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Earlier today, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir visited Libya, receiving a warm welcome from National Transitional Council leader Mustafa Abdel-Jalil. This is hardly the first demonstration of bilateral solidarity between Sudan’s National Congress Party and Libya’s post-Qaddafi regime–in late November, Abdel-Jalil visited Khartoum for the NCP’s annual convention, where he secured strong bilateral relations between the previously embattled neighbors. Bashir’s current visit has stoked much more significant attention from the human rights community, due to its implications for Libya’s relationship with the International Criminal Court:

“Welcoming Bashir … raises questions about the NTC’s stated commitment to human rights and the rule of law,” Richard Dicker, international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

“Following the end of decades of brutal rule in Libya, it is disturbing if Tripoli hosts a head of state on the run from international arrest warrants for grave human rights violations.”

Dicker is right to observe the NTC’s circumstantial human rights failing; seeing as the ICC has indicted Bashir for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, travel restrictions–or, better yet, an arrest–would be an impressive demonstration of support for international human rights principles. However, Dicker’s “rule of law” assertion is more tenuous. International criminal justice is a preferable moral goal in and of itself, but there is no fundamental, correlative relationship between state participation in international criminal justice regimes and the domestic strength of the rule of law. The World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index outlines nine characteristics of the rule of law–including limited governance, anti-corruption institutions, and the accessibility of civil justice mechanisms–none of which incorporate rhetorical support for international criminal prosecutions. In fact, the NTC appears to be making tentative progress towards meeting its rule of law metrics, despite initial challenges in security, transitional justice, and post-conflict reconciliation.

Rather than a weak commitment to the rule of law, the NTC’s implicit rejection of the ICC stems from two likely sources. First, as David Bosco notes, Libya gains a geopolitical advantage from accommodating Bashir’s diplomacy. Qaddafi’s regime provided safe haven, financial support, and military assistance to the early seeds of the Darfur region’s anti-government insurgency–in particular, to the Sudan Liberation Army’s Zaghawa factions. Darfuri mercenaries, often affiliated with the late Khalil Ibrahim’s Justice and Equality Movement, supported Qaddafi’s forces in their six-month conflict against the NTC. In the aftermath of Libya’s conflict, Bashir claimed that “the forces that liberated the [Libyan capital] Tripoli were armed 100 percent by Sudan”–while erroneous, the Sudanese president’s statement indicates the depth of Sudan’s relationship with the new Libyan regime, as well as Bashir’s emphasis on maintaining strong bilateral ties.

Second, the NTC has little internal motivation for supporting the ICC’s prosecution efforts against Bashir and his NCP colleagues. Contrary to Ken Roth’s assertions on Twitter, the ICC probably played a limited role in facilitating the ancien regime’s demise–without the NCP’s operational victory in Tripoli (and sweeping air assistance from NATO forces), Qaddafi’s robust security apparatus would have probably withstood the rebel onslaught. After all, under the international community’s “last resort” argumentation, the political failure of the Security Council’s international justice strategy triggered NATO’s aerial intervention. Since consolidating authority over the post-Qaddafi regime, the NTC has skillfully maneuvered around the ICC Prosecutor’s reach, as indicated by its unwillingness to sign on to the Rome Statute. Mark Kersten’s description of Abdel-Jalil’s political psychology, written shortly after Qaddafi’s fall, remains apt:

Jalil’s statement is a remarkably cunning political move. By arguing that Libya has the right to try Gaddafi for any crimes he committed prior the the ICC’s involvement in Libya, Jalil skillfully circumvents a show-down with the ICC. The NTC is not outright saying the ICC cannot or should not prosecute Gaddafi. Instead it is making, at least on the surface, a very sensible argument: Gaddafi has committed atrocities for a long time before February 2011 and he should be tried for the crimes he perpetrated against his own people. By making this argument, Jalil and the NTC can also claim that they are seeking a more encompassing justice which covers decades rather than months of injustices.

The extent of the NTC’s commitment to the rule of law remains uncertain. However, its commitment to the ICC arrest warrant’s implicit foreign travel restrictions is a poor indicator of the regime’s future.

Update: The Bashir-in-Libya controversy has sparked some valuable commentary throughout the blogosphere. In a new post on his excellent Causal Loop blog, fellow Hoya Anton Strezhnev outlines a game-theory approach to the NTC’s rejection of the ICC, emphasizing the new regime’s interest in building the credibility of domestic institutions:

If the commitment explanation for state behavior is accurate, then the NTC’s tenuous relationship with the International Criminal Court may suggest a belief by Libyan transitional leaders that their domestic reforms are a sufficient signal that they will not return to Gaddafi-style repression. Given the NTC’s professed goal of establishing democratic and accountable institutions, one would expect Libya to be less likely to turn to the ICC as a post-civil war commitment mechanism, given that the sovereignty costs are still high, but the signalling benefits are not uniquely advantageous. However, the task of disarming militias and integrating fighters remains daunting and if not done properly, could increase the risk of renewed violence.  Indeed, if the NTC begins to lack credibility in the eyes of some factions, then it may start looking outward to international organizations as a means of reassurance.

Responding to Strezhnev, Jay Ulfelder is more skeptical of game theory’s application to post-conflict Libya, underlining the regime’s inherent weakness and ready-born credibility dilemma:

The NTC wants and needs some things from the states that have endorsed the ICC, but it also wants and needs things from the militias that emerged during the civil war, and from neighbors like Sudan. Moreover, the members of the NTC are themselves presumably engaged in lots of internal haggling. In other words, the transitional government is simultaneously engaged in bargaining at four levels–internal, domestic, regional, and global–and actions that look like the prudent play on one of those levels will often look wrong-headed on others.

And, finally, Mark Kersten looks at the politics of international justice as they apply to Libya’s post-conflict development. Read the whole post, but I found his conclusion–on the broader context for the NTC’s political evolution–particularly compelling:

There is, no doubt, a need to guarantee human rights standards and the rule of law in post-Gaddafi Libya. But expectations should be tempered and pressures should be well-thought through. You don’t build an independent and effective judiciary, eroded over 40 years, over night. Likewise, bludgeoning Libya with the blunt end of the liberal peacebuilding and international justice stick won’t build the rule of law. Of course, doing nothing won’t either.

Writing in the early months of the Obama administration, Mike Abramowitz and Lawrence Woocher identified mass atrocities prevention as a national security priority for U.S. foreign policy:

Genocide’s negative consequences for the United States are increasingly plain. Mass violence destabilizes countries and entire regions, threatening to spread trafficking in drugs, arms, and persons, as well as infectious disease pandemics and youth radicalization. When prevention fails, the United States invariably foots much of the bill for post-atrocity relief and peacekeeping operations — to the tune of billions of dollars. And even as Washington is paying, America’s soft power is depleted when the world’s only superpower stands idle while innocents are systematically slaughtered.

While small arms trafficking, radicalization, and transnational public health crises occupy targeted, compartmentalized attention within the U.S. foreign policy community, the U.S. government rarely devotes game-changing resources to ameliorating tertiary concerns. As DNI Clapper’s annual threat assessment makes clear, U.S. foreign policy institutions devote many more resources, man-hours, and organizational attention to counterterrorism and WMD proliferation. With the exception of unique instances, conflict prevention advocates often lose the constant struggle for bureaucratic resources–while the Obama administration has made important strides in increasing the flexibility of U.S. institutions, inert processes still characterize decision-making in the intelligence, defense, and diplomatic communities. The non-prioritization of preparedness, crisis response, and preventive action throughout and within the “Interagency” continues to limit the effectiveness of U.S. responses to mass atrocities and regional instability in conflict-affected areas.

Enter Kenya. Since al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya has emerged as a valuable counterterrorism partner for the United States in East Africa. The Bush administration’s “war on terror” thrust the U.S.-Kenya strategic partnership into the fore, with the United States relying on Kenya to house the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command’s covert operations against al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa. Kenya’s October invasion of southern Somalia, a stability operation against al-Shabaab, has given greater weight to U.S. support for Kenyan security, as well as the country’s political and economic stability; while the United States appears to have incorporated Kenya’s invasion into its Somalia strategy, Kenya has struggled to mitigate the political, economic, and security consequences of its anti-Shabaab operations, including a wave of bombings in Nairobi. In terms of strategic priorities, Kenya’s counterterrorism efforts in Somalia are a far stretch from, say, the tenuous U.S.-Pakistani relationship, given the wide projection disparity between Somali Shabaab and al-Qaeda insurgents, and their Central/South Asian counterparts. However, as AFRICOM’s influence on U.S. Africa policy mounts, Somalia will become an increasingly crucial theater for U.S. operations, thus deepening the importance of Kenya’s strategic partnership.

In the early months of  2008, as Kenya’s post-election crisis escalated, the international community mobilized an impressive preventive diplomacy effort, headed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Recognizing the impact of the post-election crisis on its economic and military priorities in East Africa, the United States played an active supporting role in the AU-facilitated mediations, dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pressure incumbent President Mwai Kibaki and popular opposition candidate Raila Odinga towards a political resolution. International mediation lasted for forty days, culminating in a thus-far-successful power-sharing agreement, as well as concrete planning for constitutional reform and a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation commission.

Despite the apparent success of 2008’s preventative efforts, the international community’s follow-through has been inconsistent. Gaps in post-conflict accountability, justice institution and land reform, and a sustainable resolution to Kenya’s internal displacement crisis form the structural foundation for acute violence in the midst of Kenya’s approaching political transition. Through USAID, the United States supports small-scale, programmatic attempts to address lapses in Kenyan governance, conflict resolution, and civil society participation. However, U.S. assistance has provided insufficient support to technical electoral preparations, IDP resettlement, and the implementation of constitutional reforms. Additionally, in contrast to the 2008 response, U.S. civilian agencies remain woefully unprepared for crisis stabilization in post-election Kenya: the Civilian Response Corps, the U.S. government’s sole crisis response mechanism, received a paltry $33 million in FY 2012 for “Overseas Contingency Operations.”

As friend-of-the-blog Ben Brockman wrote on the international community’s non-preparedness for the DRC’s 2011 elections, half-hearted, rhetorical support for democratic processes and institutions often creates tangible incentives for electoral fraud and violent opposition mobilization. Where the DRC was 2011’s sparkling case study of the negative consequences of international inertia, Kenya’s looming electoral crisis may be 2012’s. In the DRC, electoral failure has yielded few strategic consequences for the United States, with the exception of a tentative spillover effect. In Kenya, by contrast, the stakes for U.S. regional strategy in East Africa are much higher: while the Kenyan military’s newfound political influence has strengthened the country’s resolve, the potential combination of political instability, divided leadership, and deepening fiscal crisis will threaten the already-fragile political will for Kenya’s Somalia operation. Given the prominent overlap between political violence and electoral contestation in Kenyan democratization processes, U.S. investment in the country’s conflict prevention efforts should be a core component of the United States’ regional policy. The opportunity for effective change is closing quickly, with problematic consequences for U.S. priorities in East Africa.

 

Sifting through a recent State Department programmatic briefing, FP’s Josh Rogin reported Tuesday on a joint State/Pentagon emergency crisis fund, which will pool civilian and defense resources to strengthen U.S. government participation in stabilization, conflict prevention, and crisis response efforts. According to Rogin, the emergency crisis fund has its origins in former Defense Secretary Gates’ prior thoughts concerning civilian/defense coordination on institution-building, security reform, and conflict prevention. Gates used the United Kingdom’s cross-cutting pooled funding structure for conflict prevention as a model for State/Pentagon collaboration on conflict mitigation efforts:

Building on the UK’s concept, [the “Shared Responsibility, Pooled Resources” (SRPR)] approach envisions pooled funding mechanisms for (1) Security Capacity Building, (2) Stabilization, and (3) Conflict Prevention. Each department would seek funding within its budget to contribute to the funding pools. Each pool would operate with joint formulation requirements in the field and dual-key authority to achieve their purposes. Each department would be able to add funds to the pool to meet a departmental imperative, although the use of these funds would be subject to the dual-key approval requirements.

The Global Security Contingency Fund, as the new, $2 billion dollar initiative is called, builds on extant preventative initiatives within U.S. civilian agencies, specifically the joint State/USAID Complex Crises Fund. As civilian foreign policy efforts, both initiatives have come under significant scrutiny from Congressional budgeting processes, which view productive, sustainable, and longer-term preventative investments with a skeptical eye. In FY 2011, a year after the initial inception of the interagency Complex Crises Fund, the House threatened to zero out the funding pool, only to have the Senate restore the initiative at eighty percent of its initial $50 million budget. With discretionary foreign policy spending on the chopping block, such initiatives remain in constant flux, despite their evident–if not necessarily primary–importance to U.S. national interests.

The new Pentagon/State crises fund is, therefore, a savvy attempt by the Obama administration to maneuver around the messy (and generally preposterous) politics of discretionary, non-military foreign policy funding. Pentagon/State resource coordination is an essential component of an effective conflict prevention strategy, as the Genocide Prevention Task Force’s conclusions on the “Interagency” indicate. The Pentagon has occupied an important role in U.S. policy approaches to conflict prevention and stabilization; four years before the 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) highlighted the State Department’s new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review identified early warning and preventative response as a Defense Department policy priority. The Defense Department’s Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, departing Undersecretary Michele Flournoy’s brainchild, has played a decisive role in crafting the military’s approach to humanitarian action. While the complete policy impact of DoD’s bureaucratic policy shifts remain unclear, the military’s persistent presence in organizational discourse on conflict prevention and stabilization is evident.

At the same time, the new emergency fund–as a microcosm of civilian/military policy collaboration–leaves a number of questions unanswered. As Rogin suggests, civilian power advocates possess real and entirely justified concerns about the militarization of conflict prevention and mitigation efforts. Stability operations play an important role in Army doctrine, but the U.S. military has a problematic, muddied history of encounters with institution-building and stabilization in weak/failed states. Military actors can stabilize neighborhoods, but mediation, inclusive political facilitation, and conflict negotiation are fundamentally civilian-based initiatives. Deterring the militarization of stabilization will necessitate a more credible commitment to and investment in civilian foreign policy approaches.

The emergency fund may provide a greater degree of fiscal flexibility for civilian foreign policy institutions, but it cannot function sustainably in the absence of interagency-wide cultural shifts in conflict prevention and stabilization institutions. An excellent new report by the Center for American Progress and Humanity United, released in tandem with the QDDR’s first anniversary, highlights an essential gap in civilian preparedness for conflict prevention:

So on paper, crisis prevention is a U.S. government priority. Translating the administration’s rhetoric into reality, however, is tremendously difficult, and it would likely require far more disruptive changes to current systems than any of these reviews acknowledge. The USAID policy framework is an important start, but unless significant institutional reform occurs in the near future no meaningful
change will happen…

…Training is a good place to start. Our research for this paper made abundantly and sometimes painfully clear that the state of conflict prevention training at both State and USAID remains shockingly limited, ad hoc, and uncoordinated. Training has little or no link to career advancement, as opposed to our military branches, and it is often seen as an inconvenience rather than an asset.

More flexible funding is an important foundation for institutional change. However, in order to reverse the perpetual cycle of civilian impotence in conflict prevention and stabilization initiatives, policymakers need to commit themselves to overhauling severe civilian/military disparities in institutional capacity, policy knowledge, and training on conflict prevention. Unfortunately, Congressional politics will continue to dominate the interagency’s ability to facilitate such institutional reconfigurations. However, as the CAP/HU report notes, U.S. government institutions can form more sustained, strategic partnerships with civil society organizations working to build civilian preventative capacity, gradually lessening the destructive civilian/military gap on crisis response.

 

Welcome to my blog! I’m an undergraduate at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, preparing to jump into thesis work on contemporary U.S. responses to genocide and mass atrocities. This blog will serve as a platform for commentary on international politics, African affairs, human rights advocacy, and miscellaneous, completely unrelated subjects.

A couple of comments on the blog title: First, a tip-of-the-hat to Kate and Amanda, whose labeling syntax has clearly served me well. Second, the title demonstrates the blog’s dual lens, approaching the processes, objectives, and perspectives of human rights advocacy from a security perspective. Over the past two centuries, since the early years of the Western European and American abolitionist movements, human rights advocates have been extraordinarily successful at promoting human rights–that is, proliferating a global discussion and use of human rights norms. If the 2005 World Summit‘s rhetorical endorsement of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine is any indication, human rights have received widespread recognition in international politics. However, large-scale, international human rights activity is often performative, rather than substantive, with few deliverables for civilians and civil societies in local communities.

It look more than two centuries of cataclysmic global conflict, a reconfiguration of global power dynamics, and the formation of a convoluted transnational-institutional bureaucracy for the international human rights community to reach R2P, the ultimate normative reconfiguration of the individual/society/state nexus. In 2011, 224 years after Thomas Clarkson convened the first British anti-slavery community at 2 George Yard, securing those rights in the reality of politics. International human rights responses to social upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa have thrust the promotion vs. security dilemma to the forefront of the blogosphere discourse. On Libya, bloggers and policy commentators contended with Anne-Marie Slaughter’s depiction of R2P/sovereignty antagonism. In Uzbekistan and Bahrain, U.S. security priorities have often trumped human rights concerns, leaving advocates with few leverage points against the respective regimes’ repressive behavior. On Sudan, advocates for civilian protection have had to confront the unnerving reality of dwindling U.S. influence in Khartoum. In the human rights community, we speak frequently about the need for new, creative approaches to the challenge of policy leverage; unfortunately, collective thinking on the leverage question has yet to bear fruit.

This blog is an attempt to address the leverage question, to adopt a critical, contextualized perspective towards human rights advocacy, and to incorporate an international security lens into the human rights discourse. As with many bloggers, Andrew Sullivan’s notion of the blog-as-curator underlines my concept of the blogger’s role in the public sphere. Accordingly, my posts will be a mix of information-sharing, analysis, and, to a lesser degree, personal reflection. I won’t post my frustrations with Georgetown basketball (Beat ‘Cuse!), or my disgust with the rise of hook-up culture on university campuses (certainly not–that would be the National Review’s responsibility, I suppose), but my religious, political, social, and cultural experiences indisputably affect my perception of and perspectives on global affairs. Much like the rest of the world, this blog and my opinions are dynamic entities, continuously evolving and re-inventing themselves. Being a student, I’ve read a small fraction of published work on genocide and mass atrocities, African politics, international relations, and other subjects addressed on this site. Pure consistency always struck me as a bit dishonest; as my global outlook evolves, through readings, travels, conversations, and professional encounters, I’ll do my best to narrate the process of continual discovery, so that anticipated ideological anomalies are, at the very least, transparent. For additional narrative forums, check out my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Finally, a disclaimer: As you might expect, my official participation in the human rights community will limit my blogging scope; that said, I will never use the blog as a mouthpiece for STAND’s perspectives, nor as a vessel for inter-organization disputes. I encourage advocates, scholars, policymakers, and casual observers to join the conversation, to challenge my perspectives, and to create new approaches to securing human rights for years to come. Enjoy!