The benefits of norm ambiguity: constructing the responsibility to protect across Rwanda, Iraq and Libya

Abstract

Over the past two decades, International Relations scholars have highlighted the importance of efforts by hegemonic states and norm entrepreneurs to foster norm clarity when promoting the establishment, institutionalisation, and internalisation of norms. Yet, such analyses obscure the benefits of norm ambiguity in facilitating consensus, flexibility, and compliance. The authors offer a framework positing that hegemonic and institutional ambiguity can help create consensus and facilitate incremental reform necessary to sustain that consensus. Empirically, the authors then show how such ambiguity has facilitated the development of the responsibility to protect norm, tracing Rwanda-era debates over humanitarian intervention, Iraq-era backlash over interventionist abuses, and Libya-era norm implementation.

Keywords:

• ambiguity
• constructivism
• norms
• responsibility to protect
• Libya

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council in Future Fellowship [FT100100833] and Discovery Grant [grant number DP130104088].

Notes

1. To be sure, some scholars have recognised the scope for ambiguity. From a realist view, Henry Kissinger coined the term ‘constructive ambiguity’ (Klieman, 1999). From a liberal view, Mahoney and Thelen (2010, p. 11) cast ambiguity as pertaining to situations ‘subject to interpretation, debate, and contestation’. A classic study that considered the importance of ‘determinacy’ for the legitimacy of legal norms is Franck (1990). For constructivist discussions of ambiguity that are outlined later in this article, see Best (2005, 2008, 2012), Krook and True (2012), Percy (2007), Sandholtz (2008), Van Kersbergen and Verbeek (2007), and Wiener (2004).

2. One might argue that ambiguity also contributes to ‘norm localization’ (Acharya, 2004, pp. 239, 241) – which pertains to ‘contestation between emerging transnational norms and pre-existing regional normative and social orders’, as ‘local agents reconstruct foreign norms to ensure the norms fit with the agents’ cognitive priors and identities’ – although to maintain conceptual focus, we emphasise here contributions of ambiguity to consensus, flexibility, and adjustment.

3. The notion of a norm feedback loop has also been explored by Prantl and Nakano (2011).

4. In terms of debates over ambiguity and R2P, some scholars have applied this stress on clarity to argue for the weakness of the norm. For example, Reinold (2011, p. 66) casts R2P as ‘stuck’ in its development, blocked by an American liberal exceptionalism. From this perspective, an American view of sovereignty as granting a right but not a responsibility to intervene has limited the scope for the emergence of R2P. Citing ‘America's ambivalent engagement’, Reinold draws on the Finnemore–Sikkink framework to argue that US resistance has left R2P ‘currently stuck in stage two of the life-cycle’. However, Reinold overlooks key costs of clarity and benefits of ambiguity. First, she overlooks the ways in which opponents of R2P have used calls for clarity to limit interventionist possibilities. Second, Reinold fails to recognise that, because the responsibilities of bystander states in the formulation of R2P negotiated in 2005 were constructed in ambiguous terms, the US was willing to accept the concept and, since this initially cautious decision to sign on to R2P, the US has over time become one of its key implementers.

5. The challenge for scholars, then, is one of interpretation as they seek to juxtapose the broader context of values and expectations with institutional and policy debates that arise from moments of crisis.

6. For two important works that begin to grapple with questions of normative coherence, consistency, and contestation with respect to R2P, see the concluding chapter of Thakur (2011) and Welsh (2013).

7. One well-known way in which the emphasis on normative clarity reduced the likelihood of humanitarian intervention in this period was the sharp distinction drawn between situations of genocide, which would generate an obligation on the US and other powerful states to ‘do something’, and situations short of genocide, which would not. For analysis, see Power (2002).

8. Rwanda also motivated agents across administrations. When Samantha Power interviewed Susan Rice regarding her Clinton-era experiences, Rice recounted to her future Obama administration colleague, ‘I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required’ (Power, 2001, pp. 107–108).

9. On the historical development of sovereignty, a principle that has been subject to contestation since long before the end of the Cold War, see Glanville (2014) and Philpott (2001).

10. Rice (2009), the former US Ambassador to the UN during the Obama administration, later lamented that ‘some defended the war in Iraq by invoking the Responsibility to Protect, a tactic that still casts a shadow on efforts to deepen the consensus around the R2P concept’. Rice countered efforts to ‘conflate R2P with an unfettered right to intervention’ on the grounds that R2P encompassed ‘a range of responses’ spanning ‘early warning, analysis, and decision-making … preventive diplomacy … peacekeeping … sanctions … [and] peacebuilding [efforts]’, all of which could reduce the need for more costly military intervention.

11. It should be acknowledged that the Libyan intervention proved deeply controversial among both states and scholars. For some of the more sophisticated critiques of R2P and its implementation in Libya, see Hehir and Murray (2013). Nevertheless, it is worth observing that the international community has since remained willing to apply R2P to a range of international crises since Libya. Indeed, the Security Council has invoked the principle in 20 resolutions adopted in the three and a half years since 17 March 2011, compared with only five resolutions adopted prior to that date. For a robust refutation of claims about the irrelevance or death of R2P post-Libya, see Bellamy (2014).

12. If our argument about the benefits of norm ambiguity is correct, it may provide grounds for the international community to exercise caution when considering such proposals for further clarification and specificity regarding the legitimate grounds for the resort to force lest it facilitates a renewal of Rwanda-era debates about criteria that must be satisfied before action takes place, which can perversely hinder the protection of populations.

13. Research for this article was completed before the recent decision of the Obama administration to resort to force to counter Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria, justified in part with reference to the need to protect civilians from atrocities. While it is too soon to draw firm conclusions, this action seems to indicate that, despite the backlash after Libya and the failure to deal adequately with the Syrian civil war, the international community, and the US in particular, remains willing to take meaningful action to protect populations where it seems clear that there is a real opportunity to save lives.