Ed Webb's List: R2P Discussion

• the Force Intervention Brigade, made up of 3,000 soldiers from South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi. Rather than waiting for attacks, the United Nations Security Council authorized the troops to “neutralize armed groups.” It was a major departure from the often passive approach that has given peacekeepers a bad reputation, from failing to prevent the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica to not intervening to stop the massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda

• “I think it has contributed to rebuilding the credibility of the U.N., which was almost nonexistent in the Congo after years of humiliation,” said Jean-Marie Guéhenno, who was the United Nations peacekeeping chief from 2000 to 2008, and under whose watch its blue helmets were overwhelmed by rebel forces in eastern Congo.

   The shift could have broad implications for peacekeeping operations all over the world. Nearly 100,000 uniformed personnel serve under the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, from the Western Sahara and Haiti to the island of Cyprus and the mountains of Kashmir.
• The decision to send the blue helmets into offensive operations has not met with universal approval. Humanitarian aid organizations worry that the shift could put their workers at risk because armed groups will not distinguish between soldiers and those who feed, heal and house civilians in war.

• A more aggressive approach could also alienate countries like India and Uruguay, which have traditionally sent many troops to serve in United Nations operations. Such countries see peacekeeping missions as a way to get training, equipment and extra pay for their forces with relatively little risk of casualties.

2 more annotations...

• US military will incorporate counter-atrocity planning into its operating procedures
• a presidential study directive (number 10 ^↑ ) issued in 2011 that aimed to bridge the gap between national interest and altruistic intervention. It claimed that "preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest" as well as "a core moral responsibility of the United States. Our security is affected when masses of civilians are slaughtered, refugees flow across borders, and murderers wreak havoc on regional stability and livelihoods. America's reputation suffers, and our ability to bring about change is constrained, when we are perceived as idle in the face of mass atrocities and genocide."
• genocide campaigners should beware functioning as the administration’s cheerleaders. Even if atrocity-prevention is a national interest, that hardly means it will trump other national interests - strategic and commercial, for example.The fate of the "ethical dimension" of New Labour’s foreign policy is a warning: it remained just a dimension, and an increasingly subordinate one at that.
• It is one thing to sanction your enemies in the name of fine ideals, but if you don’t mobilise the United Nations to do the same against your allies, these ideals are tarnished
• Israel’s leaders, the pro-Israel lobby in the US, and some "genocide scholars" are already framing their proposed attack as "genocide prevention". Yet the last thing genocide prevention needs is to be linked to aggressive war, which will severely discredit the whole idea.
• The Atrocities Prevention Board, to live up to its name, cannot ignore the way that US military policies daily produce atrocities. Genocide campaigners need to be alive to these dangers, and campaign against US policy when it too causes violence against civilians. The potential of the Obama administration’s latest moves to prevent some atrocities should be noted, but there must be sustained vigilance lest they end up being mobilised to produce other atrocities.

4 more annotations...

• In the debate over “Responsibility-to-Protect”, assumptions, cultural myths and language conspire to promote unwise military action.
• R2P proponents insist that their doctrine prefers non-military approaches. But the language of the debate suggests otherwise: robust by definition means strong and healthy, but in the international community’s debate over approaches to conflict it is usually a synonym for military and violent. The double-edged phrase last resort implies both that the military option has great risks but also that if all other means fail, this is the one that will work.
• I have had the opportunity to spend some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo in recent years, assessing strategies for the protection of civilians, in a situation where the international community and the UN have put all their eggs in the military basket. Many Congolese themselves are also desperately hoping for military salvation. Yet after a decade of blue berets and billions of dollars spent, civilians remain totally vulnerable to privations from armed groups as well as from the (UN-supported) Congolese military. This year the UN was faced with broad-based pressure to do something more. Despite there being no objective assessment of the real protective impact on the Congolese people of the current militarized approach, the only “new” strategy they could come up with was to strengthen the military approach and approve a UN force with an explicit offensive mandate: more military, more “robustly” offensive.
• Interestingly, a recent study looking at a different type of conflict – resistance movements against repressive regimes – suggests that in the last hundred years, unarmed resistance movements were more successful at achieving their objectives than armed ones. (Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.)  With adequate research, the hypothesis of a correlation in international interventions between military force and protective impact might be shown to be valid, or it might not. But in the meantime it is largely a myth, a heuristic simplification that gives us a too-readily-available and simple answer to complex situations. It is also a myth that gives many people hope, because we deeply wish that there were a quick solution to the human suffering we are witnessing in the conflicts that prompt these debates.
• Those in power who order violence against civilians are usually linked to a range of powerful economic interests, and may be even more sensitive to economic pressures than to military ones. (In fact, external military threats can sometimes serve to strengthen domestic support for a targeted group – consider how Hezbollah has benefitted from Israeli attacks on Lebanon.)
• It should not be surprising that we cannot control the arms trade, for instance, when huge multinational interests in the US and Europe make so much money from it;
• The point here is not that economic measures are better or worse than military ones, but rather that there is no self-evident hierarchy among them

5 more annotations...

• In the absence of any context, the image becomes an abstraction; it is an image of European soldiers, acting in the name of the international community and benevolently protecting a group of happy but poor, brown children in some nameless tropical locale. In other words, this is the new portrait of the white man's burden.