Introduction
The critical realist methodology argues that human-centred philosophies fall foul of reducing the theory of reality and being to the theory of nature or behaviour of actors.Footnote 1 According to this fallacy, the whole (organisation) is never more than the sum of its parts (members of an organisation). Chris Brown, for example, argues: ‘These [the United Nations and the UN Security Council] are not bodies that have some kind of collective existence apart from their members.’Footnote 2Contra Brown, this article will claim that methodological individualist approaches are flawed simply because they fail to see the wood (UN system) for the trees (members of the system).
According to methodological individualism, all social phenomena, and particularly the functioning of all social institutions, should always be seen as resulting from the decisions of individual actors.Footnote 3 Political realist theories tend towards methodological individualism by reducing all the powers of the UN and all the explanatory factors of the Security Council's successes and failures to its members, with no role accorded to the structures and mechanisms of the UN within which they were embedded. According to a Hobbesian political realist worldview, the UN and not least its security component the Security Council is, to use R. J. Barry Jones's characterisation, nothing more than a ‘society of states, created by states, for states’.Footnote 4 By emphasising the ‘political will’ on the part of member states, the mainstream literature tends to attribute the explanatory factors of the Security Council's performance to (state) agents and their volition, without considering that their will and behaviour is, to a greater or lesser degree, enabled and constrained by certain structures and mechanisms. Structures here encompass the norms and institutions of the UN, while mechanisms denote control processes of the Organisation.
The ontologicalFootnote 5 assumptions and flaws of political realists are similar to those of neo-liberal institutionalist theories, which do not considerably deviate from the statist worldview. Robert O. Keohane, who has been hailed by his contemporaries as the leading neo-liberal institutionalist, asserts that ‘Institutionalist theory assumes that states are the principal actors in world politics.’Footnote 6 Neo-liberals take a step towards examining institutional structures, but still regard states as the real powers and cannot see any substantial independent powers lying in institutions. Therefore, they lack suggestions of how the UN Secretariat may make any difference in preventing and managing conflicts once states decide to freeze all humanitarian interventions. Therefore, the ‘missing piece in the puzzle’ is the ‘surrounding structures and mechanisms’ of the Security Council, that is, the conglomeration of mechanisms and their underlying structures that possess independent powers in relation to the decision-making of state representatives and UN officials.
The problem of solving this puzzle lies not only in finding the ‘missing piece’, but also entails interrogating the ‘scattering of pieces’, namely the atomisticFootnote 7 worldview harboured by existing studies. This article will claim that previous accounts manage to identify the key actors and central themes of UN conflict management, but fail to move beyond this to a necessary examination of interrelations between the agents and their intersubjective properties. As individualism prevails in political realist theories, the mainstream accounts of the UN tend to also emphasise the role of certain individual member states of the Security Council, the US in particular.Footnote 8 Together with political realists, neo-liberals also represent the individualist line of thinking typified by Robert O. Keohane and Lisa L. Martin, who contend that ‘Institutions are important “independently” only in the ordinary sense used in social science: controlling for the effects of power and interests, it matters whether they exist.’Footnote 9 Thus, one symptom of methodological individualism is that while the material powers and interests of individual states are emphasised, there is a complete disregard for identity and other intersubjective properties, such as groupthink and the emergent products of cooperation between the Security Council and the Secretariat.
The first section of this article will provide an overview of the main differences between critical realism and individualist theories of International Relations (IR) with regard to research on international organisations. Based on this methodological framework, the second section will analyse the powers of the UN Security Council. The third section will proceed to investigate one crucial aspect of that organisation, namely the early warning mechanism. The final section will close the whole argumentative circle of this paper by considering its practical and theoretical implications for emancipation. This article aims to widen the ontological horizon of research from an exclusive focus on the actors emphasised by previous accounts towards an inclusion of mechanisms and structures. The hypothesis here posits that the UN Security Council constitutes what critical realists term an ‘open system’: it is composed of fifteen member states, but what makes this group of state representatives the Security Council in control of international security threats, rather than a closed gentleman's club of ambassadors, is the surrounding framework of structures and mechanisms of the UN. The first two sections will demonstrate how the critical realist philosophy illuminates a novel way of understanding the Security Council as an open system and of conceiving the UN conflict management system as a related whole, in which control mechanisms play a central role. The term ‘mechanism’ here means ‘social control’ by monitoring institutions. According to this definition, as Colin Wight describes, ‘A mechanism, even a social mechanism, is a process or technique for achieving a desired end state or outcome.’Footnote 10 In the case of an early warning mechanism, for example, the desired outcome is the early detection of potential genocides.
‘Control mechanisms’ in the context of UN conflict management are understood as causal linkages by which images of outside security threats are produced in the UN system. These linkages denote both the relationship between the ‘two principal organs’Footnote 11 of the UN with regard to the maintenance of peace and security, namely the Security Council and the Secretariat, and their connection to the outside security environment: the Secretariat seeks to detect and issue warnings of forthcoming security threats under Article 99 of the UN Charter, whilst the Council bearing the greatest responsibility for peace and security under the Charter uses such information as raw materials for its conceptualisation of and reaction to conflicts. In sum, a control mechanism penetrates the whole UN system and functions as a ‘conduit’ between input (outside conflict) and output (images of conflict). Although control mechanisms are, metaphorically, the ‘eyes and ears’ of the Council, they can also serve to blind the Council to reality. When the dysfunctions of mechanisms overpower their functions, as in the Rwandan case, ‘blinders’ (dysfunction) supplies a more fitting metaphor for mechanisms than ‘eyes and ears’ (function). As in Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore's account, ‘dysfunction’ here is understood as ‘behaviour that undermines the IO's [international organisations'] stated objectives’.Footnote 12
Control mechanisms are intersubjective and emergent properties of the UN, for they usually emerge through interaction between member states and the Secretariat. One example of this type of interaction took place in January 1992, when the President of the Council asked the Secretary-General to come up with recommendations for strengthening the conflict management capacity of the UN, and Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali responded to this by writing An Agenda for Peace. The Agenda, published in May 1992, envisaged the establishment of early warning mechanisms, which were supposed to move the focus of UN conflict management from previous reactive and ex post facto measures to more proactive and preventive strategies.Footnote 13
As opposed to the Kantian idea of universal structures and to the positivist belief in universal covering-law explanations, critical realism assumes that mechanisms in the social world are always socio-historical, shaped by surrounding conditions in a particular time and place.Footnote 14 As one instructive example, the third section of this paper will explore the early warning mechanism situated in the socio-historical context of the early 1990s which saw a fleeting moment of optimism in the UN Security Council's long history of impasse: it was an interregnum between the Cold War paralysis, caused by the bipolarity of world politics in the 1980s, and the late 1990s paralysis, caused by the crushing disappointments of UN peacekeeping in the early and mid-1990s.Footnote 15 This was the era during which the Security Council, in cooperation with the Secretariat, demonstrated an unprecedented willingness to monitor international conflicts with the aim of preventing their outbreak in the first place. During that brief period of optimism, the Council invoked mechanisms by which to control international conflicts. The third section will investigate the emergence of one such mechanism which typified UN conflict management in the early 1990s, namely that of early warning. The point of departure for such a socio-historical examination will be furnished by a groundbreaking report on UN conflict management covering the period from 1992 to 1995, namely Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's An Agenda for Peace (1992).
The fourth section will argue that an exploration of mechanisms might be the key to providing an emancipatory vision. Emancipation here refers to the liberation of agents from unwanted states of affairs.Footnote 16 For this article, emancipation means addressing the crucial question as to what structural amendments or adjustments could be made to the UN system in order to prevent tragic failures, such as the Rwandan disaster. An Agenda for Peace proves that there was a meaningful effort underway in the Security Council to monitor international conflicts at the beginning of the 1990s. If such monitoring mechanisms had worked properly, the Rwandan genocide might have been prevented. Widening the ontological horizon of research from states to control mechanisms yields a more complex view of the UN and the Security Council, but, as a reward, it may reveal unrealised possibilities of emancipation inherent in those mechanisms. It could thus be said that freedom lies within complexity. However, it is equally important to expose those dysfunctions and constraints which hampered the working of control mechanisms. These possible defects may, in turn, encompass not only the lack of political will on the part of member states, but also factors such as human limitations in predicting events in complex civil wars; the rigidity of bureaucratic procedures; the loose coupling of modern organisations; and the ensuing fragmentation of worldview. These novel methodological devices based on critical realism are applied to examine the UN's failure to save those Rwandan civilians who were targeted by génocidaires. Between 7 April and 15 July 1994, approximately 800,000 Tutsi civilians and Hutu moderates were systematically killed by the extremist Hutu interim government,Footnote 17 decimating the original population of seven and a half million people.Footnote 18 In analysing the causes of the UN's failure, the article calls for a methodological turn in IR research from an individualist and atomistic ontology to a relational and holistic one; from explaining the policy of individual member states to understanding the UN system and its relationships as a whole.
Section 1: Setting the scene for analysis: critical realist and IR approaches to studying international organisations
Critical realism draws upon the work of the Frankfurt School by emphasising that knowledge is produced in order to reinforce power structures in society and to serve hidden interests. Social objects, unlike natural ones, are concept and activity-dependent and do not uphold the distinction between fact and value.Footnote 19 Hence, a social scientist should always maintain a critical stance towards research objects and never take speeches, statements and narratives as ‘objective truths’, because they usually serve particular political purposes. The significance of this to understanding the Rwandan drama is that one should critically evaluate certain statements made by UN officials, according to which the UN's failure had nothing to do with its knowledge-production processes in general, or early warning in particular, but was caused by the political unwillingness of member states. Kofi Annan, the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at the time, formulated this claim as follows: ‘If there was a problem, it was not one of information or intelligence. The problem was lack of political will.’Footnote 20 On closer scrutiny, however, Annan's argument cannot be sustained, because the Secretariat did not convey any early warning signals of the genocide to the Security Council until the beginning of May 1994, one month after the massacres had begun. Nevertheless, such statements have, unfortunately, managed to fulfil their ulterior motive: to lead researchers to indict the usual suspects, namely selfish states, and to exclude the Secretariat as part of the UN's knowledge-producing system from the sphere of blame.
Critical realism must be strictly separated from political realism encompassing classical and neo-realism in IR theory. While the latter contains substantial – and often fallible – axioms concerning the universal nature of human beings and the state-system, critical realism allows a socio-historical case study to reveal its particular nature. As opposed to positivism, critical realism deems that explanation based on events, phenomena and appearances is unsatisfactory. One should always go beyond events to explain and understand the structures and mechanisms which produced them.Footnote 21 What this means in terms of research of the UN Security Council is that one should explore the structures and mechanisms operative within the UN system at a particular time.
As opposed to political realism, critical realism is not so much theory but more a methodological approach, as it does not explain a phenomenon as such but only constitutes a general approach to a research topic. Hence, various theories can be applied in critical realist research. In fact, various theories should be applied under the auspices of critical realism, because its initial hypothesis is that a phenomenon is usually not caused by a single factor but by a causal complex of various factors.Footnote 22 Similarly, an event is typically not generated by only one mechanism but by a combination of various mechanisms.Footnote 23 Therefore, all of the explanatory theories are mistaken, if their emphasis on one particular mechanism leads to the reduction of explanation to that mechanism. By emphasising the material powers of states, political realists tend to disregard or underestimate the role that UN institutions and the Secretariat could have played, for example, in lobbying for intervention in Rwanda.Footnote 24 Neo-liberal investigations do take UN institutions into consideration but fail to conceive of how the Secretariat could have made a difference in rescuing Rwandans vis-à-vis states. Critical realism can serve as an ‘umbrella meta-theory’ or ‘safety net’ to prevent the occurrence of such reductionism. This expansion of worldview, in turn, paves the way for an emancipatory vision: if the efforts of individual states and UN officials would have been insufficient to save Rwandans, could states, institutions and mechanisms have made a difference by working together? Although IR research boasts of being inter-disciplinary in nature, compartmentalisation is still prevalent in IR studies and only a few approaches actually succeed in supplying a consistent, multi-theoretical methodology to a research topic. This article argues that critical realism can respond to that challenge.
Moreover, a critical realist approach has the potential to provide a novel understanding of communicative action in international organisations. While Heikki Patomäki has reformulated Habermas' concept of communicative action in critical realist terms,Footnote 25 social constructivists have been more rigorous in their attempts at bringing this notion to IR theory. In common with critical realism, social constructivist IR approaches criticise the methodological individualism of rational choice theory elaborated by neo-liberals and neo-realists.Footnote 26 Furthermore, the critical realist emphasis on relational as opposed to atomistic ontology can easily be accommodated by the constructivist premise that communication is not only characterised by the ‘logic of consequentialism’ and ‘bargaining’ whereby individuals strive to maximise or optimise their given preferences, but also by the ‘logic of arguing’, according to which actors deliberate about the truth, common worldview or mutual understanding in a collective communicative process.Footnote 27 While neo-realists and neo-liberals advocate the former logic, social constructivists and critical realists emphasise the latter. For example, the Security Council's deliberations on Rwanda were, indeed, characterised by bargaining, such as rhetorical remarks by the US that ‘there was no peace to be kept in Rwanda’ by which it strove to maximise its given preference of staying out of the Rwandan quagmire. However, the Council was also engaged in a communicative process of exchanging information, through which it was building a common worldview, or at least a common understanding, of the Rwandan conflict.
Critical realism does not aspire to refute the social constructivist notion of communicative action, but strives to add the ontological depth which is currently lacking in constructivist accounts. The term ‘ontological depth’ refers to the stratification between the surface level of speech acts and the underlying level of mechanisms (preconditions) which regulate them, and whose effects can be physical, mental, normative or social. From the critical realist perspective, such preconditions present a more interesting research object than communicative action itself, as the former to a large extent determine the course of the latter. A communicative action may evolve into a draconian one, if its underlying lifeworld is the product of certain ‘troublemaking’ mechanisms, such as Western normalisation producing racial values. Methodologically, ontological depth simply means enquiring into the causes (mechanisms) of the reasons (communication). While some constructivists consider the communicative action of an interpretive community in itself as a sufficient explanatory mechanism of any given event,Footnote 28 from the critical realist viewpoint describing communicative action per se as a causal explanatory mechanism is somewhat misleading, or deficient. Instead, it is more appropriate to describe the underlying preconditions of communicative action as ‘explanatory mechanisms’.Footnote 29
What appears striking when analysing the Rwandan case is that the Security Council's discussions in April 1994 were characterised neither by obstructions to communicative action, nor by an absence of a common lifeworld. On the contrary, the Council's discussions reflect a certain common understanding of the Rwandan conflict. What appears even more dramatic is the sinister nature of that consensus. By late April 1994, all Council members were complicit in describing the crisis as a civil war rather than a large-scale genocide. Moreover, the conflict was commonly portrayed as constituting mad, chaotic, tribal killing rather than a systematic, organised, and political project aimed at eliminating the Tutsi population.Footnote 30 Given the critical realist supplements to the constructivist conception of communicative action, the observation of such a ‘draconian communicative consensus’ requires an investigation of causal mechanisms not in the communication and speech acts but in their underlying layer of material and social structures, that is, in the structural preconditions that generated and maintained that fatal communicative consensus.Footnote 31
Section 2: The UN Security Council viewed through the critical realist prism
International organisation does not begin on a tabula rasa.Footnote 32
Ramesh ThakurCritical realism initially emerged as a critique of the empiricist fallacy in the philosophy of science. Empiricist methodology has similarly (mis-)led political realists to assume that if national egotism has often paralysed the working of international organisations, particularly with regard to the League of Nations, such an actuality can then be used to explain why the UN is destined to fail. Kenneth N. Waltz, for example, asserts that ‘The League of Nations didn't fail; it was never tried.’Footnote 33 Henry Kissinger proceeds to situate this ‘empirical wisdom’ in the context of the UN by stating of collective security that ‘Not only had nothing like it ever actually occurred, nothing like it was destined to occur in the entire history of both the League of Nations and the United Nations […] the nations of the world tend to disagree either about the nature of the threat or about the type of sacrifice they are prepared to make to meet it.’Footnote 34 Thus, all constraining mechanisms in the UN have been explained in terms of Realpolitik and the selfishness of states, especially relating to the superpowers, as if other mechanisms explaining the UN's failure never existed. In the 1990s, this political realist axiom was coupled with another actualist fallacy, which reduced all the enabling mechanisms of the UN to state powers in general, and to the capabilities of the superpower in particular.
The question then arises as to how this fallacy can be countered. The suggestion advanced here is that the answer lies in the enlargement of the ontological horizon of research. As Steve Smith puts it, ‘[Positivism's] empiricist epistemology has determined what could be studied because it has determined what kinds of things existed in international relations.’Footnote 35 For neo-realists, real = actual = Realpolitik. In contrast, for critical realists, real = actual + possible,Footnote 36 which widens the ontological horizon enormously. Logically, the actual is less extensive than the real, as reality consists not only of actualised mechanisms, such as betrayals of great powers, but also of ‘dormant’, that is, unactualised, mechanisms that ‘wait’ to be actualised by certain triggering conditions.Footnote 37 The domain of actual events is always smaller than the domain of the unactualised possibilities of the world.
From a critical realist perspective, we can therefore state contra Kissinger and other political realists that it is possible that the Security Council is capable of functioning as a collective actor, that early warning mechanisms can be triggered, and that bureaucratic control over international problems can be exercised, which together form a complexity of mechanisms that enables the management of security threats. At the same time, however, it is also possible that, under certain conditions, ‘well-intended’ mechanisms turn into ‘troublemaking’ ones: early warning mechanisms become organisational overload, bureaucratic control may slide into bureaucratic indifference, and so on. Thus, a more holistic view of explanatory mechanisms suggested by critical realism has the potential to provide a deeper and wider account of the causes underlying the Council's success and failure than that offered by the existing literature crippled by the empiricist fallacy.
It is now appropriate to tackle the ontological question as to how critical realism would consider the relationships between actors, structures and mechanisms within the framework of the UN and the Security Council. Roy Bhaskar's Transformational Model of Social Activity contends that although an agent always has the power to transform a social structure, she cannot do so either in a vacuum or under conditions of her own choosing, as the activity of an agent is always enabled and constrained by prior conditions set by that structure.Footnote 38 With regard to the Security Council, the Transformational Model indicates that states do not constantly create but, more usually, just transform or reproduce certain pre-existing structures of the UN. In this Aristotelian sense, the members of the Council can be understood as sculptresses at work, fashioning the product, for example, resolutions, decisions, and presidential statements, out of pre-existing raw-materials, such as norms, organisational culture, and control mechanisms. Concrete structures here encompass the norms and institutions of the UN, such as the UN Charter and the Secretariat, which enable and constrain the activity of the fifteen member states by delineating the boundaries of proper state behaviour in the international community.
For example, the structural basis for the powers exercised by the Secretariat in relation to the Council is set out in Article 99 of the UN Charter: ‘The Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.’Footnote 39 Article 99 here represents a structure, which, on the one hand, enables the activity of state actors in the sense that they can receive information on potential conflicts through the Secretary-General's briefings. On the other hand, Article 99 constrains the activity of the member states: once state representatives are made aware of a conflict, they must either take action or choose inaction in the public eye, with the potential damage to their international reputation as a consequence of choosing the latter option. The scope of actors' activity is determined by the surrounding ‘belt’ of constraining and enabling structures.Footnote 40
Whilst drawing a distinction between actors and structures is relatively straightforward, the process of separating mechanisms from structures is more complicated. Bhaskar often uses the terms ‘structures’ and ‘mechanisms’ interchangeably.Footnote 41 Mechanisms enable and constrain the activity of agents in the same way as structures; both may therefore be said to belong to the same ‘structural belt’ surrounding agents. However, Bhaskar specifies that mechanisms can be distinguished from structures, if the former are understood as causal powers or liabilities of structures.Footnote 42 Andrew Sayer's definition of structures is instructive here: ‘“Structure” suggests a set of internally related elements whose causal powers […] are emergent from those of their constituents.’Footnote 43 Hence, mechanisms emerge from their underlying structures as processes which realise the powers of structures and thereby produce events: structures → mechanisms → events.Footnote 44 In other words, structures may exist for a long period of time, but their causal powers remain in potentia until mechanisms realise those powers. In the case in question here, the structure (Article 99 of the UN Charter) possessing the causal powers of early warning has existed since the UN Charter was drafted in 1944. However, these powers were only realised for the first time in 1992, when Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, in cooperation with the Security Council, invoked early warning mechanisms.
Bhaskar's notion of open systems in the philosophy of social science implies that mechanisms usually emerge from structures in convergence with other mechanisms, except in laboratory conditions.Footnote 45 For example, speech (mechanism) can emerge from a throat (structure) only in convergence with other mechanisms, such as social learning and mental processes. Following this logic, the next section of this paper will demonstrate in more detail that it was possible for the early warning mechanism to emerge in the early 1990s only because of a convergence of certain other mechanisms and conditions, such as the end of the Cold War, the consequent preparedness of the Security Council to revise the UN conflict management system, and the rise of bureaucratic rationalisation. Moreover, mechanisms not only emerge but also operate in combination with other mechanisms. For example, the early warning mechanism, which aims to detect potential conflicts at the earliest moment, is not only concerned with prediction as such, but also intrinsically related to the mechanism of bureaucratic rationalisation, namely the consideration of what early warning signals might ‘cost’ the bureaucracy as a whole.
The term ‘emergence’ deserves closer attention here, as it is situated at the centre of critical realist ontology. This article argues that a possible and productive, although not exclusive, means of understanding the powers associated with the Security Council is offered by the critical realist model of Synchronic Emergent Powers Materialism pioneered in Bhaskar's The Possibility of Naturalism (1979). The original idea of Emergent Powers posits that psychological experiences and thoughts, for example, emerge from the underlying material base of neurophysiological processes in the brain. The causal powers associated with the mind are both real (causally efficacious) and irreducible (emergent and independent from matter). Against reductionist materialism, the Emergent Powers model maintains that the subject matter of psychology cannot be reduced to neurophysiology or ultimately to physics, for no direct link or correlation exists between social and neurophysiological states.Footnote 46 The value added of Emergent Powers in comprehending the powers associated with the UN Security Council lies in its ability to function as an illustrative metaphor which allows for the independent and irreducible existence of control mechanisms but nevertheless recognises that these can only emerge from the mutual interaction between agents (states) and structure (UN institutions).
As Bhaskar criticises materialism for reducing social and psychological states to physical-material interaction between nerve cells, so can political realism be denounced for its similar reduction of the Security Council's powers to the material powers of its constituent units – namely, states. Political realists are correct in arguing that control mechanisms are initially developed by states. It is, however, necessary to go beyond such an observation in order to note that mechanisms can and will ‘strike back’ at their ‘founding fathers’ by changing and shaping their behaviour, with or without their consent. Liberal accounts, in turn, tend to downplay the emergence of new mechanisms, as they refer back to the UN Charter as the normative, regulative basis of international security laid down in 1945. This rather erroneously implies that the activities of the Security Council can be reduced to the intentions of its ‘founding fathers’, the original member states of the UN.
For example, the mainstream literature emphasises that by 1990 the Security Council had begun to work ‘as its founding fathers had intended’,Footnote 47 which refers to the increased application of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. At the same time, however, almost half a century of UN history is ignored. During that time, many important control mechanisms sprang up that were neither intended by the ‘founding fathers’ nor envisaged in the Charter. Most notably, peacekeeping was invented by the second Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1956, when the first UN peacekeeping mission United Nations Emergency Force was launched in Suez.Footnote 48 Nowhere in the Charter is there any reference to peacekeeping, nor was it anticipated or planned by states, as evidenced by Hammarskjöld's coining of the expression ‘Chapter Six-and-a-half’ to denote peacekeeping. What Hammarskjöld meant was that peacekeeping falls somewhere between Chapter VI and Chapter VII of the Charter, the former concerning the peaceful settlement of disputes and the latter denoting more robust measures, such as military action.Footnote 49
Bhaskar's notion of ‘open systems’ implies that social mechanisms seldom emerge or work in isolation from other objects belonging to the surrounding environment, such as actors, structures, and interacting mechanisms.Footnote 50 Similarly, Milja Kurki's idea of ‘related wholes’ in critical realist IR theory implies that social structures cannot include material causes alone but must also encompass three other Aristotelian causes, that is, the formal, final and efficient ones.Footnote 51 What these critical realist definitions of ‘open system’ and ‘related whole’ mean in terms of the subject matter of this article is that the reduction of the understanding of UN conflict management to the fifteen member states of the Security Council is inadequate, because the Council cannot be isolated from the control mechanisms of the UN system, such as early warning, or from the institutional structures embodied in the Secretariat. The resources provided by states usually constitute the material cause of UN actions (that out of which something is made),Footnote 52 while control mechanisms form the efficient cause (that by which something is made). The Secretariat maintaining the institutional procedures of the UN establishes or facilitates the formal cause (that according to which something is made), and the member states of the Council and Secretariat officials together determine the final cause (that for the sake of which something is made).Footnote 53 The crux of the idea of the Council as an open system can be encapsulated by the term ‘holistic ontology’: it widens the conception of the nature and operations of the Council from states to a triangle of powers, which encompasses also institutions and control mechanisms. This new holistic understanding of the Council and UN conflict management in general could be considered as the ‘Related Powers’ model.
Each of its three vertices (actors, structures and mechanisms) is both necessary and interrelated to the others, for without any one of these components the proper functioning of the UN conflict management system would not prove possible. Without the material powers of states, the Security Council would lack ‘teeth’ in the same way as its predecessor the League of Nations did. Without the UN Charter and other normative and institutional powers of the Secretariat, the actions of the Council, such as collective military intervention, would be groundless, aimless, and even illegal. Without establishing and maintaining control mechanisms, the Council would soon begin to lack legitimacy, because it could neither perceive the threats of the outside security environment nor win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the international community. The value added of this innovative three-tiered approach is its ability to demonstrate that the UN conflict management system constitutes more than the sum of its parts (states).
Figure 1. Related powers of the UN conflict management system.
From a critical realist standpoint, there is, in fact, a dual emergence of mechanisms out of structures at two levels: they arise from structures both in the concrete sense, for example, from UN agencies; and in the abstract sense, such as from the social relations of modern society and Western civilisation and from human resources. It can therefore be said that concrete structures are visible ‘traces’ or ‘reflections’ of more profound structures and problems deeply rooted in our society and civilisation. The method of abstraction allows us to follow such traces from the concrete ‘surface level’ to the abstract ‘deep level’. Just as the classic method of political economy construed capitalism as one trait of industrialised society abstracted from the concrete appearances of working life,Footnote 54 so too could the working of the Security Council reflect the state of affairs in modern society and Western civilisation.
How, then, does the distinction between the levels of concrete and deep structures fit into the separation between control mechanisms and metaphysical (causal) mechanisms?Footnote 55 In basic terms, it might be said that control mechanisms, which simply denote intentional control processes by agencies, emerge from and work through concrete structures. Early warning mechanisms, for example, operate through the Secretariat's regular briefings of the Council on potential conflicts. The term ‘control mechanisms’ implies that security experts monitor and ‘reach out’ to the outside security environment. The function of such mechanisms is to detect and securitise threats. In this sense, they serve as ‘bridges’ connecting state actors to outside security concerns. Thus, control mechanisms emerge from the ‘structural belt’ of norms and institutions and link actors to an outside security environment.
A combination of these control mechanisms constitutes an epistemic complex. This complex resembles not so much a cognitive prism, through which an agent switches his/her worldviews as he/she pleases, but more an ‘optic nerve system’ that enables and sets the limits for an agent's view or understanding of the outside world. An epistemic complex can also be conceived of as an epistemic context within which decision-makers are embedded. On the one hand, it enables knowledge by connecting state actors to an outside security environment, but, on the other, it constrains knowledge by surrounding and insulating state actors from the outside world and determining what they can and cannot possibly know about that world. The behaviour of actors varies according to different social and material contexts: it is possible to walk on solid ground but not on water. In exactly the same (common) sense, the behaviour of states differs under the influence of different control mechanisms. Metaphysical mechanisms, in turn, emerge from deep structures beyond our direct observation. These should not be understood as a separate type of mechanisms, but as a deeper dimension of control mechanisms.Footnote 56 As the latter specifically refer to control processes by agencies, the former refer to causal powers in general, namely the way in which mechanisms emerge from certain deep structures belonging to social and human strata, such as human resources and the social relations of modern society.
Figure 2. The Security Council as an open system.
Section 3: The emergence of the UN early warning mechanism
A wise man is strong; yea, a man of knowledge increaseth strength.
Francis BaconThis section will put the innovative model of the Security Council as an ‘open system’ into use by investigating the emergence of one crucial control mechanism of the UN in the early 1990s, namely, early warning. The beginning of the 1990s saw the renaissance of the Security Council. For the forty years following 1945, the Council had remained at an impasse due to the lack of co-operation between member states, which, in turn, was caused by the prevalence of ideological mistrust between the Soviet block and the Western powers. It ensued that the Council labelled only two conflicts between 1946 and 1986 as ‘breaches of the peace’ under Article 39 and pronounced a ‘threat to international peace and security’ on a mere seven occasions, although there were approximately 80 inter-state wars during that period.Footnote 57 Nevertheless, the collective security system existed as an ‘unrealised ability’, to use Justin Morris' phrase, until it was activated at the end of the 1980s.Footnote 58 For the first time, in July 1987, the permanent members of the Council were able to reach a consensus on demanding a cease-fire in the Iraq-Iran war, which was achieved the following year. Then, with much wider publicity, the Council authorised the use of force in reversing the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces in November 1990. In the early 1990s, collective measures were also taken in Somalia, Liberia, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Angola, Haiti, Cambodia, Namibia, and Rwanda.Footnote 59 There were as many as 13 new peacekeeping operations initiated by the Council between 1988 and 1993, equalling all previous peacekeeping operations from 1945 to 1987.Footnote 60 In December 1994, seventeen operations were underway, compared to only five in 1985.Footnote 61 The increase in the number of peacekeepers in the field was even more dramatic, rising from about 11,000 at the beginning of 1992 to approximately 82,000 in 1993.Footnote 62 The Council, previously constrained by the bipolar rivalry between permanent members, began to work efficiently.Footnote 63
In terms of the Related Powers model presented in the previous section, it can be said that the end of the Cold War converted the disunited conflict management system of the UN into a related one: it released the mutual interaction process between member states and UN institutions, which, in turn, materialised and energised control mechanisms. As a consequence, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, who was in office from 1991 to 1996, found himself in charge of a global armada of UN peacekeeping operations and other conflict management mechanisms established by the Security Council. The Secretary-General began to exercise considerable rational-legal powers, not only as the executive manager of peacekeeping missions, but also as the conceptual architect of the new conflict management system, for example in the drawing up of an influential document called ‘An Agenda for Peace’, which will be examined at length below.
On 31 January 1992, the President of the Council asked the Secretary-General to elaborate recommendations on strengthening the UN conflict management capacity, and making it more efficient.Footnote 64 As Boutros-Ghali describes this unique occasion, ‘The Security Council had delegated a responsibility that hitherto had belonged to the Security Council itself.’Footnote 65 Boutros-Ghali accomplished his task by writing An Agenda for Peace (henceforth the ‘Agenda’), published in May 1992. With the help of the Agenda, Boutros-Ghali effectively exercised bureaucratic powers of a type which Barnett and Finnemore term ‘classification’, that is, the categorisation of information. Boutros-Ghali emphasises one key category of conflict management in the Agenda, namely ‘preventive diplomacy’. He argues that ‘In the past, UN forces had been sent only after a conflict had occurred and a cease-fire had been agreed on. Preventive deployment meant that UN forces could be dispatched quickly, at the earliest warning of serious trouble.’Footnote 66 Section 23 of the Agenda captures the relationship between preventive diplomacy and early warning mechanisms: ‘Preventive diplomacy […] needs early warning based on information gathering and informal or formal fact-finding.’Footnote 67
Relying on the rational-legal authority of the Secretary-General, Boutros-Ghali embarked on promoting the establishment of early warning mechanisms. ‘You will pay the price sooner or later if you don't intervene’, he reasoned to state representatives, ‘and later it could cost you 10 times more.’Footnote 68 Boutros-Ghali's statement echoes the efforts of Hammarskjöld and his chef de cabinet Sir Brian Urquhart to persuade state representatives that the future of the UN lay in ‘preventive’ rather than ‘corrective’ action, ‘which was far less effective and in the long run far more expensive’.Footnote 69 Yet despite the success of the first-ever preventive peacekeeping force UNPREDEP (United Nations Preventive Deployment Force) in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), the Security Council did not establish any more preventive peacekeeping missions in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the negative experiences with early warning mechanisms were mounting, not least the failure to foresee the Rwandan genocide in 1994. UNPREDEP reveals one obvious cause of such failure: states are unwilling to spend resources on those operations in which there is no actual proof of a tangible threat. Only strategically and geo-politically important areas, such as FYROM on account of its proximity to European states, are exceptions to this rule. It is thus no surprise that Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali's initiative of the Agenda fell somewhat by the wayside.
Section 4: Emancipatory move: from the anthropomorphist fallacy to the responsibility to transform social structures
This section will argue that emancipatory possibilities reside not in individual states as partisans of an atomistic ontology assume, but in cooperation between the Security Council and the Secretariat (relational ontology). As demonstrated in the second section, existing accounts are epitomised by the ‘corner dilemma’ of reductive argumentation, which provides only a partial picture of the ‘related whole’ of the UN conflict management system and cannot espy the relationships between its components. Subjecting the whole system to analysis here provides not only more information but also a wholly new dimension, in the same way as the corner pieces of a puzzle alone cannot reveal its image. That picture emerges only once all the necessary pieces are in place.
The anthropomorphist fallacy further undermines or distorts a full understanding of the possibilities of the Security Council. Put simply, the anthropomorphist fallacy denotes an erroneous assumption that the Council and its member states could be understood as a (collective) actor with a certain human-like nature or character. Linda Melvern's account (1995) is one example: ‘The Security Council consists of a room full of ambassadors, cautious to pronounce on anything and loath to take actions.’Footnote 70 This statement, which reflects the mainstream approach to the UN, rather worryingly resembles the political realist figuring of the Council as a closed system. In this image, the nature of actors (the selfishness of state representatives) is taken as given, a move which pre-determines the outcome of their actions (the UN's failure) regardless of the surrounding socio-historical context, including the structures and mechanisms of the UN. Henry Kissinger, for example, argues from the political realist viewpoint:
The basic premise of collective security was that all nations would view every threat to security in the same way and be prepared to run the same risks in resisting it. Not only had nothing like it ever actually occurred, nothing like it was destined to occur in the entire history of both the League of Nations and the United Nations […] the nations of the world tend to disagree either about the nature of the threat or about the type of sacrifice they are prepared to make to meet it. This was the case from Italy's aggressions against Abyssinia in 1935 to the Bosnian crisis in 1992.Footnote 71
It is Kissinger's adherence to a political realist image of timeless human nature which sanctions both his careless sweep through 57 years of world history from Abyssinia to Bosnia, and his complete disregard for the considerable socio-historical differences between these two cases he invokes. To use Martti Koskenniemi's characterisation, such a Waltzian ‘first image’, based on Hobbesian philosophy, views a state as a ‘gladiator, prepared to face constant betrayal and ready to betray itself as soon as that seems necessary’.Footnote 72 The image of an agent as a universally rational egoist can be repeatedly deployed to explain the failure of international organisations independent of time and place. In a similar manner, the very sub-title of Melvern's book, ‘Who betrayed the UN and Why?’, implies that the Rwandan catastrophe was a deliberately treacherous affair only redeemable through a ‘change of statesmen's hearts’, rather than a tragedy (in part) attributable to structural, institutional, bureaucratic and psychological factors susceptible to conscious transformation. Such appraisals appear to deliver answers before the relevant questions have even been posed.
Interestingly, some attributes that neo-liberals attach to agents are equivalent to this realist image. To neo-liberals, agents are rational and egoistic as well, but they are also expected utility maximisers. The latter attribute of agents enables co-operation between them on those occasions where their common interests converge.Footnote 73 The list of anthropomorphist accounts in IR theory does not end here. Classical idealism, for example, suggests that human nature is essentially good or even altruistic and that the fundamental human concerns are those of social welfare.Footnote 74 In functionalism, the driving force of international cooperation and integration emanates from ‘positive functions’, which are defined as ‘social and economic needs’,Footnote 75 ‘welfare needs’Footnote 76 or ‘basic needs’.Footnote 77 These universal needs determine organisational arrangements to satisfy them and to solve the pragmatic problem at hand. To use David Mitrany's words, ‘form follows function’.Footnote 78 In accordance with this deterministic formula, Mitrany views security needs as a universal function, which must be followed by the Security Council as a logical and necessary form serving this function: ‘The view that it is the function of the military arm to be the common keeper of law and order […] has now found a first international expression in the Security Council […].’Footnote 79
Both in Kissinger's and in Mitrany's account, the agent – structure interaction appears as a hermetic circle, wherein the nature of agents (states) and structure (anarchy or cooperation) determine each other, independently of outside factors such as historical and social context. They both draw upon a few empirical events, which best suit their purposes, and then universalise them. They both therefore commit an anthropomorphist fallacy coupled with an empiricist fallacy. Following Mitrany, for example, would certainly be a mistake, as it would be necessary to read Article 47(3) of the UN Charter literally: ‘The Military Staff Committee shall be responsible under the Security Council for the strategic direction of any armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council.’ The Military Staff Committee, the neutral expert organ (form) serving the universal security needs (function), has never materialised and will probably remain an empty shell.Footnote 80 If Kissinger's was the view being followed, on the other hand, a similar error would be committed by rewriting the history of the 1990s. Contra Kissinger, the 1990s actually saw the emergence of collective security and a period when some threats were, indeed, perceived in the same way. These problems epitomise the anthropomorphist and empiricist fallacies committed by (neo-)realists and (neo-)liberals and show how these fallacies are underpinned by an erroneous belief in closed, hermetic systems.
Social constructivism, which approximates to the critical realist Transformational Model, provides a less agent-centred and more balanced account of agent-structure interaction than political realism and liberalism by stating that not only are institutions constituted by the intentional activity of agents, but also agents are socially constituted by institutions.Footnote 81 A normative or institutional structure also possesses an independent organisational culture, which may survive even where the entire personnel changes. Moreover, Brent Fisse and John Braithwaite note that ‘The products of organisations are more than the sum of the products of individual actions; while each member of the board of directors can “vote” for a declaration of dividend, only the board as a collectivity is empowered to declare a dividend.’Footnote 82 In the same way, the Security Council resolutions are more than the sum of individual actions, as they are seen to represent the will of the international community as a whole, not simply the particular interests of any member state voting for these resolutions.
However, there still remains the problem of hermetic, closed systems within certain social constructivist accounts. Social constructivist spiral modelsFootnote 83 illustrating the interplay between agent and structure downplay the fact that there are also emergent products as independent properties arising from this dual interaction. These emergent products are first generated by agents and structure, but they can thereafter react back on that interaction in an unanticipated manner. As social constructivists ignore these intervening variables, some of them commit a deterministic fallacy, according to which international law (structure) and international politics (agents) continuously react back on one another as in a closed system and thereby deterministically lead to a ‘better world’ as in path-dependency.Footnote 84
It is now useful to summarise the argument made thus far. In the same way as a laboratory represents a closed system in Bhaskar's criticism of positivism, the neo-realist, neo-liberal and social constructivist (mis)conceptions of agent-structure interaction represent a closed, hermetic system in IR theory, which cannot be logically upheld. As opposed to realism and liberal institutionalism, critical realism contends that less attention should be paid to the universal nature of agents, because states do not possess any pre-determined human-like character or monolithic foreign policy. Instead, the decision-making processes of states vary according to particular socio-historical contexts, of which mechanisms form parts.Footnote 85 Hence, more emphasis should be put on socio-historical mechanisms that enable and constrain the activity of states.
One of the most recent contributions to the debate on UN conflict management, namely Madeleine Albright's memoir (2003), does however succeed in contradicting this anthropomorphist presumption. Albright, working as the Permanent Representative of the US to the UN at the time, describes the Council's discussions on the Rwandan conflict of 15 April 1994:
As I listened to the informal debate led by Nigerian Permanent Representative Ibrahim Gambari I became increasingly convinced we were on the wrong side of the issue […] Even though my instructions came from the State Department, I thought I might be able to get faster action from the NSC [National Security Council], which on peacekeeping played a critical coordinating role and where Tony Lake's knowledge of Africa was crucial. Speaking to one of his top aides, I described what was going on in the council and reported that the American position was being viewed as obstructionist. I first asked for more flexible instructions, then yelled into the phone, demanding them.Footnote 86
Albright's account stands in contrast to the anthropomorphist assumption by pointing out that the US was less a monolithic (and selfish) actor pursuing a fixed policy of opposition to action in the Council than a layered structure in itself, where competing agencies like the State Department and the National Security Council had, if not entirely different policies, then at least differing vantage points from which to deal with the Rwandan situation.Footnote 87 Such an ‘anti-anthropomorphist’ view of the US as a layered structure, as opposed to a selfish actor, opens up possibilities for emancipatory transformation: if US policy was not monolithic but subject to change, then the surrounding structures of the UN could have contributed to such alterations. Therefore, the institutional power base of the UN, embodied by the Secretariat and the institutional platform of the Non-Aligned Caucus, held the potential to influence the behaviour of states, even that of the permanent members of the Council.Footnote 88 As Gambari noted to the author:
The Non-Aligned Group in the Council at that time was really quite active. We made our points known and clear, and we worked with the other members of the Security Council, particularly the permanent members. But I think it is fair to say that in return they took us fairly seriously, because at that period Madeleine Albright, who was the US Ambassador, used to come to brief the NAM [Non-Aligned Movement] Caucus almost once every month, and we had exchange of views. If they didn't take our views seriously, she wouldn't have bothered to do so. So did the French, and so did the, I would say, British to a lesser extent.Footnote 89
Gambari's comment underlines the principal argument of this article regarding emancipation: the potential for preventing the Rwandan disaster resided not just in individual states, such as the US (atomistic ontology), but with the interaction between the member states of the Council and UN structures, including the Secretariat and the institutional platform of the NAM Caucus (relational ontology). Although such potential, if exploited, would have resulted neither in the effective averting of Presidential Decision Directive 25Footnote 90 nor in the banishment of the ‘shadow of Somalia’ from the US psyche, which ultimately prevented the US from launching a large-scale military intervention in Rwanda, it might have enabled the US to be more cooperative, less obstructionist towards other countries considering intervention, and less reluctant to provide material assets for multinational intervention.Footnote 91
Conclusion
This article has not refuted the well-established distinction between the member states of the UN (the First UN) and its Secretariat (the Second UN) but maintained that there is, in fact, a third UN. The latter is evidenced in the mechanisms which the UN Organisation initiates through co-operation between the Security Council and the Secretariat in order to control the international security environment. Perhaps the most helpful way of describing ‘control mechanisms’ is to assume a negative rather than positive standpoint and imagine how the Security Council might work without them. The obvious answer is that devoid of control mechanisms, the conflicts of the outside world would be beyond the Council's reach. The Council would thus become literally nothing but a ‘club of states’, as political realists have long suspected, where ‘club’ connotes a posse of ambassadors sipping coffee in the Northern Delegates Lounge with no semblance of serious business to discuss. In other words, the Council would be a closed system. Control mechanisms allow it to function as an open system, by enabling it to visualise and control the world outside Manhattan's East 46th Street even in those situations in which Council members have decided not to share with other members information that is crucial for conflict prevention and management. However, the necessary flipside which these crucial mechanisms inevitably harbour is the ever-present possibility of their dysfunction and failure.
Interestingly, contemporary IR theory largely refrains from pronouncing on which explanatory model best captures the workings of the UN Security Council in preventing large-scale human suffering. This aversion seems attributable to the constant flux in international politics, and consequently in international peace and security, since the Cold War; it is thus claimed that no pre-fixed model can accurately describe the role and function of the Council in such a dynamic international security environment. Consider, for example, the following passage from one seminal account of the Council published recently, entitled The UN Security Council in the Post-Cold War Era (2004):
[W]e did consider a number of possible models for the Council's role in international relations: an Athenian model, essentially consultative; a Congress of Vienna conclave model under which the Council is devoted to norm-development […] and a Roman model allowing for mobilizational governance – under this scheme, the Council serves as a senate constraining the emperor. In the post-Cold War era the Roman model may apply best, with the US president cast as emperor, but contemporary history is proving sufficiently fluid that we were not persuaded that any such theoretical approach would be profitable for this venture.Footnote 92
Despite its explicit rejection of theory, the statement reveals the implicit ontological presumption which underlies current thinking about the Security Council, namely actor-centrism; in each of the models considered above, the Council is regarded as a collective actor, whether it is constraining the emperor or devoting itself to norm-development. At the same time, the statement manifests a complete disregard for what has here been termed the ‘structural belt’ of the Council. The ‘Related Powers’ model and the notion of structural embeddedness employed in this article, by contrast, can account for the immediacy of structures and mechanisms in the working of the Council; they demonstrate that the Council's perceptions and (re)actions are mediated through the context of certain mechanisms and structures within which Council members are embedded.
Most of the existing studies are underpinned by the political realist assumption that international organisations cannot rise above the constraints set by the selfish great powers.Footnote 93 Other accounts view organisations through a neo-liberal prism which portrays institutions as merely the instruments or powerless servants of states. These studies therefore believe that, irrespective of whether the Secretary-General could have recognised the Rwandan genocide at an early stage and lobbied for intervention, such efforts would have made little difference vis-à-vis the member states of the Council once they had made up their minds to freeze all humanitarian interventions, following their failure in Somalia in 1993.Footnote 94 Hence, the previous accounts, based on Hobbesian and neo-liberal theoretical underpinnings, effectively nullify the possibility of finding a means of emancipation in the Council's conduct of the genocide: they view the UN either as a victim of the ‘irresistible forces’ of great powers or as a powerless servant of states.
The critical realist models presented above, by contrast, invoke an emancipatory vision: the Council works most efficiently only when its actions are both mediated through the surrounding normative and institutional structure of the UN system and multilateral (involving the Secretariat, which Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke aptly call the ‘sixth permanent member’) rather than unilateral (undertaken by individual permanent member states). Such a vision portrays the Council as an open system. This conclusion offers a methodological guide for future research which adopts a simple logic: if it were acknowledged that not only states but also institutions and control mechanisms are important legitimating power bases in the UN, then it would follow, contra political realists, that the great powers do not constitute the only ‘powerhouse’. To continue in a similar vein, if it were believed that after 11 September 2001 world politics had shifted towards a unipolar world order, and that emancipation from strengthening hegemony would be desirable if it could be achieved without a deterioration of UN-US cooperation, then a researcher would be mistaken to concentrate on the ‘Roman model’ referred to above. Instead, research would benefit from discussing how the Security Council could work as an open system through interactions between its member states, UN institutions and control mechanisms. A further implication is that academic contributions have a role to play in offering practical suggestions on possible means of transforming the UN conflict management system into a related whole and enabling the Security Council to become an open system.
These considerations guide the formulation of the final conclusion of this article, concerning conflict management. Current debates on humanitarian intervention have engendered an emerging consensus which holds that the responsibility of international society to protect civilians threatened by genocidal regimes embraces three elements: responsibility to prevent the occurrence of massive human rights violations; responsibility to react to them; and responsibility to rebuild societies in order to repair the damages inflicted upon them by intervention and prevent the recurrence of violence.Footnote 95 This article has suggested a fourth element to be included in these notions of responsibility, namely the responsibility to construct and transform early warning structures and other control mechanisms in order to be able to prevent or halt genocides. The necessary structures and mechanisms should have been developed long before the eruption of the Rwandan crisis, simply because actors did not have time to construct them during the genocide. In this sense, the UN's failure between January and May 1994 not only reflects ‘damage in the making’ but also ‘damage done’. The responsibilities for the UN's breakdown should thus be apportioned not only to the actors in office during that period, but also to those who failed to set up the necessary structures prior to the genocide when such capacity-building was feasible, for example in the aftermath of An Agenda for Peace.
