The challenges of “humanitarian intervention” have been of pressing concern to policymakers and academics ever since the end of the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. This became most evident when the international community failed to respond decisively to the genocide in Rwanda, despite having forces on the ground, as well as when it did not stop the atrocities of the Bosnian war: as during the shelling of Sarajevo after United Nations peacekeepers had left the city to its fate and when “safe havens” in Srebrenica were attacked and overrun by Serbian forces. In other conflicts, the UN Security Council did authorize a military response using “all necessary means,” as in Somalia, Sierra Leone, and, as the most recent humanitarian intervention, in Libya. However, the problem of selectivity in its responses to grave human rights violations continues to haunt the international community, most visibly in the deadlock of the Security Council in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria.
In All Necessary Measures, Carrie Booth Walling explores the social construction and evolution of humanitarian intervention discourse and subsequent action at the UN Security Council. In a nutshell, the book argues that Security Council members shape the likelihood of force being used in defense of human rights by constructing narratives about the character and cause of a conflict. According to Booth Walling, these “causal stories”—a concept borrowed from Deborah A. Stone (Policy Paradox, 2012)—can be “inadvertent,” “complex,” or “intentional” in kind. The latter type of story seeks to “identify perpetrators and name victims,” which increases the prospect for subsequent forcible action by the Security Council (p. 23). By contrast, inadvertent causal stories contain a “narrative of moral equivalency” whereby multiple warring parties share responsibility for human rights violations and the actors are perceived as morally equivalent (p. 24). If the inadvertent story predominates among Security Council members, ensuing action will likely amount to the monitoring and observation of human rights violations, or include palliation efforts, such as the provision of humanitarian assistance. Finally, complex causal stories describe “multifaceted, complicated, and tragic situations in which multiple and often fragmenting groups are responsible” (p. 26). For Booth Walling, the main difference between inadvertent and complex causal stories is that the latter describe the violence as the result of both political decision making and structural factors that are “beyond the realm of individual human control” (p. 26), making these conflicts particularly resilient to outside intervention.
The book is comprised of seven empirical chapters, framed by an introduction and conclusion. In addition to her analysis of “positive cases,” that is, where the Security Council endorsed humanitarian intervention, Booth Walling also examines cases where human rights violations could have led to outside intervention with UN authorization but did not. The carefully crafted case studies on Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan, Sierra Leone (included in the Kosovo chapter), and Libya amount to nothing less than a contemporary history of humanitarian intervention. This begins with the formation of no-fly zones in Iraq in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and ends with Libya as the first case in which the council explicitly authorized the use of “all necessary measures” in reference to the principle of the “responsibility to protect” (RtoP), adopted at the 2005 World Summit of the UN General Assembly.
The theoretical argument made by Booth Walling, namely, that it is “no longer about whose military can win but also about whose story can win” in Security Council debates (p. 5), resonates with a large body of constructivist work that challenges purely rationalist accounts of phenomena in international politics. While this book is neither the first on humanitarian intervention nor on the selected conflicts, the author provides new insights and concise accounts of Security Council debates and negotiations in the run-up to the selected interventions (and noninterventions). For example, it is intriguing to read how France and Britain eventually withdrew their support for the inadvertent story in Bosnia and rallied around the intentional story “in the face of mounting expert testimony” (p. 118), leading to a (belated) military intervention. In other cases, such as in Kosovo, competing stories were being embraced, without any substantial movement on the part of the member states, resulting in a stalemate and preventing “effective and unified UNSC action” (p. 166).
This book is empirically rich while being parsimonious in theoretical terms. The “causal story” framework provides a valuable heuristic device for analyzing UN Security Council discourse and behavior when it comes to humanitarian crises. But there are also a few shortcomings. First, the book’s argument concerning the evolution of a norm of humanitarian intervention seems overstated. Booth Walling concludes that the “international normative context has changed such that it is now easier to justify humanitarian intervention than to justify failure to respond to mass atrocities” (p. 32). This claim reflects a normative bias that is present throughout but which appears overly idealistic given the complex interplay of interests and norms that undergird humanitarian intervention discourse. While there has been a development toward a broader acknowledgment of human rights norms in international politics, the sheer number of unaddressed human rights violations shows that atrocities continue to occur without decisive action on the part of the UN Security Council, irrespective of a general norm endorsement.
Second, throughout the book, humanitarian intervention is equated with humanitarian military intervention (see the author’s definition on p. 16). This is regrettable, since the emphasis on a military response foregoes a discussion of alternative measures to address humanitarian crises (which might be part of actors’ causal stories).
Finally, in a similar vein, due to its research design, the book focuses narrowly on the Security Council and its members’ causal stories without taking into account important external conditions. In consequence, a blind eye is turned toward crucial factors, such as material capabilities, veto rights, and the domestic politics of foreign policy decisions—all of which are important influences on the outcome that the author seeks to explain.
These limitations do not diminish the overall contribution of the book, however. All Necessary Measures provides a cogently argued constructivist account of the influence of causal narratives and discourse on decision making at the United Nations. The detailed and clearly structured case studies illuminate existing pathways toward intervention at the Security Council. Moreover, the book provides a succinct explanatory framework that should be applied to additional cases of humanitarian military intervention and nonintervention, as well as cases where nonmilitary means have been authorized to address humanitarian crises. Against the backdrop of Security Council deadlock in the face of humanitarian disasters such as the ongoing conflict in Syria, the book can help us understand why inaction occasionally prevails over humanitarian intervention.
