Causal Stories and Humanitarian Intervention.

During the 1990s the the United Nations Security Council authorized military interventions into several sovereign states to halt gross human rights abuses. Yet during this same time period humanitarian interventions did not occur in contexts where the scope or scale of mass killing was arguably as significant, or greater than the conflicts in which the use of force was undertaken. Why do great powers fail to protect human life in some places but intervene militarily to stop human rights abuses in others? In order to answer this question, the paper does a discourse analysis of Security Council meeting records on a case of intervention (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and a case where intervention was possible but did not happen (Democratic Republic of Congo). The paper builds a theory of causal stories and humanitarian intervention based on the work of Deborah Stone who argues that difficult conditions only become problems to be solved once they are seen as amenable to human action (Stone, 1989: 281). In short, the paper argues that in order for humanitarian intervention to occur, permanent members of the UNSC must adopt a particular frame for understanding the character of conflict, an intentional causal story with clear victims and identifiable and intentional perpetrators. It argues that there is a connection between the ways in which Security Council members conceptualize conflicts and their decisions to intervene in cases of ethnic cleansing. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]