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This is the second post in a series on the lexicon of intervention’s slippery slope. The series is intended to educate human rights advocates about the opportunities, costs, and opportunity costs of coercive responses to mass atrocities.

Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich, and Bridget Conley-Zilkic, three genocide scholars, have penned an exceptional essay on the analytical shortcomings of the present discourse on mass atrocities prevention. Disaggregating historical models of atrocities termination, de Waal, Meierhenrich, and Conley-Zilkic complicate popular trends in atrocities scholarship. The authors outline three dominant characteristics of the “genocide and mass atrocities” narrative: the teleological sliding scale of genocide’s emergence, the epistemological assumption of military intervention’s effectiveness, and the subsequent ethical imperative underlying our cognitive perceptions of mass atrocities. For the authors, the policy-based, moral, and analytical fixation on the Holocaust and Rwanda as historical atrocity models lays the foundation for a deterministic, static paradigm for prevention:

In its simplest form this [“essentialist logic of violence”] seen as a graduated scale of warnings of genocide that corral the full complexity of conflict and inter-ethnic relations into a one-dimensional slippery slope that leads inexorably to genocide, and reduce the varied instrumental political logics of violence to evil motive alone. These cases model only two possible outcomes: either a completed extermination of the target group or an external military intervention to bring an end to the killing.

The essay is worth reading in full. Given this blog’s focus on mass atrocities prevention and policy, I’m planning over the next week to address each component of de Waal, Meierhenrich, and Conley-Zilkic’s analysis, starting with an assessment of the “teleology of mass atrocities.” The authors’ conclusions are apt, but generally unattributed, and I’d like to expand on their analysis of literature trends, cognitive narratives, and these narratives’ implications for policy formation and implementation.

So, to the teleology. It’s worth starting our assessment with James Young’s “texture of memory”–that is, the ways in which public discourse, memorial institutions, and narratives shape our collective understanding of the Holocaust, in particular. During high school, I spent two summers working as an education intern at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, the city’s relatively nascent Holocaust memorial museum. Compared to its counterparts in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Jerusalem, MoJH sits squarely in the middle of the “Jewish particularism vs. Holocaust universalism” spectrum. The core exhibition progresses chronologically, but also thematically: the first floor emphasizes the cultural origins of Eastern European Jewry, where the third floor focuses on the moral universalization of the Holocaust. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s interactive, cinematic, and LA-style Museum of Tolerance, on the other hand, features a “Tolerance Center,” transferring the Holocaust’s moral lessons to postwar and contemporary civil rights, human rights, and anti-bigotry struggles; similarly, DC’s US Holocaust Memorial Museum hosts “From Memory to Action,” a semi-permanent exhibit on post-Holocaust mobilization surrounding mass atrocities prevention and international human rights.

The moral project of Holocaust remembrance underlines public perceptions of subsequent crises, united under the essential ethics of common human dignity and justice. See, for example, President Obama’s 2009 Holocaust Remembrance Day address at the DC Holocaust museum, which articulates the post-Holocaust, moral stain of mass atrocities: [W]e have the opportunity to make a habit of empathy, to recognize ourselves in each other, to commit ourselves to resisting injustice and intolerance and indifference…[by] doing everything we can to prevent and end atrocities like those that took place in Rwanda, those taking place in Darfur.” The moral narrative of mass atrocities demonstrates de Waal et al.’s “graduated scale” of early warning and preventive opportunity; the “lessons-learned” understanding of humanity’s universal, collective responsibility offers little distinction between the rights hierarchy. Under this ethical logic, hate-crime prevention and anti-bigotry education are the natural, fluid counterparts to atrocities prevention–as de Waal et al. observe, the resulting narrative is “one-dimensional,” defined by genocide’s inevitable emergence. Thus, the teleology: if we perceive genocide or large-scale atrocities as the unavoidable end-point of political violence, our cognitive approach to policy formation and implementation becomes maximalist. Resolving localized outbreaks, internal political disputes, and regional divisions becomes a moot point, because the perpetrator’s underlying immorality transcends the political power of short-term, non-coercive interventions.

Under the moral narrative of mass atrocities, conscientious policymakers bear overwhelming responsibility for the prevention of the world’s worst crimes; transgressions against said responsibility are redeemable through decisive displays of courageous, moral leadership. Again, the teleology of mass atrocities prevention is in play. Political leadership emerges as a rough approximation of Godwin’s Law: as atrocity events escalate, the probability of an ahistorical, misappropriated comparison to past atrocities approaches 1. The penchant for non-rigorous, comparative analysis undermines responsible discourse and, at the formation level, intervention: conflict resolution approaches become “intervention by analogy,” an inexcusably shoddy model for public policy. Rwanda 1994 is no longer Rwanda 1994, but an unhappy synergy of Somalia 1993 and Rwanda 1994; Libya 2011 is no longer Libya 2011, but a misplaced moral reflection on Rwanda 1994, Darfur 2004, and Libya 2011; etcetera.

Public textures of atrocity memory carry significant relevance for academic and policy understandings of mass atrocities, not least because high-level policymakers perceive and depict the common policymaking discourse on mass atrocities through a moral lens. The field of anthropology has long fixated on the social origins of inter-communal conflict, violence, and atrocities memory (for an excellent example, see Liisa Malkki’s Purity and Exile, a field study of ethnic politics in the aftermath , constructed through the lens of Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania). Over the past decade, sociocultural anthropologists have proposed an “anthropology of genocide,” which probes the social foundations of dehumanization, “Otherization,” and inter-communal animosity. Similarly, two decades of experimental research on the collective and individual psychology of mass atrocities, victimization, and perpetration has extended academia’s perceptions of atrocities’ social origins.

Disaggregated, socially-oriented research is important, particularly for policy and programmatic approaches to trauma relief, post-conflict reconciliation, and restorative justice. But, for public perspectives on mass atrocities, the “socialization” of genocide research possesses an unfortunate side-effect: an over-emphasis on social dynamics, perceptions of the “Other,” and the “psychology of evil” de-politicizes mass atrocities, reducing the social phenomena to easily replicable models of “eliminationism” (to use Daniel Goldhagen’s uniquely unhelpful term). Anthropological and psychological frameworks for genocide and mass atrocities explain how individuals and groups mobilize against civilians, and how basic, human goodness declines into the world’s worst crime. But they don’t explain why. Crucial questions remain: Why do political institutions perpetrate atrocities? How do atrocities expand, limit, and perpetuate national, regional, and local political priorities? Justice, empathy, and human dignity are important, but the moral narrative of mass atrocities doesn’t begin to address the incentives and disincentives that transform institutional actors into perpetrators, third-party bystanders into interveners, and targeted communities into victims.

In carving a path forward for non-teleological research, de Waal et al. reference Meierhenrich’s disaggregated framework for atrocities termination, presumably present in his forthcoming Oxford introductory surveys. Meierhenrich differentiates between three characteristics of genocide’s emergence: genocidal acts, which are one-off instances of massacre (periodic outbreaks of ethnicized violence in northern Nigeria, for example); genocidal campaigns, which may include instrumentalist forms of genocide-by-counterinsurgency, genocide-by-resistance, and genocide-by-occupation (de Waal et al. cite the Ethiopian Red Terror as one such example); and genocidal regimes, whose existence, survival, and political legitimacy is reliant on a genocidal ideology (Hutu Power in Rwanda, Germany’s Nazi regime). In some sense, Meierhenrich’s model represents a confluence of trends within the larger research literature on conflict emergence and political violence. Large-scale genocide studies, such as Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil, have disaggregated historical models of mass atrocity throughout time, rather than Meierhenrich’s institutional distinctions. Meanwhile, advances in data collection technology (geographic information systems, especially) have allowed civil war researchers to prioritize the spatial disaggregation of conflict onset, duration, and termination (see, in particular, Cederman and Gleditsch’s 2009 JCR issue on “disaggregating civil war” (ungated), including excellent papers on ethnic marginalization, absolute/relative economic disparity, and geographic terrain, all gated). Atrocities analysis might apply a similar research model, using GIS data to trace complex local, regional, and national overlays of violence to determine the trajectory of and interaction between genocidal episodes.

In addition to the Intervention Ratchet’s Lexicon series, this post is the first in a three-part assessment of contemporary narratives of mass atrocities prevention and genocide termination, sparked by de Waal et al.’s essay. Check back in a couple of days for the second installment, which will address the “epistemological assumption” and its implications for policy formation.

Hat-tips: to AIPR’s Alex Zucker, for the essay recommendation; and, to Holger Schmidt, my Georgetown professor, for the “disaggregated civil war” literature.

This is the first post in a series on the lexicon of intervention’s slippery slope. The series is intended to educate human rights advocates about the opportunities, costs, and opportunity costs of coercive responses to mass atrocities.

In mid-January, U.S. special envoy Princeton Lyman warned of a “looming humanitarian disaster” in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. In March, a devastating famine is poised to hit the conflict-ridden border states, sparked by an ugly convergence of political violence and government-imposed restrictions on humanitarian relief operations. The famine will likely affect half a million Sudanese, according to USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS-NET).

Recognizing the potential for humanitarian catastrophe, the U.S. State Department has launched an aggressive diplomatic campaign, urging the Sudanese government to allow international humanitarian operations to return to South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Khartoum hasn’t budged, and the prospect of interstate conflict between Sudan and South Sudan will only increase the NCP’s inertia towards international humanitarian engagement within its borders. For a regime concerned about its internal political stability, the presence of international organizations–that is, more non-Sudanese personnel, more transparency, and, subsequently, more accountability–is an unpalatable possibility.

Noting the preliminary failure of unilateral and multilateral diplomatic outreach, Amb. Lyman’s office offered a brief consideration of stronger measures, including the unilateral distribution of food supplies and humanitarian assistance. In a multi-organization letter, the Sudan advocacy community has endorsed the policy approach, calling for “concrete steps outside the diplomatic realm” to facilitate humanitarian access, aid distribution, and unfettered population flows. The multi-organization letter cites a variety of humanitarian aid interventions throughout the 1980s and ’90s, including the ’85 Ethiopia airdrops and Operation Lifeline Sudan, as potential models for escalated action. The letter utilizes the catch-all term, “cross-border operations,” to describe the internationally-facilitated, non-consensual distribution of aid throughout South Kordofan and Blue Nile. An affiliated blog post called for the implementation of multiple “humanitarian corridors” throughout South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

Despite dismissing “logistical and political concerns,” the multi-organizational letter does not articulate the mechanics of a cross-border humanitarian aid operation. The procedural ambiguities are understandable–the goal of the letter is to build consensus, political will, and a framework for mobilization, rather than to guide administrative policy implementation. However, given the complex, multi-faceted nature of relief aid distribution in conflict-affected zones, the cross-border operation’s mechanics, political challenges, and potential hazards are worth considering.

Humanitarian aid operations range widely in their implementation, based on the degree of consensual participation by the state authority, the enormity of the humanitarian crisis, and the existing aid infrastructure within the crisis-affected area. In general, approaches to humanitarian crises in conflict zones bear greater similarity to each other than to those in disaster-affected, but otherwise stable crisis areas. Violent conflict compounds humanitarian aid delivery’s existing political complications, as allegedly neutral aid actors engage with and rely on less-than-savory insurgencies, government forces, and paramilitary operatives for logistical support and protection. If humanitarian actors, including third-party facilitators, fail to implement appropriate supply chain accountability measures, aid materials and food resources may sustain local military actors, as occurred during Ethiopia’s 1984-5 famine.

In the midst of political violence, cross-border, non-consensual aid operations frequently morph, shifting from a supply distribution initiative towards a militarized stability operation. To begin with, the politics of humanitarian assistance provide aid organizations with an unresolvable moral dilemma: accede to the central polity’s coercive, anti-humanitarian restrictions, or withdraw. Cross-border aid interventions seek to mitigate existing instability, providing a coercive cover for the distribution of assistance and supplies. For a conflict environment, the establishment of reinforced humanitarian corridors remains the only mechanism to secure the continued protection of humanitarian actors and crisis-affected populations. Airdrops and clandestine support to humanitarian organizations are, at best, piecemeal approaches to systemic crises.

If fluctuating government and rebel authorities had not previously facilitated the militarization of aid distribution operations, the establishment of a humanitarian corridor likely will. In 1992, the US-led United Task Force deployed to Somalia to secure the protection of humanitarian aid organizations, transporting thousands of tons of aid materials across the Kenyan border. Far from eliminating the security threat, Operation Restore Hope ensured the continuation of attacks against humanitarian workers and operations. With Farrah Haidid’s forces plundering, exploiting, and manipulating humanitarian actors, UNITAF established a civilian-military joint unit, responsible for overseeing aid distribution and civilian protection. However, standard operating procedures, civilian protection priorities, and logistical dynamics clashed, ensuring the continued dominance of military priorities, which failed to create sustained space for civilian, non-coercive humanitarian operations.

Of course, Somalia represents a worst-case scenario: the scale of sectarian conflict, terrain, waning political will, and the local dynamics of humanitarian mobilization throughout Operation Restore Hope are by no means illustrative of the standard, day-to-day challenges of aid distribution. Indeed, the multi-organizational letter makes no reference to the botched, internationally humiliating Somalia intervention. So, let’s take a look at a cross-border operation that the letter references: Operation Lifeline Sudan, the three-phase, UN-coordinated cross-border relief operation. Beginning in 1988, OLS occurred at the apex of Sudan’s (second) north/south civil war, preceding emerging SPLM schisms and the sudden collapse of the al-Mahdi regime in Khartoum. OLS’ initial phases occurred in the context of tenuous, negotiated consensus between the central Sudanese government, the SPLM, and the international community. The first two phases of the operation, prior to Omar al-Bashir’s 1989 coup, represented a distinct, if replicated approach to complex emergency response, where the conflict actors functioned as the primary arbiters of security in crisis-affected areas.

Sudan’s current security situation bear little resemblance to OLS’ permissive environment. As I mentioned above, the NCP is increasingly wary of Western-, UN-, and NGO-affiliated actors, particularly in its unstable, insurgency-ridden border provinces. A negotiated, consensual relief operation is an unlikely, perhaps impossible prospect. Coercive force would be a necessary element of a cross-border operation, which third-party actors would likely launch from South Sudan. The UNITAF operation, which deployed in response to a famine of similar magnitude, included 37,000 personnel, 25,000 of whom were American. AFRICOM’s Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. military’s only base in the region, supports 3,500 military and civilian personnel, rendering a unilateral intervention an unlikely task. From a multilateral perspective, it’s difficult to imagine the composition of an intervening force. UNMISS, the UN peacekeeping force in South Sudan, possesses no operational mandate in South Kordofan or Blue Nile, and would need UN Security Council approval to expand its reach to Sudan’s border regions. After last weekend’s Syria fiasco, as well as the SPLM-N’s recent kerfuffle with China’s construction operations in South Kordofan, the miraculous emergence of a non-consensual peacekeeping operation within Sudan’s territorial boundaries seems unlikely. The South Sudanese are hardly worth mentioning–between Bashir’s saber-rattling and the recent oil production freeze, the last thing Juba wants is a large-scale ground invasion.

For the moment, let’s side-step the practicality questions; is a cross-border operation a good idea? That is, would a cross-border operation in South Kordofan and Blue Nile facilitate marked improvements in the lives of Sudanese? It’s not an easy question. At a first glance, the absence of humanitarian aid delivery will be disastrous, amounting to the willful negligence of half a million civilian lives. But, seen from a larger perspective, the consequences of decisive intervention would be far, far worse. According to colleagues in the aid community, non-consensual aid delivery operations often jeopardize the integrity of humanitarian assistance, particularly given OLS’ complex legacy. Aid workers and local populations would become vulnerable to accusations of sheltering the SPLM-N insurgency, further aggravating the human security environment in the border regions. The international humanitarian aid community maintains a broad infrastructure throughout Sudan, particularly in Darfur, where hundreds of thousands of IDPs remain dependent on UN and NGO assistance. Food insecurity affects a much broader swath of the country’s population–in 2011, more than five million people throughout Sudan received World Food Program assistance. As the ICC indictment controversy indicated, the NCP regime needs few excuses the initiate retaliatory attacks and restrictive measures against aid operations in Darfur.

As in most cases, the appropriate approach to Sudan’s humanitarian crisis must be comprehensive. On its face, a cross-border intervention is a compelling notion, but offers few mechanisms for the country-wide redress of Sudanese instability and food insecurity.

For those in the social media sphere paying attention to the politics of international diplomacy and the UN Security Council, this morning’s latest is nothing new: Russia and China vetoed the UN Security Council’s weak-kneed resolution on Syria. The resolution offered an ambiguous model for civilian protection policy, Assad’s transition, and political transformation in Syria, based on the Arab League’s post-observer proposals. As Philip Gourevitch tweeted snarkily, the UN Security Council’s resolution, forged after a series of disingenuous Russian and Chinese objections and negotiations, was “toothless,” offering few opportunities for tangible change.

But, for better or worse, it was an opportunity for international consensus, as well as an entry point for further collective action. The crisis reached a tipping point last night, when Syrian forces massacred over 250 civilians across the country, especially in the protest-heavy city of Homs. Especially with Homs in the backdrop, international actors did not perceive the resolution as the be-all-end-all of civilian protection policy in Syria. However, today’s failure at Turtle Bay has caused more diplomatic disarray, more uncertainty, and has lowered the prospects for an effective political resolution to Syria’s crisis. Russia and China may not have “betrayed” the Syrian people, as Human Rights Watch observed in a press release earlier today, but their intransigence is remarkably “disempowering” (friend-of-the-blog Sean Langberg‘s words, not mine).

Of course, the UN Security Council’s failure has cued a new stream of calls for military intervention in Syria, underlined by an unfortunately deterministic vocabulary (“inevitable” has proven aggravatingly persistent, especially following Michael Weiss’ January op-ed). The logic of “last resort” military action is simple and, on its face, morally convincing: the international community has engaged in every credible policy mechanism to ensure civilian protection and, more broadly, political transition; at its core, the UN Security Council is an institution of “last resort”, responsible for mobilizing collective action where individual diplomacy fails; in the absence of reliable, decisive Security Council action, the international community–whether the United States, the Arab League, or Turkey–must uphold the mantle of liberal foreign policy and universal values.

For Shadi Hamid and Anne-Marie Slaughter, two respected policy experts and supporters of military intervention in Syria (generally, in the form of a “humanitarian corridor”/”safe zone”), it’s not just a matter of civilian protection; the credibility of the international moral project, underlined by the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, is at stake. For Hamid, if the international community cannot operationalize R2P in Syria, then the doctrine “is just an idea, and not a reality.” Well, yes! The relative success of NATO’s Libya intervention has established a false standard of successful R2P implementation. A policy doctrine can provide a powerful framework for international mobilization, but, like all aspects of international politics, it’s not a self-perpetuating force. The international community’s failure to intervene in Syria will not cast R2P into Hades’ Room of Unrealized Concepts–rather, Syria demonstrates that we need to improve our mechanisms for preventive diplomacy and early warning, in order to avoid the perpetual round of insubstantial, failed Security Council negotiations.

And, from a broader perspective, Syria is a poor, poor model for “last resort” intervention. As I’ve written, a military intervention in Syria, particularly one undertaken by Arab League and Turkish forces, would likely damage, rather than improve R2P’s credibility. A quick glance at the ICISS report, R2P’s framing document, suggests Evans and Sahnoun’s broad agreement with this assessment. Outlining the preconditions for a successful, just, and responsible R2P intervention, the ICISS framers write:

In particular, a military action for limited human protection purposes cannot be justified if in the process it triggers a larger conflict. It will be the case that some human beings simply cannot be rescued except at unacceptable cost–perhaps of a larger regional conflagration, involving major military powers. In such cases, however painful the reality, coercive military action is no longer justified.

In a masterful critique of the R2P doctrine’s application in Syria, Dan Trombly addressed the folly of the “military intervention = regional stability” logic. I don’t agree with Trombly’s dismissive analysis of R2P’s normative evolution, but he has it right: the “second and third order” effects of an international intervention in Syria would be catastrophic for regional stability. Jackson Diehl’s speculations on the prospect of an emerging sectarian war across the Middle East confirm these stability-oriented concerns about “last resort” intervention in Syria. From a larger civilian protection perspective, there are few credible technical or operational indications that a humanitarian corridor, safe zone, no-fly zone, no-fly zone, or cross-border humanitarian aid delivery operation would alleviate Syria’s dire human security situation. In this circumstance, a “last resort” intervention would likely be irresponsible, rather than a fulfillment of the R2P doctrine.

What, then, is to be done? I haven’t had enough time to consider the post-veto policy options, but CFR’s Robert Danin offered some valuable, pre-UNSC proposals in late January, including an ICC indictment for Assad’s inner circle, stronger sanctions on the Assad-friendly Aleppo and Damascus business communities (the regime’s primary patronage networks), and the establishment of a coordinated “Friends of Syria” group. Indeed, much of the policy commentary remains speculative–see, for example, Daniel Serwer’s quick (but comprehensive) post on the post-veto landscape:

What the United States, Europe and the Arab League need to do now is to keep up the pressure by maintaining and tightening sanctions, redeploying the observers if it is safe enough to do so and encouraging continued nonviolent protest in forms (boycotts in particular) that do not expose large numbers of people to the regime’s violence.  They also need to consider new measures:  blockade of arms shipments?  extension of the financial sanctions used against Iran to Syria?  Reinforcement of the Arab League observers?

I’ll continue to update this page as additional policy resources flow in.

Last week, Registan.net author Sarah Kendzior offered a rousing condemnation of the “reverse Orientalism” of the democratization discourse in Central Asia.  Riffing on Edward Said’s seminal work of postcolonial theory, Kendzior depicts a mutually destructive interaction between the Arab Spring’s contemporary legacy and public perceptions of political unrest in Central Asia. As with most cases of essentialization and generalization, Kendzior’s “reverse orientalism” reduces the inherent agency of democratic participation, reducing Tahrir Square to an easily replicable, undifferentiated phenomenon, as well as Kazakh opposition activity to a static instance of political-change-by-analogy. Broad cultural, political, and economic similarities substitute for nuanced analysis, with few credible conclusions on the role of technology, social change, and ideology in producing democratic reform.

If, in popular discourse, Central Asia’s political upheavals are the ambiguous step-cousin of the Arab Spring, social movements in sub-Saharan Africa are its sickly younger brother, susceptible to North Africa’s democratic epidemic–in a piece on 2012’s looming “sub-Saharan” spring, The Economist noted that, throughout the African continent, “the protest bug is catching.” Uganda’s Walk2Work movement, political transition in Sata’s Zambia, and opposition protests in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burkina Faso are no longer localized displays of human dignity, civic participation, and civil society strength; rather, the so-called “African Spring” relies on the causal contagion of technological growth, economic uncertainty, and ideological mimicry. The democratic epidemic ignores sixty years of postcolonial social mobilization by diverse civil society organizations, organized labor movements, and political parties. Similarly, the contagion effect perceives the collective power of political action throughout the Middle East and North Africa as a passing phase, democratization with a kindergartener’s attention span.

In her essay, Kendzior neglected to discuss the flip-side of Said’s Orientalism: in addition to its implications for the orientalizing/orientalized hierarchy, the Orientalist ideology becomes integral to the orientalized’s processes of self-definition and social participation. The “African Spring” is an illustrative example of the Global Revolution’s discursive impact. As Sahel Blog’s Alex Thurston observes, the economic, political, and social origins of Nigeria’s fuel subsidy protests lie far earlier in the country’s muddled postcolonial history than its “Occupy Nigeria” label would suggest. Even in an era of democratizing media access, the global flow of information brands provides tangible incentives for Nigerian labor unions and fuel subsidy protesters to cast their lot with the international revolutionaries. In the spirit of social upheaval, #OccupyNigeria is a much more compelling hashtag than #fuelsubsidyprotests, as a remarkably unscientific Hash Tag Battle analysis indicates.

One can only hope that, as the local distinctions in sub-Saharan Africa’s “revolutionary” outcomes emerge, the appeal of the “African Spring” meme will wane. There are encouraging indications, but they’re few and far between. When it comes down to an analysis of inequality, political abuse, and failed governance in sub-Saharan Africa, we need more of Malawian academic Jimmy Kainja’s perspective, both from Western media sources and from African intellectuals, civil society leaders, and opposition politicians themselves:

These demands and the eagerness by the people to be heard–to hold their governments to account–can only be addressed by developing strong democratic institutions–and not simply by getting rid of presidents and their governments.

This is what is necessary in the next stage of Africa’s democracy–not an African Spring in the mould of the Arab Spring.

In an Atlantic piece earlier today, Anne-Marie Slaughter offers her two cents on the prospect of international intervention in Syria, contextualized within the international discourse on the “responsibility to protect” future evolution. Slaughter offers her support for Steven Cook’s moral argument for military intervention in Syria, which calls on international policymakers to consider the future consequences of continued Assad atrocities (I addressed the Cook/Lynch discussion last week). Slaughter, rightly wringing her hands over the prospect of R2P’s normative delegitimization, outlines five conditions for effective, justified military intervention in Syria: a call for armed intervention from the Syrian opposition; legitimization of military force by the reigning regional authority–in this case, the Arab League; a restricted focus on civilian protection, rather than regime change; UN Security Council authorization; and, finally, Turkish and Arab operational leadership, reliant on NATO logistical support and combat intelligence.

I’ll save the combat assessment for more skilled military analysts, but a couple of points are worth raising, especially with regard to Slaughter’s reliance on opposition legitimacy and the impact of an armed intervention on R2P’s evolution:

On the opposition: Human rights advocates, in general, and Slaughter, in this particular instance, likely place too much of an emphasis on the legitimizing authority of opposition movements in conflict situations. The consolidated opposition movement is a rare phenomenon in sub-state politics, and Syria is no anomaly. As avid-intervention-supporter Michael Weiss writes, the Syrian National Council, which Slaughter perceives as the legitimate and legitimizing Syrian opposition organization, has received little on-the-ground support, largely due to its inability to develop an inclusive coalition of Syria’s ethnicized political entities. If, as Slaughter assumes, the international community is not concerned with bolstering the Syrian opposition and, instead, focused on the establishment of a sustainable protective zone, there is little justification for a moral and political reliance on the SNC.

The question of opposition authority touches on an essential dilemma in coercive intervention: if international actors are interested in mitigating the unintended consequences of coercive action, who’s voice do you prioritize? In the context of the DRC, a multitude of civil society voices maintain manifold perspectives on the conflict minerals debate, and neither human rights advocates nor their critics have developed a consolidated framework for incorporating said voices into the policy discourse. In the DRC, it’s a matter of coercive certification authority; in Syria, where military force is the essential consideration, the stakes of the international/opposition discourse are exponentially higher.

On intervention and R2P’s evolution: Applying her notion of “credible influence” to the prospect of international intervention in Syria, Slaughter perceives the effectiveness of international response to mass atrocities in Syria as a partial determinant of R2P and, more broadly, human rights norms’ continued credibility. From a moral perspective, Slaughter’s assessment of R2P’s deterrent significance may be correct; if we perceive norms as a relevant force in international politics, then the expansion of R2P’s normative strength may well lessen the recurrence of mass atrocities and violent conflict. Unfortunately, R2P’s credibility relies on its application within the decision-making processes of domestic and transnational political institutions, rather than its moral acceptance.

If the international community successfully intervenes in Syria–that is, if a civilian protection operation secures a safe zone on Syria’s eastern corridor, in the midst of a successful political transition–R2P’s political salience will surely benefit. However, as Marc Lynch has observed and two millennia of just war theory has reinforced, a reasonable chance of success is a necessary precondition for a successful intervention. Much to the detriment of human security in Syria, the technical and operational requirements, human terrain, and weak international political will for intervention renders success an unreasonable hope. In this context, as in all others, the moral imperative for intervention is insufficient. If we’re truly concerned about R2P’s political future, “do something that works” is a much more effective operative framework for human rights policy interventions than its more concise counterpart.

Update: In a post today, CFR’s Robert Danin offers a couple of non-armed policy options for the Obama administration, most centered on symbolic international attempts to prioritize civilian protection in Syria, including closing small sanctions loopholes, Security Council prioritization of Syria, and an arms embargo. Russia, of course, is the persistent party-fouler.