoption of human security as a foreign policy priority for the Canadian government and was subsequently joined by the government of Japan in creating the ‘Human Security Network’: a coalition of like-minded states promoting human security worldwide.
Furthermore, human security gained international appraisal as it appeared in major U.N. reports. The Commission on Global Governance (CGG) claimed that ‘global security extends beyond the protection of borders, ruling elites and exclusive state interests to include the protection of people’ (CGG 1995:81) whilst the more recent U.N. Report ‘A More Secure World’ by the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change recommended that ‘increased attention be paid to human security’ (U.N. 2004:106).
Additionally, the compilation of NGO comments included in the Secretary General’s Report In Larger Freedom (U.N. 2005a) endorsed the fact that human security ideals generated a ‘globalization of solidarity that promotes international cooperation to pre-emptively manage conflicts before they turn violent’.
This discourse has gained the support of both academics and policy practitioners alike (Kaldor & Glasius 2005; Jolly & Ray 2006; MacLean et al. 2007). Although some scholars have been critical of its expansive definition and potential overstretch (Ayoob 1997; Paris 2001; Khong 2001), the narrow, policy-relevant dimension of human security that decouples the security of the state from that of the individual and conditions the sovereignty of the former to the respect for the security of the latter represents the crux of the human security discourse.
Indeed, it is Annan’s widely acclaimed article published in The Economist just two days prior to his speech at the 54th General Assembly that fundamentally shaped the nature of the HSD. His Two concepts of Sovereignty claimed that ‘states are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their people’ and that there exists a moral imperative to ‘protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them’ (Annan 1999b: 49). He argued that the respect for individual sovereignty, as codified in the U.N. Charter, has come to condition state sovereignty to the extent that a state forfeits its sovereign rights of exclusivity when it fails to guarantee the protection of its citizens.
In a sense, the fundamental ideas of human security that prioritize the safety of the individual have searched to undermine the historically uncontested — albeit incessantly violated — sovereign principle of non-intervention given the proposition that ‘sovereignty finds its limits in the protection of human security’ (Stahn 2007:143). For this reason, the aspiration of the HSD is to gain ‘the acceptance of human security over state security by the international community and to this end, the qualification of state sovereignty’ (Foson 2007:32).
Reconceptualizing sovereignty
For long, sovereignty has been conceived as absolute and has been used as a legal barrier prohibiting external intervention in a past century during which more people have died as a direct or indirect consequence of the actions of their own governments than by invading foreign armies (Human Security Gateway Report 2010).
Rooted in Gong’s (1984) work on the Standard of Civilization and Deng et al.’s (1996) Sovereignty as Responsibility, the principle of sovereignty has been brought back to its Lockean origins whereby the legitimacy of the sovereign state is derived from its capacity to guarantee a minimal standard of security for its constituents.
The authority of the state has progressively been transformed from being uncontested to being constrained and regulated internally by legal arrangements in the case of democracies and externally by international law and force in the case of non-democracies.
Although the U.N. Charter was oriented toward protecting the sanctity of sovereignty and non-intervention as enshrined in Articles 2(4) and 2(7), it contained important references to the protection of human rights, particularly in Articles 1.3 and 55 that imposed limits regarding a state’s freedom in its treatment towards its citizens.
For this reason there have been attempts to reformulate the basis of sovereignty such that the ‘rationale of state sovereignty ceases to apply in favour of the state when the domestic sovereign violates the rights of its own people’ (Stahn 2007:113). In relation to this, and prior to the signing of the U.N. Charter, the international legal scholar Lauterpacht claimed that ‘when a state renders itself guilty of cruelties against its nationals in such ways as to deny their fundamental human rights and to shock the conscience of humanity, intervention in the interest of humanity is legally permissible’ (Lauterpacht 1940:280).
This line of thinking, along with the advocacy of the HSD is what led to the formulation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The case of rethinking sovereignty emerges from the ‘increasing impact of international human rights norms and the increasing impact in international discourse of the concept of human security’ (ICISS 2001:11).
The ICISS searched to outline the ‘conditions under which, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive action against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk’ (ICISS 2001:vii). Their policy challenge was to address the dilemma posed by Kofi Annan in his Millennium report:
“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 offend every precept of our common humanity?”
In the attempt to confront this challenge, the ICISS set out to formulate a norm rooted in the ideals of human security — establishing a moral duty and responsibility to act in the face of gross humanitarian atrocities. As such, the basic tenet of the R2P predicates that when human suffering has escalated to a level of humanitarian emergency, we should temporarily suspend the norms of sovereignty and non-intervention for the purpose of protecting civilians.
Its basic principles outline the idea that ‘state sovereignty implies responsibility’ where ‘the prime responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself’. However, ‘when a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure’ and the sate in question is ‘either unable or unwilling to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect’ (ICISS 2001:xi).
In a sense, the R2P employs the narrow conceptualization of human security of ‘violent threats to individuals’ (Human Security Report, 2005:vii) such as ‘mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion, deliberate starvation and exposure to disease’ (U.N. 2004:65) that would compel the international community to intervene given their ‘extreme and exceptional’ nature (ICISS 2001:31). In sum, the R2P holds that ‘intervention for human protection purposes, including military intervention, is supportable when major harm to civilians is occurring or imminently apprehended, and the state in question is unable or unwilling to end the harm or is itself the perpetrator’ (ICISS 2001:16).
The R2P essentially represents the operationalization of the HSD as it utilizes the maxim of the primacy of individual security to define and identify the circumstances under which there is a moral imperative to suspend the legitimacy of sovereign prerogatives and authorize intervention in ‘cases which so genuinely shock the conscience of peoples’ or which present an imminent danger to international security requiring ‘coercive military intervention’ by the so-called international community (ICISS 2001:31) .
Although there is no explicit mention of ‘intervention’ in the two paragraphs of the 2005 U.N. World Summit document outcome dedicated to addressing the R2P, all members of the U.N. essentially pledged to ‘take collective action’ to ‘help protect populations from war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ (U.N. 2005b:para. 139).
Was the incorporation of the R2P clause into the outcome document an indication of a meaningful emasculation of the sacrosanct Westphalian sovereign prerogative of nonintervention? Todd Lindberg viewed this endorsement as ‘a revolution in consciousness in international affairs’ but whether this represents a significant transformation in the nature of an international society that is arguably being influenced by a normative humanitarian discourse is subject to great contention.
As an interim assessment, it can be asserted that the emergence of the HSD and its subsequent operationalization into the R2P has come to undermine the sovereign prerogative of non-intervention because members of the U.N. have agreed to endorse this new principle. However, having not yet gained the status of customary international law, when the threshold conditions of the R2P are met in a given locality, no state is legally compelled to act — especially if the UNSC does not authorize it.
Crucially, a wide array of civil society organizations have raised serious reservations about the R2P for three main reasons.
- The threshold conditions are ambiguous and lack precise quantitative value such that the designation for or against intervention is dependent on a subjective interpretation of what ‘large-scale’ constitutes.
- The R2P essentially de-politicizes interventions as they are reinterpreted to be moral obligations under instances of grave humanitarian emergencies that make interventions less transparent, accountable and more susceptible to abuse (McCormack 2008).
- The authorizing body, the UNSC, is an organism whose decision-making process is dominated by the veto powers who are able to legitimize or de-legitimize interventions at their discretion.
In an era where a majority of states are subject to weak governing structures, such states have become increasingly weary of the power of the R2P to become a ‘Trojan Horse’ (Bellamy 2005). By employing the R2P, powerful states can justify interest-driven interventions under the guise of humanitarianism when they deem that a sovereign state is not respecting a minimum standard of human rights and security.
Former Algerian president Bouteflika voiced the scepticism towards this new paradigm of humanitarian intervention when he declared:
“We do not deny that the U.N. has the right and the duty to help suffering humanity, but we remain extremely sensitive to any undermining of our sovereignty, not only because sovereignty is our last line of defence against the rules of an unequal world, but because we are not taking part in the decision-making process of the Security Council.”
If we are to take a critical stance towards the operationalization of the HSD into the R2P, we must contextualize the inherent interests in the promotion of the R2P by powerful states in an international society that remains significantly characterized by important power imbalances and strategically-driven behaviour.
Given this power disparity, the R2P has the potential to become a tool for the interference of the strong in the affairs of the weak as humanitarianism essentially provides a ‘veneer to justify intervention’ (Ayoob 2002:92). The important question thus remains as to ‘who determines when a state has not met its sovereign obligations and that the consequences are such that intervention to force compliance is justified’ (Lyons & Mastudano 1995:13).
The potential for the R2P to become a double-edged sword essentially puts the safety of millions of individuals in peril at the mercy of the UNSC veto powers as they ultimately have the ‘legitimate’ power to authorize humanitarian interventions. When a normative principle as powerful as the R2P suffers from potential abuse, it is of crucial importance to provide a critical assessment of its shortfalls.
The following section attempts to critically evaluate how discourse has been used to promote human security and the R2P in such a malleable way that it has allowed state actors to abuse its moral phenotype in order to justify interventions for allegedly humanitarian ends.
Deconstructing R2P
The objective of any critical security analyst is to ‘denaturalize and historicize all human-made political referents’ (Booth 2005:268). Although human security itself represents an underlying critical challenge to the state-centric orthodoxy of traditional security studies based on territorial integrity against external threats, the adoption of human security as a discourse by actors in IR must not be devoid from analytical critique.
Even though the HSD carries the potential to fulfil the emancipatory agenda of the Welsh School as advocated in the scholarly works of Booth (1991, 1999, 2005) and Jones (1999, 2001), the adoption of the HSD and the endorsement of the R2P by state actors generates substantial suspicion.
Despite its normative and morally grounded foundations to empower and protect individuals from the oppressive sources of threats arising within the confines of states, its endorsement by powerful states can be interpreted as politically motivated given that it can potentially allow them to justify interest-driven interventions under the selfless veil of humanitarianism.
Scholars have suggested that the HSD has been co-opted by states, especially so-called Western states (see Duffield & Waddell 2006; Dillon 2006) for its utility in legitimizing interventionist actions that are undertaken for strategically-driven purposes. Indeed, ‘human security has taken on the image of the velvet glove on the iron hand of hard power’ (Booth 2007:324). This implies that the HSD can and has been used as soft power mantra for powerful states to justify interventionist actions that serve their interests.
This was epitomised by the 2003 Iraqi intervention where the discourse of freeing the Iraqi people from the oppressive forces of Saddam Hussein took prominence only after the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) argument was discredited. As such, the possibility for the HSD to truly empower and emancipate individuals from threats to their security must be considered with caution because the instances whereby states are willing to intervene for genuine humanitarian purposes will tend to depend strongly on the concomitant presence of strategic, and more precisely, economic interests.
The empirical grounding for this idea is backed by the selectivity and inconsistency with which states have deployed military missions to halt humanitarian catastrophes. In 1994, for example, the perception that the United States (U.S.) was using double standards in the Haiti intervention was strengthened by the fact that the refugee movements in Rwanda were of a much higher order but did not evoke the same interventionist response from the UNSC (Ayoob 2002).
In short, and as argued by Ayoob (2002:89), ‘the successful intervention in Haiti and the humanitarian disaster in Rwanda were both related to the presence and absence of U.S. national interest concerns’. The interventionist absenteeism in Darfur (2003) where, with a total casualty figure of about 300,000 and at least 1.8 million people displaced, the R2P should have been applied given it had arguably met the threshold requirements of ‘large scale loss of life’ (ICISS 2001:xi) added to the fact that Colin Powell went as far as labelling it a ‘genocide’ in Congress (Bellamy 2006:31).
No international mission was however deployed in Darfur to halt the violent atrocities at the time, only a small UN mission (UNAMID) was sent in July 2007 — arguably too little too late. Contrastingly, the 2011 intervention in Libya raised great concerns about the power to co-opt the HSD and employ the R2P to intervene for the allegedly noble purpose of protecting civilians.
Although estimates vary, civilian casualties during the five weeks between the start of the uprising in Libya and the allied military intervention were at approximately 1,700 people, a figure that is minute relative to the casualties in Darfur. This has raised significant concerns regarding the real motifs behind interventions for humanitarian purposes.
The reason why the mobilization of international resources to intervene in Libya were larger and available more expediently relative to Darfur sheds some light on the idea that the normative predicaments of the international community are being applied inconsistently. This reality has been recently heightened by the international inaction in halting the crisis in Syria, where the death toll surpassed 5,000 in December 2011. Currently, questions are being raised regarding the appropriateness of international action mobilised to address the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
The fact that interventions are taken on a selective basis and that the same criteria are not applied universally leads humanitarian interventions to lose legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of international civil society (Pérez de Cuéllar 1991, Adams 1993, Annan 1999a,).
This seems to indicate that states will not risk military costs, economic resources and soldiers to ‘save strangers’ unless crucial economic or geo-strategic interests are at stake. On this note, Wheeler revokes the realist assertion that ‘the best we can hope for is a happy coincidence where the promotion of national security also defends human rights’ (2000: 30). Sadly, it seems that if interventions are merely fuelled by moral appeals, then interventions are threatened to ‘succumb to half-hearted commitments’ (Wesley, 2005: 58) — as evidenced by the case of Somalia (1992).
This suggests that the pursuit of ‘humanitarian intervention for self-regarding reasons saves lives but it is not done primarily for the protection of human rights’ (Makinda 2001:355) such that the problem of selectivity is brought to the forefront as a criticism of humanitarian intervention and its latent motives.
In sum, the selective application of the R2P essentially undermines the normative ideals of the HSD as it suggests that states are driven by realpolitik considerations rather than by a genuine concern for the security of individual communities in grave danger. In this vein, Brown notes that ‘selectivity in itself is more or less inevitable and it is equally inevitable that the criteria for selection will not simply be humanitarian’ (2002: 165). Put bluntly by Weiss (2000:20); ‘there can be no universal imperative, states will pick and choose’.
These evaluations seem to suggest that the power of the HSD to undermine the sovereign prerogative of non-intervention is largely relative and contingent on the presence of strategic interests. In a sense, this is an indication that although there has been a significant shift in the normative international context evocating the practice of security to be more consistent with humanitarian concerns, the emasculation of the non-intervention norm is likely to gain strength only when the motivations for intervening are accompanied by gains that are not necessarily related to relieving human suffering.
It can therefore be asserted that what is witnessed every time that an intervention is justified on the basis of the protection of civilians is a ‘securitization’ of the individual that ‘conveys urgency, public attention and resources’ (Paris 2001:95; Waever 1995) that facilitate the possibility to promote interventionist policies for allegedly humanitarian ends whilst masking possible ulterior geo-strategic interests.
The protection of the individual can thus become a mere vehicle to depoliticize interventions and an arguably Machiavellian attempt to camouflage the underlying power interests that tend to motivate such interventions. From a critical standpoint, this reveals a rather pessimistic evaluation of the power of the HSD to truly empower and emancipate individuals from grave threats to their security.
Although there seems to be an apparent trend whereby the international society is moving away from its ‘pluralist’ nature where the violation of the cardinal rules of sovereignty and non-intervention are perceived as serious threats to international order, it is yet premature to claim that the international society has become truly ‘solidarist’ in the sense that states ‘accept not only a moral responsibility to protect the security of their own citizens but also the wider one of guardianship of human rights everywhere’ (Bull 1966:63).
Granted, we have arguably witnessed an evolution in world politics where normative humanitarian ideals have gained a more prominent presence in the policymaking realm — but its application has fallen short of its promising potential. The endorsement of the R2P at the 2005 U.N. World Summit remains a significantly symbolic act that represents the endorsement of a norm that has the potential to guide international behaviour but is limited by the fact that it has not yet become a legally binding international norm.
As such, we can agree with Finnemore (1996:158) that ‘new or changed norms enable new or different behaviours but they do not ensure such behaviour’. The R2P ensures that states can intervene for humanitarian purposes but it certainly does not ensure that they will.
The prevailing idea that the norm of non-intervention will only be undermined under the presence of significant national interests essentially constitutes a morally discouraging reality that saving gravely imperilled human beings across borders is yet to become an internationally ingrained legal imperative.
Intervention threshold
The selectivity with which the international community has responded to humanitarian crises essentially undermines the integrity of the R2P. For this reason, ensuring that the R2P is applied consistently should be of primordial concern to international policymakers.
A primary concern is to establish a quantifiable threshold that determines the conditions under which international (and where necessary, military) action to protect civilians is justifiable. The ICISS report does not define or offer a quantifiable figure of what constitutes ‘large-scale loss of human life’ and argues that disagreement on its interpretation would be unlikely in practice (ICISS: 33).
MacFarlane et al. (2002) however argue that an undefined threshold is controversial as it leads to ambiguity and allows for selectivity. They assert that leaving the threshold conditions unquantified essentially allows states in the UNSC to subjectively decide which cases constitute humanitarian emergencies requiring international intervention. They allude to the international inaction towards the civilian crisis in Chechnya and contrast it with the urgency with which a military intervention in Kosovo was deployed — despite the fact that the civil casualties in Chechnya were far higher than in Kosovo.
This parallels the more recent paradox regarding the absence of any significant international military mobilization to halt the rising human casualties in Syria crisis in the backdrop of the rapid and swift deployment of NATO military forces in oil-rich Libya.
These examples highlight a significant disparity in the way that the so-called international community responds to humanitarian crises. Resolution 1970 explicitly employed the R2P and emphasized that the primary motif for the intervention was the protection of civilians yet no resolution has been approved for intervention in Syria despite the fact that its population has arguably fallen victim to one of the R2P threshold conditions of ‘crimes against humanity’ — as condemned by the U.N. itself.
This demonstrates how the absence of a clearly defined and agreed upon thresholds essentially allows states to cherry-pick which humanitarian crises matter most and the extent to which they are willing to deploy military operations to avert the killing of civilians by armed state and non-state actors.
Although it would not entirely mitigate the problem of selectivity, proposing a quantified threshold condition would at least permit members of civil society to hold state actors accountable for inaction in cases which trespass a quantified threshold that should ideally be proposed and agreed by the members of the UN General Assembly.
Should a precise threshold be implemented, this would provide the international community with a yardstick against which decisions regarding international interventions should be considered and implemented.
Organized hypocrisy
This analysis has sought to evaluate whether the adoption of the HSD has succeeded in undermining the sovereign prerogative of non-intervention under instances of grave human suffering.
Whilst it has been demonstrated that its promotion by actors in the realm of international politics has led to the endorsement of a principle that searches to shift the sovereign responsibility to protect gravely endangered people from the state to the so-called international community when the former is unable or unwilling to so, the R2P falls short of gaining the status of customary international law that would compel states to intervene under all instances satisfying the ‘just cause thresholds’ (ICISS 2001:xii).
Although human security represents a clear challenge to the traditional interpretation of sovereignty by advancing the security of individuals as a source of legitimacy and authority of states, the instances whereby the international community is willing to abide by the ideals of human security and intervene for genuine humanitarian purposes are weak.
From a critical perspective, we have seen how the HSD has been co-opted to justify interventions for ostensible humanitarian ends and how the selectivity with which humanitarian interventions have been carried out sadly indicates that the imperative to save strangers is not consistently applied. We speak abundantly of human security but seldom do we witness its fulfilment.
Human security has gained significant appraisal and endorsement by members of global civil society but the necessity to safeguard gravely imperilled individuals remains at variance with the interests of those with the power to authorize and mobilize the sufficient resources to do so.
Although there has been a universal approval of the R2P by state actors, the inconsistency with which it has been applied leads to the pessimistic reality predicated by Thucydides long ago that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. In other words, powerful states will be willing to save strangers and override the non-intervention norm only when it is in their interest to do so.
Wendt’s (1992) theory regarding the behaviour of states in an anarchic international system illustrtes that R2P remains what powerful actors make of it. The implication is that despite the normative prescriptions, R2P may not necessarily serve the intended function of ‘saving strangers’ — particularly when saving strangers is uncongenial to state’s strategic priorities.
So long as international society is characterised by this culture of ‘organized hypocrisy’ (Krasner 1999), the HSD will fall short of its potential to safeguard gravely endangered individuals. As such, we are not yet witnessing the establishment of a ‘politico-moral community’ (Makinda 2001) where normative Kantian ideals of solidarist cosmopolitanism override Westphalian principles of sovereignty unconditionally.
As long as state actors continue to be guided by the logic of realpolitik, Hannah Arendt’s wish for a new political principle guaranteeing human dignity cannot be fulfilled. We can however remain hopeful that in a century characterized by increasing interdependence and advances in communications technology, a unified and technologically empowered global civil society has the potential to hold government actors more accountable for their (in)action such that their ability to save strangers is not inhibited by the absence of economic interests or outdated Westphalian prerogatives.
Political borders can no longer act as barriers of impunity — the condemnation and halting of large-scale acts of violence should permeate across state boundaries. If we value the security of individuals as an inalienable human right, an ethical and humanist international community should aspire to guarantee this security unconditionally and without discrimination. The current humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region sheds light on the need to rethink the degree to which international actors can help reduce human suffering in a de-politizied manner.
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