September 03, 2012
The First DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposium
Dear Reader,
We are very pleased to announce a collaboration with the Amsterdam-based Dialogue Advisory Group (DAG) to bring to our audience quarterly online symposia on topics of international peace and justice.
DAG is an organization which discreetly assists government, inter-government and other actors to confidentially manage national and international mediation efforts. Their work is by its nature confidential and therefore not well known to the public. Among their publicly known activities is DAG’s involvement in verifying the ETA ceasefire in Basque Country and the decommissioning of the weapons of INLA, a dissident Republican armed group in Northern Ireland.
DAG is directed by Ram Manikkalingam who also teaches politics at the University of Amsterdam. He advised the previous President of Sri Lanka during the peace process with the Tamil Tigers and prior to that advised the Rockefeller Foundation’s program in international peace and security.
In the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia internationally recognized figures will debate challenges in conflict resolution and human rights. One author will present a thesis in the form of a short essay and then the others will present critiques of that point of view. Finally, the initial author will also have an opportunity to present a rebuttal to the critiques.
For the first symposium the topic is whether military intervention is a desirable and viable means to end human rights violations. This is a particularly timely subject because of the ongoing international debate on how to end the recent turmoil in Syria.
The distinguished participants in our first symposium are:
- David Petrasek: Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International affairs,
University of Ottawa, formerly Special Adviser to the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, has worked extensively on human rights, humanitarian and conflict resolution issues, including for Amnesty International (1990-96), for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-98), for the International Council on Human Rights Policy (1998-02), and as Director of Policy at the HD Centre (2003-07). He has taught international human rights and/or humanitarian law courses at the Osgoode Hall Law School, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at Lund University, Sweden, and at Oxford University. - Gareth Evans: Australian Foreign Minister (1988-96) and President of the International Crisis Group (2000-09), co-chaired the International Commission on State Sovereignty (2001), is a member of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Committee on the Prevention of Genocide, and is the author of The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Brookings Institution Press 2008, 2009). He is Chancellor of The Australian National University.
- Kenneth Roth: Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading international human rights organizations. Roth has also served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations. You may follow him on Twitter: @KenRoth
I would like to thank the participants as well as Fleur Ravensbergen and Amanda Beugeling of the Dialogue Advisory Group for working closely with me in organizing these symposia. The logo for the symposia has been designed by Amanda Beugeling.
We look forward to your comments and feedback.
Yours,
S. Abbas Raza
NOTE: DAG and 3QD wish to acknowledge the generous contribution of the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research) toward these symposia, as well as the support of our readers.
THE SYMPOSIUM
[Click the links below to read the essays.]
- The New Interventionism – Promise and Reality by David Petrasek
- Mass Atrocity Crimes Are Everybody's, Not Nobody's, Business by Gareth Evans
- Stopping an Occasional Genocide is Better than None by Kenneth Roth
- Further Thoughts on the New Interventionism by David Petrasek
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Please leave comments about any of the essays in the symposium on this post. Thank you.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:25 AM | Permalink
Comments
This debate highlights the tension between Responsibilities- as in the 'Responsibility to Protect' (R2P) which is the other side of the coin of the doctrine of 'Command Responsibility' judiciable by an International tribunal- and permissive Rights- the Right to intervene(R2I), by a given Nation, in a foreign conflict without being labelled an aggressor.
Do Responsibilities (which arise by virtue of one's office or status) give rise to Permissive Rights such that actions previously ultra vires or illegitimate become so because of exigent circumstances?
Clearly, some such doctrine has intuitive appeal. India and Pakistan, though not on friendly terms, came to the aid of Sri Lanka when that country faced a Communist (JVP) insurgency in 1971. More controversially, India intervened against Pakistan to help create Bangladesh in the same year.
Were such actions really prompted by a 'R2P' or was it the case that elites in the sub continent , putting aside their own squabbles, were uniting against a common threat from below?
What about the case of Pakistani pilots flying Saudi Arabian planes to come to the defense of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan against the Palestinians during the 'Black September'uprising? Was it a similar case of 'class solidarity' among ruling elites or was it a humanitarian'R2P'?
Indira Gandhi, the Indian Premier, vehemently asserted R2I in the case of Bangladesh, and gained electoral advantage by it, but kept quiet about Sri Lanka. Pakistan highlighted the success of its ace pilots against Israel but keeps quiet about Black September.
Similarly, at this moment of turmoil in the Arab World, this 'R2P' has a visible side- highly publicized action or the demand for action against certain regimes threatened from below- and a, probably more effective and powerful, hidden side where other Regimes in the area are being propped up against similar threats.
Our intuition is that Responsibilities can be discharged in a confidential and opaque manner- but Rights, by their indefeasible nature, are best exercised Publicly. But this creates a problem for discourse based on the Principle of Public Justification- 'R2P' does not, perhaps can not, come clean about its hidden coercion whereas 'R2I' has an incentive to toot its own horn and exaggerate its own impact.
By looking at 'R2P' through an 'R2I' lens Public Justification discourse is being derailed along adventurist, preference falsification, lines.
The hidden web of coercion implicit in the notion of Responsibility (especially R2P)is what needs to be examined. R2I is just the publicly visible tip of the R2P iceberg.
The quantum of Coercion publicly justifiable tends to change dramatically over the course of a conflict. There is a sort of tipping point such that reasonable people can go from 'do nothing' to 'intervene massively and don't stop till the bad guys are put away.' But, what if this observable verity is founded in some bio-sociological fact about our species rather than rational calculation?
This debate needs more painstaking investigation of how Responsibilities like R2P are discharged by States and non State actors, rather than focusing on the sexy manner in which Rights are asserted.
Perhaps, as a sequel to ' Team America- World Police' we need a'Team Everybody Else- World Sociologists', though of course nothing can sublate the eternal verity revealed at the end of the first film.
Posted by: windwheel | Sep 3, 2012 5:00:08 AM
Haven't gotten to any of the essays yet but I must point out that this entire project is very, very cool.
Yeah, I said 'cool'. I can't find a better word right now.
Posted by: DrunktankDan | Sep 3, 2012 5:04:16 AM
By way of two quick points, one possibly petty and the other substantive:
- to start with the petty, I find it difficult to find a place in the reasoned debate of a difficult, contentious and heavily fact-contingent proposition for this sort of thing from Prof. Evans' comment about Petrasek:
"adding, to an already considerable academic pile, one more layer of rather over-hyped angst about the risks of interventionist over-reach"
I don't know if this is intended to be stereotypically bombastic larrikinism to demonstrate Evans' machismo, larrikinism or something else, but - really - it speaks more of defensive arrogance than an attempt to address what are quite cogent empirical objections to the ongoing R2P project, as it has been pursued to date.
- the second is to consider why, as reflected in Petrosek's examples, the normative project of R2P is proving quite so fruitless thus far. The point, as Roth appears to accept, is that decisions to commit forces to conflict continue to be dictated by individual calculations of state interest and the convoluted process of posturing and bargaining within the UNSC and among the P5, rather than by normative principle. The example of peacekeeping does suggest some scope for normatively driven commitment of forces - albeit there in a far less risky context - but getting from there to this raises what looks to be a basic incompatibility between conditioning R2P on large-scale atrocity likely necessitating large-scale intervention and seeking a normative duty to intervene. The bar becomes too high and excludes, for example, the NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia.
By contrast, the concept of the "responsibility while protecting" by contrast seems much more effectual, not least because - in an echo of the greater success of ius in bello over ius in bellum - there is a collective need for normative governance of how forces, once committed, then conduct themselves.
Beyond this, thanks to the authors and to 3QD - with luck, this can prove a fruitful discussion.
Posted by: Max | Sep 3, 2012 6:19:27 AM
What a great idea. This is a subject about which I feel strongly... somehow we must get rid of violence from the discourse amongst nations and within nations. That of course means reduce conflict. DAG is new to me but sound great. 3QD is of course a great forum, with considerable following and such debates will bring up ideas that may actually be adapted by the conflicted parties. My strong support for this new forum for debate. Thanks.
Posted by: Tasnim | Sep 3, 2012 6:55:17 AM
Only time to glance devouringly today, will read for real tomorrow. What a great thing to have here -- many thanks to all involved.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Sep 3, 2012 4:17:35 PM
Thanks to the contributors for an engaging discussion. I suppose I remain a little confused, but that may be because our understanding of the flaws of the R2P, when taken together, suggest that the doctrines shortcomings have opposite effects.
Funnily, the basis of David Petrasek’s skepticism about the value and impact of the R2P doctrine in cases of humanitarian disaster is in many ways echoes the criticisms of R2P made by those who are commonly pro-intervention, even if he holds the opposite position on intervention.
Just prior to the Libyan intervention, some critics feared that the threshold for intervention, listed by Gareth Evans, was high, so unreasonably high, that the doctrine would actual serve to prevent intervention when it was needed. This threshold itself was and is tied further to a practical constraint that involves a political and public appeal to counterfactuals, what would happen in the failure of intervention, and an identification of the immanence of the threat. The latter set of skeptics worried about the viability of R2P when it looked like there would be no intervention in defense of Benghazi, as Libyan government tanks and warships headed toward the city.
While this latter set of concerns about the viability of R2P came from those who thought it threatened to make intervention less likely when it was most needed, it shares with Petrasek, the concern of an ‘adverse selection’ problem with interventions. Petrasek raises common objections to the doctrine and to principle based intervention generally: why this atrocity and not others? If self-interest becomes the deciding factor, how can the intervention not be tainted by the pursuit of these interests? All agree that
Some of these worries have been voiced from the inception of R2P, and have been even voiced about a retrospective desire to intervene in Rwanda (Mamdani, for example). The response to these concerns, made in this symposium by Gareth Evans and Ken Roth, have also been common if not unequivocal. Selective action is something that some can live with for now and others less so. All generally seem to agree that more should be done to make the principle more evenly applied across cases.
Less explicitly made by Patresak is a more interesting argument that the R2P brings with it a certain moral hazard or set of moral hazards. Many of these claims are implicit but Patresak is clear about the route to these disasters.
1. The vagueness of the threshold criteria for R2P, which are, in Patresak’s words, “malleable, imprecise and speculative, allowing even well-meaning people to reach different conclusions.”
2. The very presence of an almost obligatory threat of intervention rooted international law that undermines the peacemakers, specifically, the fact that “with human rights argument tilted towards the interventionists, the peacemakers are forced on the defensive - to explain their ‘compromises’, their willingness to engage in dialogue with the criminally culpable.”
3. And, the selective application of R2P to some cases and not others, which tinges interventions with the national self-interest of the interveners.
The hazard that emerge from these three challenges are where Patresak’s argument gets interesting.
Vagueness (and often self-contradiction), he implies, will lead to too much intervention, and mis-intervention at that—neo-imperial powers using human rights as a shield for the pursuit of self-interest through military means, something that has been politically tainted since WW2. (“One of the most important achievements in establishing the UN was to outlaw war except in self-defence,” may best capture what Patresak’s thinks is at risk with a faulty doctrine.) R2P with its faults may be jeopardizing one of the greater accomplishments of the international order.
Second with the R2P providing a background threat of force, some conflicts may actually be made worse, as peacemakers are on the defensive, and certain comprises in the pursuit of peace become less likely. According to this fear, the R2P in effect leads to perverse effects—longer and more aggressive wars against civilians, not less.
He also tells us that (re 3) there is the “risk that, over time, the inconsistent application of principle will breed distrust about one’s intentions, and undermines support for the principle,” that is selective humanitarian military intervention will erode support for intervention. That is, the doctrine becomes futile, as its very practice undermines support for meaningful intervention.
Notice that some of these concerns are at odds with each other, which is not to say that they are not legitimate. Patresak explicitly states this, “we need – urgently - to build an international consensus around action to prevent and stop mass atrocity, and have enormous respect for the demonstrated commitment of both to do so. But against the backdrop of Syria, it is hard not to see that the interventionist edge to R2P may often be a hindrance not a help to such a task.” But this is the argument that Patresak has not made, how R2P cannot be improved and reformed. Patresak has only raised areas of concern with R2P, but not how R2P itself undermines the creation of more effective interventionary institutions and princinciples.
The fact that the arguments jump in different directions and that they cite divergent effects suggests that Patresak may be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and may even be missing how these different limitation balance each other out. I’m tempted to suggest that these concerns also raise competing and countervening forces, ones that may actually balance each other, though I have little evidence to suggest that they do at the moment. What is unclear is what Patresak would have in stead of R2P. “International consensus around action to prevent and stop mass atrocity,” is more vague than R2P.
Posted by: Robin | Sep 3, 2012 6:44:15 PM
When people ask whether "we" should intervene in another country, it's code. They really mean should the U.S. use military weapons to attack another country. The answer is no.
Looking from the point of the U.S. constitution, (1) only congress can declare war; (2) Nato is just a front group used by U.S. presidents to involve this country in war when they legally have no authority to do that; and (3) the congress of the U.S. can only declare war when another nation has attacked or threatened to attack us. #3 is important because it is the essence of international law which prohibits wars of aggression. We cannot invade another country under the claim that its government is bad to its citizens.
Any "intervention" which includes the use of military weapons or force is just another way of saying that some group should declare war against some nation. But that is illegal under international law.
The exception, of course, would be for unarmed NGOs to offer medical, shelter, food, and so on, to the civilian population of a country at war, or offer safe passage for them to move to a bordering nation until the conflict is over.
Posted by: NABNYC | Sep 3, 2012 9:46:44 PM
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