permanent member opposition forward for public vote.14 The number of resolutions passed by the UNSC dramatically spiked at the end of the Cold War and has remained significantly high since. The same is true for Chapter VII resolutions, and most sanctions regimes and peacekeeping operations also were established in the post–Cold War period.15 Increasing UNSC action reflects both the altered political environment within the council among its members and dramatic change in international society. Not only has the number of armed conflicts increased—peaking in the early 1990s with only a minor decline in the subsequent decade—the character of these conflicts has changed from primarily interstate to intrastate.16 Changes in Security Council behavior and the council’s justifications for that behavior suggest that the meaning of sovereignty and the purpose of military force have shifted since the end of the Cold War and continue to evolve. These changes have not occurred without contestation, however. Severe disagreement on the source of sovereign authority and the character of violence in target states as well as the appropriate military response have seriously strained relations among permanent members and can temporarily block Security Council action, as the chapters on Kosovo and Libya will demonstrate.
In contemporary international politics, the Charter of the United Nations provides the normative framework through which contestation over the legitimate use of force occurs, and the Security Council is the forum in which that debate takes place. According to the Charter, there are only two legal justifications for the use of military force: self-defense (protected by Article 51) and with the authorization of the UNSC under Chapter VII. Historically, other resort to military force was considered aggression because protecting state sovereignty was considered the heart of the legal regime of the UN. Article 2 affirms the sovereign equality of states, proscribes the threat or use of military force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states, and prohibits the UN from interfering in matters that fall within the domestic jurisdiction of states. Nonetheless, the core principles and purposes of the UN outlined in the preamble and Chapter 1 of the Charter include the achievement of international cooperation in solving international humanitarian problems and the reaffirmation of fundamental human rights, in addition to the prevention of war and maintenance of international peace and security. Changes in the international political and normative context since 1989 have prompted debate within the Security Council about other purposes for which military force should be used. Originally, different organs were created to achieve the UN’s diverse purposes. The Charter tasks the UNSC with maintaining international peace and security and regulating sovereignty, whereas the encouragement and monitoring of human rights was assigned to the Economic and Social Council and its Commission on Human Rights, which was replaced by the Human Rights Council in 2006. A strict separation of responsibility was largely maintained between the two bodies until 1991, when the subject of human rights entered the UNSC for the first time during the Gulf War. This sparked rancorous debate among council members: China and India argued that addressing human rights concerns was not within the competency of the council and therefore inappropriate, citing the division of labor created by the Charter.17 Despite these concerns, the UNSC passed Resolution 688 with ten affirmative votes, defining the transborder effects of human rights violations in Iraq as a threat to international peace and security and bringing human rights concerns within the purview of the Security Council for the first time. Human rights concerns that pertain to international peace and security have continued to be a legitimate subject of Security Council deliberation ever since.
The United Nations, Human Rights, and Sovereignty
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 and has been essential to “establishing the contours of the contemporary consensus on internationally recognized human rights.”18 Indeed the Universal Declaration was created to define more clearly and completely what the drafters of the Charter meant when they referenced human rights in the preamble and identified promoting human rights as a purpose of the UN. Contemporary human rights norms are generally accepted to be the rights of individuals that are codified in the Universal Declaration and the United Nations’ other human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which together with the Universal Declaration make up what is commonly termed the International Bill of Human Rights. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (or the Genocide Convention) is also cited by members of the UNSC as providing both the humanitarian and human rights justification for the use of force. Martha Finnemore argues that contemporary beliefs about human rights at the domestic and international level have transformed understandings of the legitimate use of military force to include responding to humanitarian crises and stopping mass atrocities.19 Only since the early 1990s has humanitarian intervention become a legitimate response to human rights violations reaching the gravity of crimes against humanity or genocide in sovereign states.
Sovereignty, in addition to being well defined in the Charter, is considered to be the grundnorm of international society.20 According to Robert Jackson, sovereignty is “a legal institution that authenticates a political order based on independent states whose governments are the principal authorities both domestically and internationally.”21 The core notion of sovereignty has been enduring but its practices are “periodically renovated” to respond to historical changes in circumstances.22 Daniel Philpott conceptualizes sovereignty in terms of “revolutions” or periods of conceptual change where notions of authority are revised in significant ways, despite the permanence of the institution.23 Because sovereignty is a social construct rather than a material condition, Bruce Cronin argues, it is the “subject of interpretation and re-interpretation by the participants in the nation-state system.”24
While sovereignty became an institutionalized political norm in the twentieth century, in practice there remained a significant tension over whether sovereignty should be determined on a territorial basis—where historical borders are sacrosanct even when they do not match the demographic facts of the state within those borders—or based on the political desire for self-rule of a distinctive group of people.25 Indeed this unresolved tension about what constitutes legitimate statehood is often a cause of the massive human rights violations that elicit humanitarian interventions. Internationally sanctioned military intervention as a response of the international community to state-led ethnic cleansing represents a revision in sovereignty—one that demands more stringent guarantees of individual rights within a state.26 This revolution in sovereignty reemphasizes the nation-state as the primary actor in international politics rather than displaces it because it problematizes legitimate state authority over people and borders rather than that state authority itself.
The meaning of sovereignty derives from the international community of sovereign states because state sovereignty requires mutual recognition. Members of the broader global system of states have consistently placed constraints on sovereign independence. Despite enduring commitment to state sovereignty as a principle, in practice, the revocation, temporary suspension, or violation of sovereignty rights has regularly occurred in the international society of states.27 Since the end of the Cold War, however, the revocation or temporary suspension of sovereignty has been justified on the basis of violations of fundamental human rights and international humanitarian law. Indeed the current and past three secretaries-general of the United Nations—Ban Ki-Moon (2007–present), Kofi Annan (1997–2006), Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992–1996), and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (1982–1991)—have all recognized that “the evolution of international human rights standards and support for their implementation has now reached the stage where norms of non-intervention, and the related deference to sovereignty rights, no longer apply to the same extent in the face of severe human rights or humanitarian abuses.”28 This contradicts the practice throughout much of the UN’s history, during which it regarded the state’s treatment of its own population to be within the domestic jurisdiction of states. The balance between these two normative values has shifted in response to several factors at the end of the twentieth century, including the end of the Cold War, an increase in intrastate conflict and a dramatic rise in mass atrocity crimes, the growth of the human rights movement and the growing