Historical frames and the politics of humanitarian intervention: from Ethiopia, Somalia to Rwanda

Abstract

This article argues that historical frames we often find in news media discourse can skew the way we perceive distant wars, and that this can have a knock‐on effect on international humanitarian response within a cosmopolitan framework of global justice. Drawing on an empirical exploration of recent ‘humanitarian interventions’ in Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda, the article shows how historical frames largely reinforced the elite‐dominated news frames of ‘their crisis’, and ‘not ours’, which explains the delayed international intervention to end it. I conclude that the non‐intervention, or delayed intervention, of the international community on humanitarian grounds to end these crises was informed more by historical empathy/distance frames than empathy/critical frames in the mainstream Western news media discourse.

Keywords:

• historical frames
• humanitarian intervention
• Western media discourse

Notes

1. The term ‘historical baggage’ was first used by the former BBC Africa correspondent George Alagiah to mean the stereotypical representation in which most people in the West view Africa in the historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during the dark days of the slave trade. In other words, issues affecting Africa today are largely conceived by the West with a historical mindset, and it is like anything that fails to fit that perception is ignored.

2. Baffour Ankomah quoting BBC correspondent George Alagiah at the ‘Reporting the World’ Round Table Conference, London, 16 May 2001.

3. Riffenburgh (1993).

4. Cited in Knight (1805).

5. Cited in Hussey (1927).

6. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, signed following the end of the Thirty Years War in Europe was the agreement that made the principle of state sovereignty a fundamental basis of international relations that later came to be enshrined in the 1948 UN Charter. Yet as Chris Brown (2002) points out, the primacy attached to state sovereignty in the Westphalian system was never as rigid as is often believed, and even before NATO’s 1999 attack on former Yugoslavia, Western states carried out numerous interventions before the twentieth century. For more historical and theoretical discussions of the Westphalian norm see Walzer (1992); Brown (2002); Paul Robinson (2002b); Howe (2002); Dower (2002); Caney (2000).

7. International Relations Scholar Hedley Bull defines intervention as ‘dictatorial or coercive interference, by an outside party or parties, in the sphere of jurisdiction of a sovereign state, or more broadly of an independent political community’, (1984, p. 1). But Caney dismisses Bull’s words ‘dictatorial’ and ‘interference’ as being too pejorative and partial, and suggested instead ‘coercive action’.

8. John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian argument of non‐intervention provides that this doctrine can only be broken to help a political community aggressed by another to seek liberation; by way of counter‐intervention to protect the interests of a political community facing external aggression; or finally, when violation of human rights assumes unimaginable proportions leading to genocide or massacre.

9. Juhem (2001), p. 15. See also Cardon et al. (1999), pp. 39–54.

10. The mess or the unfinished business of the First Gulf War is, in a way, a justification of the refusal, despite the huge cost, of Bush Junior and Tony Blair to abandon Iraq to its fate.

11. These two modes of reporting can be suitably labelled as: (1) distance framing, in that the style of coverage creates emotional distance between the audience and the people suffering in a conflict, and (2) support framing, in that official policy is, in effect, deferred. Distance and support framing is implicitly supportive of a government policy opposed to military intervention and, as such, either implicitly or explicitly promotes a policy of non‐intervention.

12. See Robinson (2002a).

13. Evocative reporting is that style of reporting which more or less concentrates either on spinning the national and geopolitical interests of the home countries of the Western media, or the humanitarian angle of the news, with the primary aim of sensitising public opinion. On the other hand, diagnostic reporting, while covering the national, geopolitical and humanitarian angles of the news, pays more attention to analysing its political context; that is, putting emphasis on explaining why things went wrong leading to the crisis instead of just telling the story as it is.

14. Holbrooke on ABC’s Nightline, cited in Anthony Lewis (1995…), p. 25; see Robinson (2002a).

15. Chirac, cited in Ann Devroy and William Drozdiak, ‘Clinton agrees to plan defence of safe areas, French seek help in shoring up UN effort’, Washington Post, 14 July 1995, section A, p. 17; see Robinson (2002a).

16. See also Robinson (2002a). The overarching influence of the media coverage of the desperate humanitarian situation on the official government thinking that favoured military intervention on humanitarian grounds came to be known as the CNN effect. An independent research by journalists Nik Gowing (1994) and Warren Strobel (1997) recognised the resonance between the multiplicity of factors that came together to cause intervention with the Strong CNN effect thesis in the case of Somalia. Gowing (1994) quoted White House press secretary Martin Fitzwater as saying: ‘We heard it from every corner, that something had to be done. Finally the pressure was too great … TV tipped us over the top. I could not stand to eat my dinner watching TV at night. It made me sick.’

17. Cited in Robinson (2002a). It should be recalled that by the time of this intervention in December 1992, Bush senior had already lost the presidential elections to Bill Clinton in the previous month.

18. Here the journalists quickly opted for ‘empathy framed coverage’, which ‘tends to focus on the suffering of individuals, identifying them as victims in need of outside help’ (Robinson, 2002a); in this way, the journalists became victims of what Preston (1996, p. 112) described as a ‘narrative template of proximity’. However, in their hyping of the cholera outbreak in Goma and neglecting of the genocide in Rwanda, the journalists also ostensibly became victims of ‘distance framing’ of the genocide in Rwanda, which tended to minimise pressure for intervention.

19. Evoking the tribal or ethnic factor to explain African conflicts is more or less an empathy/distance frame that widens the gap between the concern of the audience (Western public) and the plight of the victims of the humanitarian crisis thus making the case for non‐intervention.

20. Principles of just war attributed to Simon Caney (2000).

21. As highlighted in Simon Caney (2000).