ICISS e vontade política

Introduction

‘The international community has not intervened in Darfur because it lacks the political will to do so’.

This is a familiar explanation for the failure of the international system to fulfil its ‘responsibility to protect’ civilians in Darfur and in other African crises. The recurrent complaint is that there is no shortage of international resources to respond, but rather a dearth of ‘political will’ to mobilise them effectively.

Although the idea of the responsibility to protect (RTP) is not new, it remains controversial (Holzgrefe and Keohane 2003). Many analysts are critical of its underlying arguments (Chandler 2004; Chesterman 2001), while others welcome them (Wheeler 2000). Nevertheless, the basic principles of the concept were adopted at the September 2005 UN World Summit: that the norm of state sovereignty in domestic affairs is trumped in cases where governments are unable or unwilling to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, or are themselves instrumental in causing them. In such cases, the responsibility to act is transferred to the international community (United Nations 2005b: para 139). International action to implement RTP can be preventive and reactive, and also incorporates efforts to rebuild post-conflict societies. RTP explicitly includes, where necessary, military intervention to protect vulnerable civilians.

The 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) – which coined the ‘responsibility to protect' phrase – itself acknowledges the limitations of traditional analyses of political will, observing that “[t]he trouble with most discussions of ‘political will’ is that more time is spent lamenting its absence than on analyzing its ingredients, and working out how to use them in different contexts” (ICISS 2001a: 71).

Despite the significance placed on political will as a determinant in mounting effective RTP responses, it tends to be used as a catch-all phrase to describe what is, in fact, a complex range of factors related to practically implementing RTP and, as such, can serve as a lazy substitute for more sophisticated analysis. When used so imprecisely, the term clouds rather than clarifies thinking and is of limited use in policy formulation.

The ICISS report offers some useful suggestions for developing a better “understanding of the relevant institutional processes”, and “good arguments” to mobilise RTP action (ICISS 2001a: 71). However, the report stops short of defining political will and providing a systematic disaggregation and classification of its constituent components.

What, then, does political will mean in relation to a requirement to fulfil the international responsibility to protect? As a broad working definition, political will in this context can be described as:

achieving a balance between incentives and disincentives among potential interveners with the necessary resources, including offsetting their values – such as an ideological commitment to R2P – and their interests. This balance must be sufficient to persuade a critical number of them to formulate and coordinate an appropriate policy, and to create and sustain a coalition strong enough to implement that policy effectively over the time required, given the nature and severity of the operational challenge.

Developing a better understanding of what political will entails may help efforts to mobilise international action in crisis situations.

This paper forms part of a larger research project that aims to examine how the responsibility to protect can be operationalised in Africa through critiquing existing mechanisms for addressing African crises in which populations are suffering and proposing new policy options for enhancing national, regional and international responses. Within this context, the paper seeks to remedy imprecise understanding of the concept of political will in relation to RTP in Africa by developing a more discriminating analytic framework. It will link this analysis to practical recommendations for strengthening alliances of actors capable and willing to take action in specific crises. Throughout the paper, priority is given to the ability of responses to protect vulnerable civilians.

Traditional analyses of political will

Political will is often cited as a determining factor in realising the RTP principle in practice. However, analysis of political will seldom goes beyond episodic criticism of failures by the international community to demonstrate sufficient resolve to mount effective responses to particular crises.

In his 1999 annual report to the General Assembly, Kofi Annan identified an absence of political will as the fundamental barrier to intervention in Rwanda in 1994, where key obstacles to action were the reluctance of Member States to risk injury to their troops, a lack of perceived vital interests in the conflict, concerns over financial cost, and doubts over the effectiveness of intervention in halting the genocide (Annan 1999: 21).

Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler downplays the significance of traditional debates on non-interference in relation to humanitarian intervention in Rwanda in 1994. He asserts that international reluctance to intervene did not derive from any misplaced respect for Rwanda’s sovereignty, but rather from a “lack of political will” in the international community to act. Wheeler perceives the failure of the UN World Summit Outcome to tackle the issue of political will as having placed serious limits on the significance of the agreement in the RTP context (Wheeler 2005: 9).

For Gareth Evans, the difficulty of mobilising political will is a major obstacle to protecting threatened civilians, even if the required resources are available to react appropriately. This deficiency relates not only to the use of military force, but also to non-military actions such as sanctions or arraignment through the International Criminal Court (Evans 2002).

Resources, systems and willingness to act

The relationship between resources, institutional mechanisms (systems) and willingness to act is key to implementing RTP on the ground. Does the availability of resources and functioning systems drive the willingness to act, or vice versa? The relationship is not straightforward. For instance, many humanitarians see the Security Council’s lack of access to readily available military units as a primary obstacle to effective UN intervention. Building a ‘standing’