Security Operations Since 1999

An interesting lens through which to examine normative and operational change emerging from ongoing UN security operations is the development of the responsibility to protect (R2P). In 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) issued The Responsibility to Protect, which provides a snapshot of issues surrounding nonconsensual international military action to foster humanitarian values. ¹ The ICISS was responding to two sets of events. The first were several moral pleas in 1999 from the future Nobel laureate, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who argued that human rights concerns transcended claims of sovereignty, a theme that he put forward more delicately a year later at the Millennium Summit. ² The reaction was loud, bitter, and predictable, especially from China, Russia, and throughout the Global South. “Intervention”—for whatever reasons, including humanitarian—remained taboo. ³ The second set of events concerned the weak, untimely, and inadequate reactions by the Security Council in Rwanda and the Balkans. In both cases, the Security Council was unable to act expeditiously and authorize the use of military force to protect vulnerable populations. The role of humanitarian concerns as a possible exception to the general prohibition on the threat and use of military force is one of the most salient dimensions of contemporary UN security operations.