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Guest post by Alexander Noyes
On May 17, the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved the country’s legislature in the midst of impeachment proceedings against him. Did Ecuador just have a self-coup? Opposition leaders say yes. But the answer is no, at least for now. This matters greatly for the country’s democratic trajectory and for the international community’s response.
After a recent lull, coups and coup attempts are front-page news again, from Sudan to Brazil to the United States. This surge in coup activity prompted Antonio Guterres, the United Nations chief, to decry an “epidemic” of coups. Perhaps more troublingly for democracy worldwide, coups-plotters have evolved. Scholars have traditionally defined coups as: “overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting head of state using unconstitutional means.”
But now, these softer, more subtle self-coups—whereby a sitting chief executive uses sudden and irregular (i.e., illegal or unconstitutional) measures to seize power or dismantle checks and balances—have become the new mode of coup. Self-coups, also known as auto-coups, are much more sophisticated than soldiers in fatigues taking television stations by force in order to announce the overthrow of a country’s leader. Self-coups are rarely bloody, but can be just as harmful to democracy as the more traditional military overthrows.
A raft of countries have experienced successful self-coups or coup attempts of late. There have been nine successful or attempted self-coups over the last decade, according to the Cline Center at the University of Illinois, which collects comprehensive information on all types of coups around the world. Self-coup illegal power grabs have occurred across a range of regions and political systems, including in semi-autocracies, such as Pakistan in 2022, as well as semi-democracies, like Tunisia in 2021. Worryingly, full democracies have not been immune to this trend, with the United States suffering a failed self-coup at the hands of President Trump on January 6th, 2021, which the Cline Center labeled an auto-coup.
Ecuador has been lauded as a strong partner of the United States in a region that has experienced democratic backsliding. Yet the country has recently experienced a host of crises on Lasso’s watch, including rising crime, corruption scandals, government crackdowns on the media, and protests that have often turned violent. The current impasse is the opposition’s second attempt at impeachment.
Is Lasso’s dissolution of Ecuador’s National Assembly the latest example of a self-coup? Leonidas Iza Salazar, the head of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities, which has led a series of protests against the president over the last several years, says yes. On May 17, Iza Salazar accused Lasso of launching “a cowardly self-coup with the help of the police and the armed forces, without citizen support.” Viviana Veloz, the opposition lawmaker leading the impeachment, said: “The only way out is the impeachment and exit of the president of the republic, Guillermo Lasso.”
Lasso defended his decision as a chance at a fresh start and a way to resolve recent political turmoil. Lasso proclaimed that the dissolution was “the best decision to find a constitutional way out of the political crisis… and give the people of Ecuador the chance to decide their future at the next elections.” Lasso’s decree calls on the country’s electoral authorities to set a date for fresh elections, now set for August 20, and allows him to govern with limited powers and without the National Assembly until these new elections. The measure is referred to as a “mutual-death” clause, since it leads to new elections for both the sitting president as well as the legislature. Lasso has promised that he will not seek reelection in the coming polls.
There is little question that dissolving the legislature during his embezzlement impeachment trial and slumping political support is an opportunistic move by Lasso. Yet while Lasso’s action was indeed extraordinary—it is the first time this constitutional provision has been used since it was adopted in 2008—it is legal, at least so far. On May 18, the country’s constitutional court upheld the decision, dismissing six cases aimed at blocking the legislature’s dissolution. This means that Lasso’s maneuver does not yet fit the “irregular” provision that must be fulfilled to meet the definition of a coup, including a self-coup.
This “coup or not a coup” distinction matters greatly for Ecuador’s democratic future, and should guide how the international community responds. If Lasso’s action did indeed fit the worrying rise of self-coups globally, it would be dire for Ecuador’s prospects for democracy, and likely plunge it towards autocracy. International actors would need to condemn the coup, push for regional and global sanctions, and apply strong pressure to reverse Lasso’s illegal power grab.
Since Lasso’s decree is unusual but legal, Ecuador’s shaky democracy—which democracy watchers rate as falling short of a full democracy—is on precarious, but at least constitutional footing, for now.
At this precarious moment, the United States and other like-minded, pro-democracy countries should not sit idly by. While fully recognizing the country’s own struggles with incumbent power grabs, the United States should urge Lasso to strictly keep to the letter and spirit of the law, reign in the security forces—ensuring their political impartiality—and ramp up support to help Ecuador arrange free and fair elections in the coming months.
The role of the military along with unified international pressure has proved crucial to stopping or reversing past self-coups around the world. The current situation in Ecuador fortunately does not yet fit that definition. But the international community would be wise to actively keep it that way, first by strongly and consistently reminding Lasso—and other key regional partners—that the world is watching, and by also increasing democracy support to Ecuador ahead of the coming polls.
Alexander Noyes, PhD, is a political scientist at the non-profit, non-partisan RAND Corporation and former senior advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Feminist foreign policies (FFP) are considered the latest contribution of feminism to global governance. Eleven countries around the world have embraced FFP, aiming to “systematically integrate a gender perspective throughout” foreign policy agendas.
In recent years, FFP has spread to Latin America: Mexico introduced an FFP in 2020 and the newly elected Chilean and Colombian governments have expressed their intentions of adopting the framework.
This growing interest in FFP across Latin American raises important questions: What exactly is this feminist foreign policy and what is there to gain by naming foreign policies “feminist”? Should Latin American feminists engage, support, critique, or be suspicious of this global trend? What does FFP look like in a Latin American context?
FFP is emerging as a new subfield in feminist international relations. Building on women’s rights and peace movements around the globe, feminism occupies an important position within academic and political spaces since it provides a powerful source of intervention against different forms of discrimination.
The theoretical foundations of FFP, however, are still not clearly defined. What an FFP looks like depends largely on a government’s interpretation of the concept.
Sweden first proposed a general FFP model built on what they call the three R’s: resources, representation and rights. Their model went on to define “six long-term external objectives” centered on policy making with a gender perspective: freedom from different types of gender-based violence; women’s participation in preventing and resolving conflicts, and post-conflict peace building; political participation; economic rights and empowerment; and sexual and reproductive health and rights. This initial Swedish proposal served as a basis for other countries’ policies.
For many foreign policy observers and feminist activists these objectives were still too vague and ambiguous. First, what does foreign policy entail? This question underlies the discussion among academics and activists about feminism being co-opted for neoliberal economic purposes, or if it maintains its potential as a critical proposition. There are also questions concerning contentious topics for feminists. For instance, how is the gender perspective incorporated into defense and security? Given the long tradition of pacifism in the feminist movement globally and its demand for an active commitment to disarmament, how can countries like Canada simultaneously export arms and pursue an FFP?
International organizations have tried to provide definitional clarity. In its most ambitious expression, UN Women proposes that an FFP should aspire to transform the overall practice of foreign policy—including a country’s diplomacy, defense and security cooperation, aid, trade, climate security, and immigration policies—to the benefit of women and girls.
Feminist civil society, however, tends to take a more critical stance. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Germany believes that “fixating on the production of a universally acceptable and concrete definition of a feminist foreign policy fails to consider the different and varied political realities that shape our global landscape.” Thus, it proposes five concepts to inform policy development that better accounts for this variation: intersectionality; empathetic reflexivity; substantive representation and participation; accountability; and, active peace commitment. Regardless of the concrete definition, FFP aims to achieve explicit normative and ethical goals. Yet, as Jennifer Thompson notes, FFP is a state invention in which foreign policy goals are often shaped by state interests rather than feminist activists’ normative principles. While civil society often formulates FFP demands, states implement foreign policies. In other words, it is states that ultimately decide what counts as FFP and what does not. As a result, FFPs may not fulfill their ethical promises—particularly in countries without strong accountability mechanisms. Mexico’s attempt to develop an FFP is a case in point.
In September 2022, Internacional Feminista, a Mexican feminist organization that I co-founded, published the first evaluation of Mexico’s FFP. My colleagues and I concluded that there is no clarity as to what the FFP actually entails and no policy roadmap detailing the FFP’s actions, outcomes, indicators, and intended impact. The Mexican FFP has stalled.
Regarding the question of what constitutes foreign policy, the Mexican FFP has a broad and ambitious scope. The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs seeks to mainstream gender perspectives across all foreign policy areas as one of its core objectives, yet we found this does not happen in practice. Discussion of the FFP is most visible in Mexico’s rhetoric in multilateral fora. However, tangible evidence that Mexico is actually considering a gender perspective is largely absent from other foreign policy issues, such as defense, trade, and diplomacy.
One innovation of Mexico’s FFP was prioritizing gender parity within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its diplomatic corps. Nonetheless, it is not possible to assess whether there is gender parity across the ranks as the Secretariat has no available records of personnel demographic data, disaggregated by gender or rank. The lack of available data disaggregated by gender suggests that this is not as much of a focus area as it’s made out to be.
Another feature of the Mexican initiative was its aim of strengthening the protocols to address and prevent gender-based violence within the foreign ministry. However, there is very little information available regarding how these are implemented and if they have achieved their intended outcomes. The absence of information again suggests that this was not a priority task. In fact, two cases call into question Mexico’s commitment to FFP: one involved failures in consular attention to a Mexican woman victim of gender-based violence in Qatar, and another involved an attempt to appoint a man accused of sexual harassment as Mexico’s ambassador to Panama.
In its FFP plan, the Secretariat also announced funding for intersectionality-related efforts. However, data shows that the budget remained constant from 2018 to 2020. Following the austerity policies of the current administration, no additional resources were granted to support these efforts. Moreover, the budget document labeled these resources as “Expenditures for equality between women and men.” By continuing to interpret “intersectionality” and “gender perspective” as synonymous, the Mexican FFP dilutes the disruptive spirit of intersectionality that accounts for multidimensional identities beyond binary gender categories.
Without clear implementation guidelines and evaluation criteria, Mexican officials have struggled to navigate the contradictions within the government. The most notorious is the lack of support from the president himself who, according to Mexico’s Constitution, is responsible for defining foreign policy objectives. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is openly hostile towards the feminist movement, and a recent leak indicates that the Secretary of Defense spies on feminist activists. Yet, diplomats continue to uphold feminist principles in multilateral forums. The president’s hostility and the mismatch between secretariats obstructs necessary dialogue with feminist civil society and blocks the chances of effective policy accountability.
The Mexican experience highlights the challenges of implementing FFPs in Latin America.
First, it is clear that FFP is not as boundary-pushing as its supporters suggest. It is limited by the lack of accountability mechanisms, broad political support and budget constraints. As a result, FFP is often insufficient to drive change on critical issues. Yet, feminism in the region, as Claudia Korol puts it, “is a rebellious movement in which the plural and diverse bodies and the different struggles seek their place, and demand to be named.” In other words, feminism is in tension with the circles of institutionalized, disciplined and ordered practices, such as government-led foreign policies.
In countries with rampant economic inequality and high rates of gender violence against women, feminist principled policies are sorely needed. Due to institutional resistance, however, policy implementation is far from guaranteed. The design and implementation of foreign policies in the region have historically been a space for male elites and, as the example of Mexico illustrates, the FFP has been insufficient to break this inertia. In the words of feminist scholar Angela Davis, “if standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top, how is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom?”
After recent elections in Chile and Colombia, leaders are now developing their foreign policies and both countries have declared their interest in adopting an FFP. As consultations develop in Bogotá and Santiago, it is worth remembering that simply labeling a foreign policy as feminist without implementing policies that account for gender perspectives or advance women’s rights creates an illusion of change, while keeping systems of oppression intact and further setting back gender justice.
Genuine efforts to advance gender justice ought to reimagine traditional international relations and diplomacy. As I have argued elsewhere, this can be achieved by more fully considering local dynamics and actors in developing foreign policies. Feminist civil society has been at the forefront of driving successful changes in domestic policies—and we ought to incorporate their strategies and insights into foreign policy development.
Guest post by María José Méndez
This post is part of a series on illicit economies, organized crime, and extra-legal actors and came out of an IGCC-sponsored conference hosted in October 2022 by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
In 2019, a 19-year-old woman detonated a grenade on a public bus in an extortion attempt in Guatemala City. Three years later, another woman was arrested for trying to smuggle ammunition and cell phones into a maximum-security prison in Honduras.
Accounts of criminal violence tend to portray women as passive victims. There are good reasons for this. Women are abused daily by criminal groups, especially in Latin America, where they are being killed at record rates. In Central America, women are victimized by gangs when they refuse sexual advances or protect their children from recruitment. In Mexico, they are forced into sex work by drug cartels, and their mutilated bodies are displayed to send messages to rival groups and the state.
Considering this rampant victimization, how important is the role that women play in criminal violence and what drives their participation? My research delves into this question by studying women affiliated with MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
While women have long played an active role in armed conflict, comprising as much as 30 percent of militant movements worldwide, the discussion around women’s involvement in violence tends to ignore contexts of organized crime and why women choose to stay in violent organizations.
In Central America, women are increasingly taking on lethal activities within gangs. This trend is also evident in other countries where women’s engagement in violent crime is also growing and diversifying. In Mexico and Colombia, where the number of female prisoners has more than doubled in the past decade, women have assumed prominent positions in drug trafficking organizations, with some even serving as leaders of their own criminal enterprises.
Several of the women I spoke with participated in hired killings and attacks against local business owners unable or unwilling to pay extortions. One former gang member said she felt “stronger than men” when given these missions; another spoke about regaining a sense of control, which had been shattered by a traumatic experience of rape. For both, participation in violence was a way of asserting power and earning respect from fellow gang members. For others, it was simply a way of surviving. As one put it to me, “In Honduras [t]here are no jobs for us […] But you must work to survive. We survive from contract killings, extortions, drug sales and kidnappings.”
Women’s contributions to violence also manifest in indirect ways, as revealed in a series of 2018 confiscated letters. In these letters, an imprisoned Honduran gang leader asks his wife to serve as a communication bridge with those outside, and to fulfill his daily needs. Requests for logistical support intermingled with demands for basic items, such as boxers and bars of soap, and reminders to give him and his children physical and emotional warmth.
As with armed conflict, criminal violence is made possible by a gender-based division of labor, where women bear the brunt of logistical and caregiving tasks. Most of these activities revolve around Central American prisons, which have become important nodes of decision-making for extortion schemes.
In a context of “mano dura” policies of mass incarceration and state persecution, which have imposed heavy constraints on gang members’ movements since the early 2000s, women have become pivotal in maintaining the complex operations that coordinate between gang members. The women I spoke with acted as the “eyes and hands” of imprisoned gang members, providing support in the transportation of weapons, transmission of messages, record-keeping, and intelligence gathering.
Some of these activities provided unexpected windows for enhancing their entrepreneurial and leadership skills. For instance, one woman who worked for her husband, a Salvadoran gang leader, spoke about how she leveraged this activity to offer paid courier services for other gang members on her own initiative. This allowed her to better support her children and ailing mother.
Gang-affiliated women also supply the basic services and goods—food, clothing, emotional support, childcare, and so on—necessary to sustain gang members and therefore their capacity to engage in the work of violence. One former gang member, for example, related how she was able to commit fully to the gang’s illicit activities because her aunt cared for her one-year-old son.
Women’s role in criminal violence is more important than we often realize. To acknowledge this role, we need to challenge traditional gender stereotypes that reduce criminal violence to a male phenomenon. We also need to challenge a prevalent assumption in research on women and organized violence: that women’s participation in lethal activities is simply the result of male manipulation or submission to patriarchal authority. This means paying attention to how women are also driven by their own aspirations for status and well-being.
Recognizing women’s complex agency in criminal violence, including the different labors they perform and the gendered factors shaping their involvement, is essential for helping address the unprecedented levels of criminal lethality affecting regions like Latin America. As scholars have argued, a clear understanding of the full range of women’s participation in violence can yield effective policy that gives women access to peace initiatives.
María José Méndez is an assistant professor in the Political Science department at the University of Toronto.
Real estate developments emulating U.S.-style master-planned communities are popular in Buenos Aires. Mara Dicenta unpacks the violence such developments enact on the environment and the community, as well as the resurgence against them.
The post The Violence of Gated Communities in Buenos Aires’s Wetlands appeared first on Edge Effects.
Mr. President shows widespread corruption around a fictional Guatemalan dictator. This did not please the country’s real dictators.
The post A Novel the CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress appeared first on Public Books.
The United States supported a coup in Honduras in 2009. Fast forward a dozen years, and the Latin American country finally escaped the repressive thumb of far-right administrations when a leftist president — and the country’s first female head of state — was elected. She promised reform, including as it pertains to the mining sector, which has devastated portions of the country’s environment and used horrific violence to suppress its opponents. As Jared Olson details, however, hope soon faded:
They blocked the road with boulders and palm fronds. They unraveled a long canvas sign, bringing the vehicles to a stop — a traffic jam that would end up stretching for miles. Drivers stepped out into the oppressive August humidity, annoyed but not unaccustomed to this practice, one of the only ways poor Hondurans can get the outside world’s attention. Several dozen people, their faces wrapped in T-shirts or bandannas, some wielding rusty machetes, had closed off the only highway on the northern coast. It was the first protest against the Pinares mine — and the government’s failure to rein in its operations — since Castro came to power eight months before.
Things weren’t going well. That Castro’s campaign promises might not only go unfulfilled but betrayed was made clear that afternoon last August when, as a light rain fell, a truck of military police forced its way through the jeering crowd of protesters and past their blockade — to deliver drums of gasoline to the mine.
Since their creation in 2013, the military police have racked up a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killings as a part of its brutal Mano Dura, or iron fist, strategy against gangs. Though it earned them a modicum of popularity among those living in gang-controlled slums, they also became notorious for their indiscriminate violence against protesters, as well as the security they provided for extractive projects. They’ve faced accusations of working as gunmen in the drug trade and selling their services as assassins-for-hire. The unit was pushed by Juan Orlando Hernández, now facing trial in the United States for drug trafficking, while he was president of the Honduran congress, in his attempt to give the military power over the police — his “Praetorian Guard,” in the words of one critic.
Castro had been a critic of the unit before her election. But after a series of high-profile massacres last summer, she decided that — promises to demilitarize notwithstanding — the unit would be kept on the streets. And here they were, providing gasoline and armed security to a mining project mired in controversy and blood.
Guest post by Shauna N. Gillooly and Philip Luke Johnson
In 2020, a university campus in Bogotá, Colombia was festooned with flyers threatening “the children of professors that indoctrinate their students into communism.” A year earlier, a campus in Medellín was plastered with pamphlets, this time threatening students that engaged in political activity instead of quietly getting on with their studies. Both messages were signed by the Águilas Negras, a notorious criminal band. While the strength of this group has been disputed, for those targeted by the threats—and many besides—these messages could hardly be dismissed as anything less than terrifying.
These messages are hardly an isolated occurrence. Hundreds of threatening messages signed by the Águilas Negras have appeared across Colombia in recent years. Gangs in Brazil have published threatening messages in newspapers, while in Mexico, criminal actors sometimes use “narco-messages” to threaten rivals, officials, or other members of the public. Although the practice is relatively widespread, it raises questions about the behavior and power of criminal actors.
Most scholarship shows that criminal actors maintain a low profile, wielding power through clandestine means of coercion, corruption, and cooptation. Keeping a low profile reduces the costs of run-ins with rivals or the law. Criminal actors certainly do make use of public, sometimes spectacular violence, but primarily when the government is incapable or inefficient at punishing (or protecting) organized crime. Even so, most criminal actors moderate the frequency and visibility of their violence most of the time.
Threats are a particularly useful way to exert subtle power, as they leave no mark, no “smoking gun.” For a group with an established reputation, the mere whisper of a threat may be enough to induce compliance on the part of their targets (indeed, some actors with established reputations expend considerable resources to prevent pretenders from issuing threats in their name). Publicizing threats thus seems to undermine one of the main advantages of threats; the ability to coerce while reducing the risks associated with the actual use of violence. Why, then, would criminal actors publicize their threats to far wider audiences than the intended targets?
Our new research takes up this question by analyzing the content of threatening messages from four different criminal groups in Colombia and Mexico. These range from neo-paramilitary groups in Colombia, such as the Gaitanistas, to the pseudo-evangelical cartel, the Caballeros Templarios, in Mexico. Breaking the messages down into a “grammar” of their core elements—such as who is the target of the violence, what conditions are placed on the violence, and on whose behalf violence is threatened—we identify consistencies and variations in the use of public threats across these varied cases.
We find that when criminal actors publicize threats, they are projecting order; delineating their rules on the ground, dictating who (or what) is welcome and who will find no place on their turf. The threats may also induce compliance from the target, but the publicity serves this important additional function. The orders projected by different groups share some common elements: they position the criminal actors as mediators between the in-group of decent society and the out-group of deviants from that society (the threateners are also defining—sometimes with extreme prejudice—who they consider deviant). In positioning themselves as violent mediators, criminal actors displace other possible mediators, such as rival groups as well as non-violent civil society actors.
At the same time, the specific order projected varies across groups. Some groups threaten future violence that is conditional, while others threaten violence as the inevitable continuation of actions already occurring. Similarly, the specific in-group and out-group projected by threats varies. The Gaitanistas and Águilas Negras in Colombia both use the language of social cleansing, but the Águilas target an expansive out-group of leftists and alleged guerrilla sympathizers while barely mentioning an in-group, while the Gaitanistas invoke a national in-group but target only localized rivals.
Public threats can be quite low-tech, like the flyers that blanketed campuses in Colombia, but regardless of the medium, they aim to maximize publicity. This highlights the vital role of the media in impeding or permitting the projection of criminal orders. Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with criminal actors threatening and sometimes killing media workers to shape the flow of information (officials are also deeply implicated in this). Preserving the safety and autonomy of the press—even where reporting uncovers uncomfortable truths for those in power—is thus absolutely vital to limiting the influence of public threats and criminal orders. In interviews, however, journalists told us that the government protection mechanism is unreliable and often conditioned on favorable reporting.
Criminal governance is often treated as damaging the “fabric of society.” While we often think of this damage in terms of the direct use of violence, we need to examine not only how criminal actors kill, but also how they talk, persuade, and project. We also need to think about violence beyond the act itself; the hint or threat of violence can have powerful effects on direct targets and wider society. From a safe distance, we might question the low-tech or seemingly unsophisticated threats—pundits in Mexico initially mocked the poor spelling of narco-messages—but this does not mean that they are ineffective tools. Nor does it means that the people closer to the threats can afford to discount them.
Shauna N. Gillooly (@ShaunaGillooly) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Research Institute housed at William and Mary, and an affiliated researcher with Instituto PENSAR at Pontifica Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia. Philip Luke Johnson (@phillegitimate) is a lecturer at Princeton University.
Guest post by Alexandra Byrne, Zoha Siddiqui, and Kelebogile Zvobgo
Haitian officials and world leaders are calling for an armed humanitarian intervention backed by the United Nations (UN) to defeat organized crime. Gangs in Haiti have reportedly kidnapped and killed hundreds of civilians and displaced thousands. Gangs are also limiting access to fuel and blocking critical humanitarian aid to civilians. Add to this a resurgence of cholera.
The United States asked the UN Security Council in October to approve a targeted intervention, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield underscored “extreme violence and instability” in Haiti and proposed a mission led by a “partner country” (not the United States or UN peacekeeping forces).
There is nominal support for the mission. In the coming weeks, Canada will send naval vessels to Haiti’s coast, and Jamaica has offered some troops, but no country is taking the lead. Critics argue that past missions in Haiti did more harm than good. In 2010, UN peacekeepers even reintroduced cholera into Haiti. Nonetheless, the United States is pushing for an intervention.
What is an armed humanitarian intervention and would it be legal under international law? Here’s what you need to know.
An armed humanitarian intervention is a use of force to protect, maintain, or restore peace and security in a target country and internationally. Armed humanitarian interventions differ from ordinary military operations because they aim to protect populations from severe human rights abuses.
Past armed humanitarian interventions achieved limited success in places like Somalia, where troops initially stabilized the country but failed to improve the country’s security environment long-term.
Armed interventions fundamentally clash with state sovereignty—the idea that states control activities within their territories—because they can be conducted without the target state’s consent. While sovereignty is important in international law, it can nevertheless be sidestepped to stop atrocities and restore international peace.
The prevailing law on international interventions is the UN Charter, which binds all UN member states. Chapter VII of the charter governs international interventions and comprises thirteen key articles. Article 39 establishes that the Security Council may determine when international peace and security are breached or threatened. The article also gives the council authority to take all necessary measures to restore peace.
The remaining articles elaborate on those measures. Article 41 authorizes actions “not involving the use of armed force,” such as economic sanctions, while Article 42 permits “action by air, sea, or land forces.”
So, the Security Council decides whether, how, and why state sovereignty may be infringed, including through the use of force. States may only use force without council authorization in response to an armed attack, under Article 51, but they must still notify the council.
Security Council-authorized interventions may be conducted by UN peacekeeping forces or by UN member states’ troops. (Regional armed interventions require approval under Chapter VIII, Article 53.)
The Security Council has not always authorized armed humanitarian interventions, notably failing to prevent genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s. To avoid repeating those failures, the UN in 2005 adopted the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle.
R2P delegates to all states the responsibility to protect all people from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Under R2P, the international community must be prepared to take collective action through the Security Council “should peaceful means be inadequate,” a line taken from Chapter VII.
R2P was invoked once in Kenya, not to justify armed intervention, but to rally international mediation. R2P was also used in Côte d’Ivoire to deploy additional UN peacekeeping forces. (These forces completed their mandate in 2017.) One of the largest military actions authorized by the Security Council under R2P was the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, which has since been criticized for poor planning, increasing instability, and pushing regime change.
Possible Legal Armed Intervention in Haiti
If the US resolution for an armed humanitarian intervention in Haiti is approved by the Security Council, the operation would be legal and, if it focused solely on humanitarian objectives (i.e., opening aid delivery channels, providing aid, and protecting civilians), it could succeed. Still, there is the risk of failure. A more ambitious plan, seeking to change the country’s overall security environment, could also fail, as in Somalia.
But even if the intervention complied with international law and was invited by Haitian officials, critics argue it would be unethical, undermining Haitians’ sovereignty.
If the United States fails to gain Security Council support for an armed humanitarian intervention in Haiti, there are other measures available. The United States can increase the humanitarian aid it already provides, and provide tactical equipment and armored vehicles to the government. The Biden administration could also reverse recently expanded immigration restrictions, and instead provide asylum to Haitian migrants while also supporting struggling transit countries.
For its part, the Security Council could expand the economic sanctions and arms embargoes it adopted against criminal actors in Haiti. But such measures take time to implement and might not be felt for months.
The biggest challenge to mitigating the crisis in Haiti is the gangs that are blocking the delivery of food, fuel, and medical supplies to civilians. The challenge for the United States and the broader international community is to not repeat past mistakes—either by intervening too little, too late, or too much.
Alexandra Byrne is a research fellow in the International Justice Lab at William & Mary. Zoha Siddiqui is a 1693 scholar, a research fellow in the International Justice Lab at William & Mary, and an incoming George J. Mitchell Scholar at Queen’s University Belfast. Kelebogile Zvobgo is an assistant professor of government at William & Mary, a faculty affiliate at the Global Research Institute, and founder and director of the International Justice Lab.
Enlarge / A man fills the tank of his car with hydrogen at a station of the Ad Astra Rocket Company in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, on January 19, 2022. Former astronaut Franklin Chang is confident that in 10 years Costa Rica, his country, will be different. He hopes it will be much richer and cleaner, a product of green hydrogen technology, which he has been researching and developing since 2011. (credit: Ezequiel Becerra/AFP via Getty Images)
Franklin Chang-Díaz gets into his car, turns on the radio, and hears the news about another increase in the price of gasoline. But he sets off knowing that his trip won’t be any more expensive: His tank is filled with hydrogen. His car takes that element and combines it with oxygen in a fuel cell that works like a small power plant, creating energy—which goes into a battery to power the car—and water vapor. Not only will Chang-Díaz’s trip cost no more than it did yesterday, it will also pollute far less than a traditional gasoline-powered car would.
Chang-Díaz would like to have a public hydrogen station nearby whenever he needs to fill his tank, but that isn’t possible yet, either in his native Costa Rica or in any other Latin American country. He ends up instead at the hydrogen station he built himself, as part of a project aimed at demonstrating that hydrogen generated with renewable energy sources—green hydrogen—is the present, not the future.
A physicist, former NASA astronaut, and the CEO of Ad Astra Rocket Company, Chang-Díaz has a clear vision. Green hydrogen, he believes, is a fundamental player in lowering emissions from transportation and converting regions that import fossil fuels—such as his small Central American country—into exporters of clean energy, key to avoiding the catastrophic effects of global warming.
Guest post by Shauna N. Gillooly
The last time the Colombian government and the leftist rebel group the National Liberation Army (ELN) began negotiations in 2018, they were disrupted by a car bomb set off in Bogota, which killed 20. The ELN claimed responsibility for the bomb, which immediately ended negotiations. Now, the government and the rebels are back at the negotiating table.
The ELN formed in the 1960s, and has since established a transnational presence across Colombia and Venezuela, and controls much of the illicit economies along the border of the two countries. A peace accord with the group could significantly improve security in both Colombia and Venezuela, but the obstacles to peace are significant.
Official peace negotiations tend to reflect the ways that war is waged, and ownership of these processes often reinforces pre-existing power structures and dynamics in a society. Social inclusion and integration can have positive consequences for the sustainability of peace accords and their implementation, but peace processes often exclude rather than include. Past research shows that women’s exclusion in peace processes can be seen as the canary in the coal mine—“a highly visible marker of the broader exclusivity of such processes, and the complex dynamics of elite capture in war and peace processes.”
Women’s participation in peace negotiations and peace processes creates more durable and lasting peace, and peace deals signed by women have higher rates of implementation. Yet, women continue to be primarily excluded from these processes. Between 1992 and 2011, only 2 percent of chief mediators and 9 percent of negotiators in peace processes were women.
With many Colombian citizens unhappy with the implementation of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC, another leftist rebel group), the negotiations with the ELN face a new challenge—skepticism. What can experience from the peace negotiations with the FARC tell us about the likelihood that women—and other groups—will be involved in this new round of negotiations with the ELN—and thus, about the durability of the negotiated peace?
In my new research, I conducted interviews with 25 members of both the Colombian government and the FARC negotiation teams who participated in peace negotiations in 2016, to understand how they viewed women’s participation. I interviewed main table negotiators, negotiators who were at the gender and ethnic sub-committee tables, people who worked as researchers and secretaries, and women who gave testimony during negotiations.
I found that initially, no women were included in the negotiations between the FARC and the Colombian government. In fact, it was through civil society pressures, primarily from feminist and women’s organizations, that the government appointed female negotiators. Some interviewees—both men and women—agreed that women’s participation in the 2016 accords was more than sufficient, with one stating that “this is the most involvement that women have ever had in a peace process before.” Others disagreed, stating that the creation of a sub-committee for gender had allowed gendered concerns to be siloed during the negotiation process, and that the final product of the accords reflected that. Still, others said that neither the government nor the FARC were committed to gendered concerns, and that it was only through the pressure placed on both parties by civil society organizations that women were included at the highest levels of negotiation and that gendered concerns were “taken seriously” at the main table.
I found that with a few exceptions, in Colombia, most women were mid-level negotiators, advisors, spokespersons, and secretaries. It was only through the mobilization of women’s and feminist groups that there was some representation of gender diversity at the Havana negotiations.
While conducting interviews with government and FARC negotiators, I included some questions about the ELN negotiations as a way to examine if negotiators felt that the inclusion of women at the table would continue to increase in future peace processes. Respondents were dubious about both the ELN’s and the government’s commitments to gender inclusion in this process.
Despite the benefits, women’s participation in peace processes is still not taken seriously—and not only in Colombia. Feminist activists in Eritrea have lamented the lack of women’s inclusion in nascent peace processes between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and women’s contributions to the Northern Ireland peace process are still downplayed today.
With the new Colombian administration’s commitment to “total peace,” there are many lessons to be learned from the FARC negotiation and implementation process. If Colombian President Petro and his administration want to achieve its ambitious goals toward creating sustainable peace, more robust social and gender inclusion from the ground floor of these peace talks is key.
Shauna N. Gillooly (@ShaunaGillooly) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Research Institute housed at William & Mary.
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