Tag Archives: United States

The Fallacies of Friction: A Holy Week Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

13 Apr

Where there is power, there is resistance. Michel Foucault

The friction between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ burns you, stirs you up, propels you. Marcus Buckingham

Occasionally when people in the grip of obsessive resentment were pouring out their ire and grievances, something in them, some small trace of self-awareness, heard themselves as others might, and was surprised to find they didn’t sound quite as blameless, or even as rational, as they’d imagined themselves to be. Robert Galbraith

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. Robert Frost

When we make grievance our traveling companion, it blocks out light, it distorts our perspective, it consumes our hearts until there is nothing left. Merida Johns

Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all – that is where the energy is. — Doug Aitken

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Saul Alinsky

I have been quiet in this space but not quiet. In other formats I have been doing my small part at national level to counter the grievance which has become a form of embedded cruelty and at international level commenting on the peculiar brand of diplomatic indifference which refuses even to uphold the core principles which gave rise to the institutions which we have entrusted with peace and security in the first instance.

In these strange times, in some ways a throwback to manifestations of the human condition we foolishly thought we had consigned to history, I and many others have taken up the task of creating friction for those who believe they are above the impacts of their own bad work, those who believe that their lofty positions and distorted policies exempt them (or should) from resistance to the point where such is deemed an evil impediment to the fulfillment of their desires – a grievance and even vengeance-driven remaking of political culture in their own image.

As some of you know, I have long worried that my own country has become essentially ungovernable, full of people fleeing to the safety of bubbles where we can nurture our self-serving ideas and petty grievances without friction, without interference. We have become a nation of trolls with little taste for subtlety or even self-reflection. We “root” for people and ideas rather than examine their legitimacy and intent. Our collective arrogance blots out almost all of the inclinations we might otherwise have to humility, reflection or self-awareness, let alone to service.

What I just alluded to has been true of my country for some time. The current crisis is a symptom of a larger and more systemic problem which cuts across political and even religious affiliations. Our hearts are largely consumed by violence and greed, much more than is helpful for a society which seems to have misplaced its creeds, a society which is increasingly turning its backs on veterans, on the elderly and disabled, or on those seeking refuge from governments deemed even more cruel than our own. We have “drunk the kool aid” even when we aren’t thirsty and by so doing contributed to a society which seems comfortable with mass firings of government employees, mass dismantling of our health systems and mass deportations of non-criminal legal residents. A society where its leaders huddle to embrace a God of violence, riches and vengeance as though there had not been a subsequent message focused on forgiveness, humility and reconciliation attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. A society where what is true is reduced to what someone can convince us is true.

This society has needed and now needs even more the friction which communicates categorically “this is not OK.” This is not good enough. We will not return to a time long past when enfranchisement was for the few not the many, when a cruel but not so unusual hierarchy kept too many people in the places that they were “assigned” ostensibly by a God who ordained our lofty patterns of discrimination.

You’ve heard all this from me before, this indication that what we are now living through is a culmination of sorts, a culmination of increasingly inadequate leadership and a distracted, self-interested populace which has lost sight of all that must happen in this world – the good, the bad and the sometimes ugly – in order for us to enjoy the blessings that we too often forget we have.

In this current climate, I and others continue to resist, continue to provide a bit of friction to a government and a system that has convinced itself that its cruel judgments have some sort of divine sanction. But in this season of Ramadan (now concluded) of Passover and of the Christian Holy Week, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of resisting a false religious narrative with one of our own making.

Indeed, we must remind ourselves that resistance is not righteousness, that to overquote Reinhold Niebuhr, “the evils against which we contend are the fruits of illusions similar to our own.” Resistance is an obligation for many as it is for me, but it is not a “counter-crusade.” It is not about swapping out one perverse view of God’s favor for another.

In this Holy season, we must also remind ourselves of the costs associated with being that source of friction which not all of us provide but which all of us need. This is the friction which helps us to be better versions of ourselves, refusing to divert our gaze from cruelty and poverty to which none should be subjected, refusing to allow the chores of the present to divert our attention from the needs and aspirations of those who follow.

But the friction which people like me attempt to apply in our now-adrift society cuts in many directions. We who attempt this work, including the work of inspiring resistance in others, are not immune from the responsibilities and impacts of that resistance – to challenge what we see while trying to be better than what we see. But also to acknowledge that friction wears us down too. Friction takes a toll on us too.

And this toll is in part a function of the culture of resistance itself – seeing the glass as forever half-empty, slipping into patterns of language that ascribe things to people – including evil –that apply in full measure to only a handful of humans, failing to appreciate the spring flowers, or poetry and music, or a thrilling sports match, so that we can get in one more “cut” of friction, one more pithy response to a systemic “monster” which remains much more formidable than people like me will ever be.

Indeed the consequences of resistance, of creating friction day after day, can produce their own grievances which serve neither our own work in the world nor the interests of those to whom we seek to connect.  More than anything else, we must never lose touch with the people whose lives have been upended through policies which are anything but “people-centered.” Indeed, such loss of touch helps explain the predicament we now find ourselves in.

I’m a bit beaten up now but will spend this Holy Week recalibrating my own resistance and the effects it is having (or not having) on matters internal and external to myself, including on those whose response to the gravity of these times remains to be inspired.  For those of you already in the friction business, even part time, we need to ensure that our voices and actions have all the impact that is possible.  It’s going to be a slog for now as what “is” continues to lag well behind what could be.  Let’s commit to locating the formula that can bring more hope to the world and ensure timely and healthy responses from ourselves.

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Capitol Offense: Fragility’s New Port of Call, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Jan

You Are What Your Record Says You Are. Bill Parcels

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. Chuck Palahniuk 

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! Ray Bradbury 

Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head.   Anne Michaels 

Tomorrow was created yesterday…….And by the day before yesterday, too.  John le Carré 

The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.  Barbara Tuchman

The evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions similar to our own. Reinhold Niebuhr

This past Wednesday at the United Nations Security Council, under the presidency of Tunisia, a debate was held to examine the relationship between “fragility and conflict.”

With statements from the heads of state of Kenya, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Niger and Tunisia itself, members of what are known in the Council as the “A3 + 1,” the Council focused as it so often does on the fragility of African states, the combination of widespread poverty, climate change impacts, COVID-19 vulnerabilities, threats from terrorism and insurgency, and weak structures of governance which conspire to create societies which in some instances seem forever hanging over a ledge. 

Several statements, including from the newly-minted Security Council members (India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico and Norway), indicated an appreciation of the diversity of fragility’s root causes as well as the tools and stakeholders that need to combine forces in order to address those causes, increase confidence in governance and help to build what Kenya referred to as “bridges of peace.”  The issue of “inclusion” was also noted frequently, especially by former president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the foreign minister of Ireland, both of whom rightly noted the degree to which doors to participation in governance by women, youth and all racial and religious groupings creates more reliable governments and helps to overcome legacies of colonialism, discrimination and militarism that continue to fuel fragility in the present.

But perhaps the most interesting statement during this debate was made by the US representative who, with no apparent sense of irony, highlighted fragility related to corruption, a lack of regard for the rule of law, and “authoritarian tendencies” which, he maintained, continue to sweep across the African continent.  And while lamenting the “politicization” of fragility analysis, the US diplomat reiterated the oft-stated claim by the US that it is Iran which, above all, is fomenting regional chaos and exacerbating regional fragilities, a statement which few Council members have ever accepted, at least not at face value.

To the credit of the US, I suppose, there was at least some recognition that fragility is not an African phenomenon alone, that once we get beyond economic indicators to what Niger’s president referred to as “the health of our governance and the cohesiveness of our communities,” then the fragility of many states and peoples comes into play. In that vein, the habit of Council members more than willing to weigh in on African issues but not place their own fragilities on the table, comes into sharp, if discouraging focus.

When this meeting was over, I had to pivot quickly, not to another UN event but to the unfolding assault on the US Capitol, an assault that had been brewing for months with the blessing and encouragement of the US president and a shocking number of state officials and federal legislators. The fragility which the US representative piously and oh-so-ironically outlined in his Security Council intervention a mere hour ago was now being played out on the streets, not in Tripoli or Juba but in Washington, DC.  The fragility which the US and other large powers have done much to stoke in other places when it was politically or economically convenient to do so could now be found lapping at the shores of the Potomac, threatening high officials with hanging and offering unflinching and unthinking support to a US president who successfully sold a pack of electoral (and other) lies in the way that such lies are often best sold – by repeating them over and over until the audience is ready to die for – or kill for – a narrative grounded far more in negative grievance than positive policy, aside perhaps from the “positive” for some of keeping the US president entrenched in power.

I strongly suspect that anyone reading this post has been fully immersed in commentary and analysis about these events which continue to evolve as we learn more about the players, instigators, fellow travelers inside of government, tools of organizing and much more that serve to appropriately complicate the narrative of the “unruly mob overwhelming Capitol police.”  I won’t presume to waste your time pontificating as one more, erstwhile “talking head,” aside from these few comments that are consistent with your expectations of me as an individual and us as an office.

The first thing to convey is perhaps the most obvious.   This isn’t over.  As I write, dispatches are being shared describing online chatter regarding fresh threats of violence following up on occupations which have now been rehearsed and confidently assessed, both in terms of the tools and strategies of violence and of the existence of sufficient “cover,” for now at least, in state and federal offices to ensure the unlikely event of a retributive bloodbath. Such “patriotic” violence will not, will likely never, incur the wrath inflicted on last summer’s protesters for racial justice, persons who would never have been allowed to get close enough to the US Capitol to see the windows, let alone smash them, even if they had wanted to do so.

Second, the fragility currently impacting the quality and reliability of our own governance is part of a larger pattern, one which the current pandemic may have done more to expose than any single other cause.   Food insecurity is higher than at any point in my lifetime.  Lost wages and livelihoods are only widening the distance between the rich and the rest.  Children across the country, as in other parts of the world, are having their formal schooling and other age-appropriate activities compromised with consequences for our future largely unknown. Masks have become almost grotesque symbols of “oppression” as arrogant dismissals of public health warnings have filled hospital wards and brought health care workers to their emotional breaking point.  Community cohesion is at best in a troubled state as partisan politics and alternative versions of reality conspire to turn neighbors into enemies and provide new incentives for people determined to care about little beyond the borders of their own domiciles and social circles.

Combined with fresh authoritarian indulgences, this stew that we have prepared for ourselves with its multiple ingredients of fragility, chaos and self-deception has been simmering on a metaphorical stove for some time, the toxic scents from which having sent our own version of Humpty Dumpty crashing to the pavement.  

As in the childhood riddle, our own Humpty’s injuries are severe, a reminder that “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” This inability to effect proper healing needn’t be our contemporary fate, but there are things required of us now, beyond the security fortifications and rushed impeachment proceedings, beyond the now-pervasive accusations and condemnations, matters related to our national character which we have yet to fully examine let alone adjust.

As with other national crises in my now-long memory, I am once again stunned by the delusional and self-righteous defaults of so many of our national commentators, including those representing my section of the political spectrum – the “I told you so’s,” the half-truth equivalences, the rolling out of the old national game of “light and darkness,” good and evil.  If our Humpty is ever to be reassembled, is ever to be made close to “good as new,” it is self-righteousness that we can least afford now.  We did not “all” storm the Capitol building, nor did we “all” pin our knees to the necks of black protesters or bring our health care system to the brink of dysfunction through our own willful negligence.  But each in our own way – my own way – we have helped bring this current crisis to a boil.  And while we might well “root” for punishment or sanction of the offending “others,” we need to also own our own mess, our own contributions to a social (dis) order that has never been as kind, helpful, generous and fair as we have more than willingly imagined it to be.

One large piece of what we need to “own” comes courtesy of a statement from president-elect Biden as well as others within and beyond his circle, that this current wave of violence does not represent “who we are.”  This tendency of ours to extrapolate a version of ourselves that conflates our aspirations and our practices is a habit that we simply cannot indulge at this thoroughly unsettled moment.  No, Mr. Biden, this is in fact who we are.  This is our record now.  This is what our history of choices has made of us. Indeed if you listen to the stories and voices beyond our elite centers of policy and their self-referential bubbles, this is part of who we have always been.  Part of our gender and racially-challenged national profile.  Part of the exceptionalist arrogance which we have too willingly inflicted on others in all global regions.  Part of the self-righteousness in which we have liberally bathed even when that water was obviously more polluted than pure. Part of the ample “portions” that we have enjoyed but that were not ours to take in the first place.

As a nation we have excelled at much, at times benefitting many through our universities, our technologies, our multiple forms of expertise and, at moments, our progressive values. But sadly this “much” also includes slinging often-demeaning allegations and indictments beyond our national borders, as well as beyond the borders of our intellectual and ideological comfort zones.  This isn’t going to work for us anymore.  The fragilities that we have patronized and misrepresented in other cultures and communities have found their beachhead here. And they won’t readily recede even with the shifting of the tides.

No, it’s not over and won’t be until we are willing to faithfully address the multiple fragilities now manifest in our institutions and in ourselves.  Our national iteration of Humpty is lying in pieces on the pavement.  It will take much more than political retribution and enhanced security forces to make it whole again. Indeed, it will likely take a national reckoning of sorts –an examination of historical patterns towards which we remain largely oblivious, the bricks that we don’t recognize until they hit us squarely in the head — if we are ever to firmly and fairly pursue the good that we have too often presumed and insufficiently practiced. We’ll see what we’re actually made of in the weeks and months to come. A large swath of the global community which is not laughing at our follies is now holding its collective breath.

I’m holding mine as well.

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In Defense of the International Criminal Court, Limited Sovereignty and Global Security, Professor Hussein Solomon

15 Jun

Editor’s Note:  Dr. Solomon has graced us with another of his insight-filled writings, this time providing reflection on and historical context for the US president’s recent decision to sanction members of the International Criminal Court pursuing investigations of atrocities committed against Afghanistan citizens, including by US troops.  This decision drives another wedge between the US government and global efforts to ensure accountability for the most serious of crimes, many of which have certainly been committed in Afghanistan over many years of conflict.  This piece is longer than most for us, but is worth your time. 

US President Donald Trump has launched an all-out legal and economic offensive against the International Criminal Court (ICC) following its decision to investigate war crimes in Afghanistan committed by all sides, including by the United States. The Trump Administration’s tirade against the ICC, its talk of sovereignty and international law, ignores the fact that the war in Afghanistan has resulted in more than 100,000 civilian casualties according to the United Nations. Ignoring this grim statistic suggests that impunity for such crimes should be the norm. Such impunity of course, makes a mockery of civilized norms regarding the sanctity of life and accountability for abuses.

The US, it should be noted up front, does not object to the ICC rendering judgments in situations which suit US policy interests. In the Security Council, the US offers verbal support for the work of the ICC in places such as Darfur and Libya as well as for prosecutions of persons accused of committing atrocity crimes in African states. However, this “support” does not extend to any insinuation of jurisdiction over actions committed by US military or civilian personnel which, if they were committed by Libyans or Sudanese, would most assuredly be classified as war crimes, even by the US itself. Moreover, the US is determined to use its influence to shield allies (read Israel) from any consequences stemming from ICC investigation of abuses in Palestine.

More worryingly, the rhetoric from Washington eerily echoes that of tyrants who have engaged in the internal repression of their citizens and then decried any form of sanctions or other coercive measures, arguing that this violates their state’s sovereign integrity. In this, the Saddam Husseins and Slobodan Milosevics of the world are drawing upon a particular philosophical tradition which views sovereignty as protection against external influence in a state’s affairs. Sovereignty, as a legal and political construct, arose in Europe at a time when medieval feudal states slowly gave way to absolutist nation-states. Commenting on this Francis Deng noted that sovereignty developed ‘as an instrument of feudal princes in the construction of territorial states. It was believed that instability and disorder, seen as obstacles to stable society, would only be overcome by viable governments capable of establishing firm and effective control over territory and population’.

As the old social order decayed and crumbled, absolute monarchs were installed all over Europe; and each of these had their own praise-singers and sycophants justifying the role of monarchy in a ‘New World Order’. In England, this saw Hobbes translating the social contract as people surrendering all their rights to a sovereign Ruler. In France, Jean Bodin also endorsed this view and thus this philosophical tradition contributed to the rise of the absolutist monarchy and the nation-state in Europe.

This did not mean that this philosophical tradition, which was soon transformed into an established orthodoxy, did not go unchallenged. A rich and varied alternative discourse could be heard above the cacophony of the monarchist sycophants. Other social contract theorists such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stridently argued against the notion that as part of the social contract, the people transferred all rights to a Sovereign Ruler. From this emerged the idea of limited and popular sovereignty–that the Ruler had a clear but limited mandate from the people and that its violation by the Ruler could justify popular resistance to that Ruler.

Of course, Locke’s and Rousseau’s ideas were not entirely unique and drew upon the earlier works of Althusius. This German Calvinist, who drew inspiration from ancient theories of popular rights, argued in 1603 for the ‘revolutionary right of active resistance to rulers who violated their contract’. This view was later endorsed by Suarez, who argued that ‘the Ruler always remained limited by positive law and the permanent rights of the People’. Similarly, the German philosopher Wolff, argued that the people were free to choose how much power to devolve upon government and how much to retain for themselves.

By the 1780s the fierce debates between supporters of absolute monarchy andthe proponents of popular sovereignty took a new twist with Kant arguing that the state, as opposed to an absolute monarch, was the agent and representative of popular sovereignty or as Rousseau put it, the ‘general will’. As with Hobbes’ sovereign, Kant’s state ‘absorbed all popular rights including the right to rebel or disobey’. Fueled by the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution which heralded a new class structure in Europe and North America, Kant’s notion of a sovereign state supreme in its domestic jurisdiction and free from external influence became the norm. The sovereign nation-state also became the norm in Africa following the 1885 Berlin Conference, which carved up that continent into European colonial territories.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, it is increasingly clear that the myth of sovereignty meaning national governments being supreme in their territorially defined jurisdictions, is cracking. The Afghanistans’, the Somalias’ and the Yemens’ clearly illustrate the inadequacy of the concept in these troubled times. It is also clear that ‘even as the traditional concept of sovereignty erodes there is no presumptive, let alone adequate replacement for the state. The locus of responsibility remains with the state for the promotion of citizens’ welfare and liberty and international cooperation. For academics, then, the challenge is to rethink the notion of sovereignty in an era of interdependence that has witnessed profound global change. Highlighting the enormity of this challenge, former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated: `A major intellectual requirement of our time is to rethink the question of sovereignty not to weaken its essence which is crucial to international security and co-operation, but to recognize that it may take more than one form and perform more than one function. This perception would help solve problems both within and among states’.

Supporting this shift in intellectual discourse has been social developments that contributed to a radical change in the global strategic landscape, and which enabled key policymakers to be receptive to these new ideas. The first of these movements is the process of democratization that has been gathering tremendous momentum from the nineteenth century. This has increasingly challenged Kant’s notion of the state as the embodiment of all popular rights. In an era where a democratic ethos prevails and where violations of human rights are quickly beamed via satellite into people’s homes or through ubiquitous social media, a popular consciousness has developed that state security (read sovereignty) is often purchased at the expense of human security. This has also led to the notion that in the final instance, the people are sovereign and that the state acts as the agent of that popular sovereignty. Unlike Kant, it argued against the notion of a state that absorbs all popular rights, including the right to rebel. Moreover, it also emphasizes that for the power of the state to be recognized as legitimate, it must be exercised responsibly and within the mandate given to it. Sovereignty constructed in this way means that the state uses its resources to enhance the human condition of its citizens – at the very least providing for the basic needs of its people.

Given the enormity of power the state has at its disposal vis-à-vis the individual citizen, it is equally clear that state power needs to be constrained. Here, new social contracts have evolved – Constitutions, Bills of Rights, etc. – clearly limiting the power of the state. These, together with an elected Parliament and an independent judiciary, are supposed to make governments accountable to the people and reinforce the idea that the state is an agent of popular sovereignty. The existence of several tyrannical regimes, however, clearly illustrates the limits of such domestic accountability, even in our own time. In such situations, it is becoming obvious that agents (states) who violate the trust of their people are increasingly being held accountable by the international community, in essence, to other states. But this raises another question: why should states pursuing their own national self-interest (in the classical realist genre) care about human rights violations/atrocities committed in other states?

The answer to this question relates to the second movement taking place in the world today. The myth of an independent sovereign state impervious to outside influence has been recognized by states as problematic for centuries. Since this myth, however, was crucial for the construction of nation-states from disparate peoples, states found it useful to perpetuate that myth. States realized that just as no two people can live in total freedom without encroaching on the freedom of others and therefore need the regulatory mechanism of the state, so too states need some regulatory framework, no matter how primitive, to guide the relations between states. Thus Evan Luard notes that: ‘Already during the Middle Ages conventions had emerged about some aspects of states’ conduct: for example, the treatment of heralds, declarations of war, diplomatic practice and similar matters. The rules of chivalry established a code governing the behaviour which knights should adopt towards each other in the battlefield . . . Canon law established rules about the conduct of war and other aspects of state conduct. In particular the doctrine of ‘just war’ laid down for what purpose war was justifiable and rules about the ways which wars should be conducted’.

From the nineteenth century onwards, there emerged the idea among some states that war was not a rational way to achieve their foreign policy objectives: that war was detrimental to both their political alliances and commercial ventures. Thus from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic wars to the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, states sought to create mechanisms which they hoped would prevent the occurrence of war and would regulate its conduct, should it occur. At the end of the First World War in 1918, this went a step further when states ‘accepted the discipline of compulsory conciliation of their disputes by signing the Covenant of the League of Nations’. At the end of the Second World War, and with the establishment of the United Nations’ Organization in 1945, states were once more willing to surrender a part of their sovereignty for the promise of international peace offered by the new organization. Under the new United Nations system, the international behaviour of states was subjected to the political authority of a Security Council that was more powerful than the Council of the League of Nations.

As time wore on, it became increasingly clear to states that their relationship with other states was not the only thing which needed regulation. It has become obvious that how states (agents) relate to their domestic constituencies can also serve to undermine international peace and security and hence endanger the national interests of other states. How does this come about? Samuel Makinda notes that ‘[j]uridical sovereignty without popular sovereignty can result in human insecurity.’ Indeed, social exclusion of a particular group from economic or political power, ethnic cleansing and the like, have resulted in millions of internally displaced and refugees as the current Syrian conflict demonstrates. These then become a source of regional insecurity as they flee into neighbouring states. In the process, the international order is itself threatened.

The politics of exclusion pursued by some states that deliberately undermine the human security of their citizens also adversely affect international stability in other ways. In some cases, those affected populations bearing the brunt of state repression choose to fight back as witnessed by the struggle of the Kurds for an independent homeland of their own.

Recognizing that insecurity anywhere is a threat to security everywhere, states have decided to band together for the cause of international security. For instance, acknowledging that an intrinsic relationship exists between agents (states) not acting responsibly towards their citizens and a failure to achieve international peace, states have in various international fora begun to regulate this domestic realm to ensure that states are in the final instance accountable to the international community — its laws and norms — for their actions. This resulted in the development of a normative code by which a state’s actions could be held up for scrutiny. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as a vast array of other human rights instruments became a part of these global norms by which state actions could be monitored.

The flip side to this, of course, is that those states which do not adhere to these global norms open themselves up for international scorn and even the imposition of direct coercive measures by the global community. In this regard, Kalypso Nicolaidis notes that state sovereignty can be effectively bypassed when ‘a state stops fulfilling the basic responsibilities and functions that go along with sovereignty’. This was a point made abundantly clear to the South African apartheid regime in 1974. In that year the international community questioned Pretoria’s right to sovereignty (read to non-interference) on the basis that it exercised power illegitimately, irresponsibly and to the detriment of regional peace and security. This resulted in the South African government being ousted from the UN General Assembly and replaced by the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress given that these liberation movements were perceived to be more representative of the majority of South African citizens. Sanctions and an arms embargo were soon to follow.

Despite the development of global norms as exercised in the case of South Africa, the truth is that during much of the Cold War era, dictators such as Pinochet, Mobutu and Suharto held sway – nurtured and assisted by superpowers who displayed scant regard for the precepts of popular sovereignty or human rights. However, with the more recent demise of global bipolarity and the beginnings of a new international consensus regarding sovereignty as responsibility, the way has become clear for the further development of international law to ensure accountability – that states must act as responsible agents of popular sovereignty.

One of the earliest examples of this new consensus occurred in 1991 with UN Security Council Resolution 688. This demanded an end to Iraqi aggression against the Kurds in northern Iraq and authorized a military operation to establish safe havens on Iraqi territory. In this way international humanitarian organizations were guaranteed access to the Kurds for the purposes of providing both protection and humanitarian relief. At the time, the United States’ Ambassador to the United Nations remarked that ‘this was the first time a significant number of governments denied the states’ right to the sovereign exercise of butchery.’ Since then the UN Security Council has authorized forcible intervention in Somalia in 1992 and Haiti in 1994, as well as in Yugoslavia and Libya.

The advent of forcible intervention in the affairs of a state represents a watershed in our theoretical understandings of sovereignty in the current international system. Dan Smith puts it this way: `The most familiar social science definition of the state is that it is the entity with the monopoly of the legitimate means of force within a given territory. Humanitarian intervention – especially forcible – breaks the states’ monopoly of force and rejects its legitimacy. It thus contradicts our understanding of the most basic function of sovereign statehood’.

In this way coercive intervention, at least in theory, reinforces the notion that sovereignty implies responsibility and that states that violate the trust of their citizens will be held accountable for their actions (or inaction) to the international community. Of course, developments in international law are not simply confined to the question of forcible intervention or other coercive measures but also to what John Dugard refers to as the ‘internationalisation of criminal law’. This is most clearly seen in the Pinochet case and in Tripoli’s handing over of the two Libyans to the Netherlands for trial under Scottish law for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1989. It has also resulted in the establishment of an International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha and the 120 states that signed an agreement in Rome in July 1998 to establish an International Criminal Court also serve to consolidate the trend. These are momentous developments and support the view that international law appears to be moving away from being premised on a system of sovereign states towards the development of a common law binding a world community of individuals. In the past states were the sole bearers of recognized legal status; in the twentieth century this hard shell has been breached and international law now concerns itself not just with states but also with individuals.

The twentieth century will certainly go down as one of the bloodiest centuries in the history of humanity. From the bloody plains of Armenia to the trench warfare of the First World War, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau, the killing fields of East Timor, Cambodia, Sudan; the former Yugoslavia and Congo, the twentieth century has witnessed human depravity reach new depths. Altogether 160 million people lost their lives in the century as a result of war, genocide and state killings.

Despite, an inauspicious start, the twenty-first century need not replicate the twentieth century’s bloodlust. There is a millennium feeling that such grave crimes committed by the Pol Pots and Assads are not simply crimes against the victims but an affront to our collective humanity and dignity and as such should not go unpunished. Reconstructing sovereignty as responsibility, remodeling states as agents of popular sovereignty whose purpose it is to enhance the human condition of their citizens, and who are accountable not only to their domestic constituencies but to the international community as well, will go some way to resolve the historic tensions between state and human security in favor of the latter.

None of this understanding of international law features in the Trump Administration’s antipathy towards the ICC which despite its flaws represents humanity’s best hopes and aspirations as we seek to tame the animal within us all.

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