Charli Carpenter
The military coup that deposed Myanmar’s civilian government in February has created an escalating humanitarian crisis and left the country teetering on the brink of civil war. As the junta continues to target the population with violence, including torture and sexual assault, the opposition movement has also begun to question the effectiveness of its largely peaceful protests, especially in the absence of international support for the pro-democracy struggle.
In a WPR article earlier this week, Prachi Vidwans noted that this is precisely the kind of situation where the United Nations can do the most good if it were to act early, but where it is the least likely to do so. Indeed, as I told Vidwans in an interview for the article, “the U.N. does really poorly in supporting nonviolent resistance movements before they become violent or engaging in preventive diplomacy when violence is about to break out.”
It is reasonable to conclude, as Vidwans did in her article, that “the truth is that there is not much more that the international community could realistically be doing to help.”
But rather than be the cause of despair, the gaps in U.N. architecture can instead be seen as an opportunity for innovation. First, the U.N. has more tools and more entrepreneurial power at its disposal than is often acknowledged, because it is not a single organization reducible to Security Council politics. And second, the international community is bigger, with more options at its disposal, than the U.N. itself, and it can exercise those options in ways that are consistent with the U.N. Charter.
After World War II, the U.N. was founded above all with the goal of eradicating interstate war. By locking in an arrangement that the two major blocs at the time could agree upon, the U.N. Charter outlived the blocs themselves and sustained a situation in which the five permanent, veto-wielding members of the Security Council were forced to work together to keep the international peace. At this, the U.N. Charter has succeeded brilliantly.
But while the charter has staved off World War III by limiting aggressive war, it also promises to promote fundamental human rights and human freedoms, including freedom from violence at the hands of one’s own state. Coupled with the Genocide Convention requiring states to prevent and punish genocide, the U.N. Charter has always faced a paradox between upholding the territorial integrity norm at all costs and encouraging the protection of human rights within borders, a goal that occasionally requires war. Fortunately, the history of U.N. military operations shows that the U.N. is not limited by the charter’s strict language prohibiting armed warfare. Indeed, it is precisely the charter’s flexibility to innovate that enables it to bridge this gap.
Take peacekeeping for example, which was not envisioned in the charter. What we now know as U.N. peacekeeping was devised by an entrepreneurial secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, as a way to overcome a split Security Council in managing the Suez Crisis. Invented on the fly, it has since become, remarkably, one of the most effective global policy tools ever conceived. But peacekeeping is not helpful in cases like the Bosnian war of the 1990s, where there was no peace to keep, or situations where a genocide is unfolding.
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