The International Humanitarian Order

Michael Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415776325
• eBook ISBN: 9781135190552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

One of the genuinely remarkable but relatively unnoticed developments of the last half-century is the blossoming of an international humanitarian order – a complex of norms, informal institutions, laws, and discourses that legitimate and compel various kinds of interventions by state and nonstate actors with the explicit goal of preserving and protecting human life. For those who have sacrificed to build this order, and for those who have come to rely on it, the international humanitarian represents a towering achievement cause for sobriety. What kind of international humanitarian order is being imagined, created and practiced? To what extent are the international agents of this order deliverers of progress or disappointment?

Featuring previously published and original essays, this collection offers a critical assessment of the practices and politics of global ethical interventions in the context of the post-cold war transformation of the international humanitarian order. After an introduction that introduces the reader to the concept and the significance of the international humanitarian order, Section I explores the braided relationship between international order and the UN, whiles Section II critically examines international ethics in practice. The Conclusion reflects on these and other themes, asking why the international humanitarian order retains such a loyal following despite its flaws, what is the relationship of this order to power and politics, how such relationships implicate our understanding of moral progress, and how the international humanitarian order challenges both practitioners and scholars to rethink the meaning of their vocations.

1
Introduction

The international humanitarian order

The international humanitarian order concerns the protection of those in immediate peril and the prevention of unnecessary suffering. It includes norms, informal institutions, laws, and discourses that legitimate and compel various kinds of interventions with the explicit goal of preserving and protecting life. There are now a surfeit of conventions and treaties that are designed to protect the fundamental right of all peoples—the right to life. International human rights, humanitarian, and refugee law were distant cousins for most of the last century, but over the last two decades they have become intertwined, reinforcing each other and creating an increasingly dense normative structure. In 2005 the UN World Summit acknowledged a “responsibility to protect” populations who are the victims of campaigns of extermination. Although much less famous than the doctrine of a responsibility to protect, a “right to relief” has been around much longer and has more teeth—there now exist fairly ingrained expectations that the international community should deliver life-saving assistance to those endangered by natural or humanly made disasters. A multitude of slogans and rallying cries—including “never again” and the “humanitarian imperative”—accompany graphic and heart-wrenching photos of victims of violence. These norms, laws, and institutions are nestled in discourses of compassion, responsibility, and care, which, in turn, are attached to claims regarding the kinds of obligations the “international community” has to its weakest members.

The international humanitarian order also includes a metropolis of organizations, some of which are dedicated to the goal of reducing suffering and others that will lend a hand under the right circumstances. Nongovernmental organizations such as Doctors without Borders, the International Committee of the Red Cross, CARE International, and Oxfam are perhaps most closely identified with this order because they have been around for decades. They assert that it is their job to be on the front line when danger strikes and lives are at stake, and are treated by the media and popular culture as icons of heroic compassion. Over the last hundred years states have created a multitude of international organizations to assist vulnerable and neglected peoples. Most famous are the United Nations and its specialized agencies, including the World Food Program, UN peacekeeping, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization. States, though they rarely get much credit, have been increasingly central to this order. For decades they have been its principal patron, and over the last two decades they contributed in more direct ways, including dispatching their militaries to deliver aid and protect civilians during emergencies. Even the private sector has become more visibly involved in humanitarian action. Corporations are increasingly expected to demonstrate a “social responsibility,” integrating welfare concerns into their profit-oriented strategies, and appear most willing to do so when they believe that consumers are looking.

The international humanitarian order extends beyond “humanitarianism.” Humanitarianism is generally understood as assistance that occurs in the context of disasters; consequently, it is most readily applied to emergency relief and post-conflict recovery. However, the international humanitarian order includes other professional fields and communities of practice such as human rights, development, and public health. And, you don’t have to be either a professional or even a card-carrying humanitarian to be part of the humanitarian order. All that is required is dedicated action to saving lives, reducing suffering, preventing harm, and improving the lot of humankind. Those who are committed to humanity, however defined, abbreviated, and circumscribed, are part of that order. In general, there now exists a “humanitarian government… [T]he administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle that sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of action.”¹

The international humanitarian order is most easily identified when contrasted with the international security and economic orders. What distinguishes the contemporary international security order from the long, bloody, history of war and conflict is the self-conscious attempt by states and others to try and create international institutions with the explicit purpose of managing, curtailing, and preventing organized violence and its effects. Toward that end states have established various kinds of institutions and arrangements, including preventive diplomacy, multilateral conferences, and arms control regimes. What distinguishes the contemporary international economic order from the extensive history of long-distance trade and economic exchange is the self-conscious attempt by states and others to create global rules to manage and liberalize the global economy. Toward that end states have established regimes for regulating finance, capital, labor, and trade. What distinguishes the international humanitarian order from all previous acts of compassion is the self-conscious and explicit attempt by states and non-state actors to create international mechanisms to reduce suffering and improve human welfare. Toward that end states and non-state actors have created international refugee and human rights regimes, banned landmines, created campaigns to improve global health, and attacked global poverty.

The international humanitarian order has expanded significantly over the last two decades. Before giving some sense of the magnitude of the change it is important to note that the international humanitarian order rivals in age these other orders. Historically speaking, the origins of the international humanitarian order reside in the combustible mix of technological, economic, religious, and ideological changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.² In many respects the abolitionist movements of the early nineteenth century were the inaugural event, predating the establishment of the International Committee of the Red Cross and international humanitarian law by nearly a half-century, and over the last century there has been a steady accumulation of norms, rules, and institutions whose purpose is to protect human life.³ But arguably the greatest burst of activity occurred following the end of the Cold War. There was more money available for various forms of emergency relief, rights and democracy promotion, post-conflict recovery, and the prevention and treatment of disease. There were more organizations, some private, others non-profit, some local, others global, involved in matters of humanitarian governance. The best sign of the expanding population was the growing interest in various forms of coordination that were intended to bring coherence to an increasingly dense and ever-expanding sector. Yet perhaps the most impressive change occurred in the growing, interlocking, and increasingly nested networks for the prevention of suffering, due in large part to changing knowledge regarding what kinds of interventions were desirable and necessary in order to improve human life. The world was complex, the task of building states after war was complex, preventing suffering was complex, and all this complexity required new forms of knowledge that not only identified what were the critical pieces but also how all the pieces fit together. Global governance became increasingly dedicated to humanitarian practices and humanitarian governance was now global.

I am rather astonished to be assembling a volume on the transformation of the post-Cold War international humanitarian order, for two reasons. I did not set out with a grand plan or research agenda. Instead, the essays resulted from a modified path dependence, where one topic snowballed into another. In fact, it was only recently that I even noticed the existence of an international humanitarian order; at the time that I wrote these articles I understood myself to be exploring the loosely connected areas of international order, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and humanitarianism. Also, the international humanitarian order is of a considerable distance from my “first” scholarly career. My dissertation was on the politics of warmaking and statemaking in the Middle East. By the early 1990s I knew my way a lot better around Cairo and Tel-Aviv than New York; I knew the history of the Arab League a lot better than the history of the United Nations; I knew a lot more about the causes and consequences of war than about the prospects of peace-keeping and peacebuilding; and I had considerable familiarity with Third World militarization and almost no knowledge of humanitarianism.

What changed? The end of the Cold War shifted the geopolitical plates in ways that elevated the United Nations and handed it a growing role in my areas of research. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait became a matter of “international peace and security” and was handled at the UN Security Council. During the Cold War the U.S. and the Soviet Union played their war games in the Third World, but once the superpowers settled their differences they asked the United Nations to clean up their mess. Third World security dynamics also changed dramatically, as Third World regimes who once counted on the United States or the Soviet Union to preserve their regime security against their domestic rivals now had a United Nations pushing reconciliation, democratization, and human security. The players and the terms of the debate changed remarkably as a consequence of the end of the Cold War, and I followed the action to the United Nations to better understand the evolving global governance of Third World security. I had the opportunity to study these emerging dynamics up close and personal for a year beginning in late summer 1993 at the United States Mission to the United Nations, and I became increasingly knowledgeable about the rapidly developing peacekeeping sector.

Then in the late 1990s I developed an interest in refugee studies and suddenly found myself keeping company with scholars and practitioners of humanitarianism. Again, the reasons were circumstantial. Because of my experiences at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and research on the Rwandan genocide (I will say more later), I became deeply interested in the global institutions that were assigned responsibility for protecting the world’s most vulnerable populations. Also, the international policy and scholarly community increasingly treated refugee flows as part of international security, mass displacement as both a consequence and a cause of conflict, and refugee repatriation and resettlement as an essential cornerstone for any stable peace. The intersecting interests in global governance and refugees directed me to the door of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, which became my gateway to the complex connections between security and humanitarianism. I found myself in a completely different world; in fact, my world turned upside down. Whereas once I treated the growing connection between security and humanitarianism as an instance of the humanization of security, always a good thing, aid workers were warning me about the dangers of securitization of humanitarianism. I began looking at the post-Cold War transformation of humanitarianism, realized that I could not talk about “after” without having a good sense of what came “before,” and so started a project on the history of humanitarianism. Only recently did I look backwards, connect the practices of peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and humanitarianism, and discover a body—the international humanitarian order.

While the essays were written against the backdrop of a changing international humanitarian order, I must re-state that the international humanitarian order was not born in 1990 but rather has a long history. Indeed, even a slight awareness of that history should disabuse anyone from thinking that the observed developments and dilemmas, causes and consequences, of the international humanitarian order are novel. At best the emerging international order was part rupture from, part return to, and part continuation of all that came before. The desire to save failed states sounds and looks a lot like nineteenth century civilizing missions. The dilemmas that beset humanitarian relief were present during the Cold War, during World War Two, during World War One, and during various colonial interventions. There is very little that is new under the sun, even if each day brings something different.

International (humanitarian) orders and constructivist international relations theory

I have explored various aspects of the international humanitarian order with the aid of constructivist international relations theory. I am not a constructivist, although in a discipline that feels the same need to place scholars into existing boxes as zoologists to classify animals and botanists plants, my work tends to get labeled in this way. I am not entirely comfortable with this designation. Theory is a tool and not a religion, and I have drawn from whatever tools might be useful for understanding the issues at hand and am not worried about being labeled a heretic. Moreover, while I owe a tremendous debt to those international relations theorists who are closely identified with constructivist international relations, I found myself gravitating more toward those eminent social scientists that worked at the intersection of culture and action, including Max Weber, and political theorists who offered a complex and at times uncomfortable understanding of the relationship between history and ethics, including Hannah Arendt. I do not entirely reject the label, though. Constructivism has helped me both explore my existing research questions and, most importantly, formulate the questions I want to ask. Consequently, I want to briefly address how constructivism influenced my approach to the international humanitarian order, and, in turn, how the international humanitarian order exposes some shortcomings in current trends in constructivism.

The “problem of order” has been central to the study of international relations since the discipline’s founding, but the unexpected and rapid end of the Cold War invested the topic with considerable urgency and import. It is mildly ironic that the school of international relations, namely realism, which prided itself on a keen awareness of “reality” and intimate knowledge of Soviet–American conflict dynamics could have been caught completely flat-footed by the end of the Cold War. Although few, if any, international relations theorists predicted the collapse of the superpower rivalry and the demise of the Soviet Union, the failure to see this “black swan” proved particularly damaging to a school of thought whose authority rested on its presumed expertise regarding patterns of war and peace. To compound matters, when during the Cold War realists speculated about possible endings they imagined scenarios from bad to worse, from major power war to nuclear destruction.

Realists also seemed particularly ill-suited to explain the emerging organization and architecture of the post-Cold War order. Certainly any international order would be built on the foundation of national interests, but states were actively debating what were their national interests. It was trivially true t...

Table of contents

• Security and Governance Series
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Section I UN and world order
• Section II The ethics of intervention
• Index