Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2013 Vol. 26, No. 1, 111132, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2012.

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Civilizing interventions? Race, war and international law

Robert Knox London School of Economics
Abstract Over the past decade there has been an explosion in literature on imperialism and international law. This scholarship has focused on the use of force, especially humanitarian intervention and the war on terror. These accounts foreground the issue of race, arguing that these legal arguments reproduce the dynamic of the civilising mission. This article argues that such analyses miss some key elements. Contemporary interventions must be counterposed to the First Iraq War, which was enabled through the uncontroversial authorization of the Security Council. Humanitarian intervention and the war on terror emerged in reaction to the fear that other states would veto Security Council resolutions. Consequently, the racial discourse around intervention cannot simply be read as othering the peripheries, but was also a response to inter-imperialist rivalry. The article then advances a conception of the arguments as an attempt to articulate hegemonic coalitions against emerging rivalries, and reads racialization in this light.

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Introduction The 2011 humanitarian intervention in Libya reignited a series of debates that seemed to have been settled in the aftermath of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Both had been taken to demonstrate the limits of military power for guaranteeing a transition to liberal (or even stable) states. Equally, they cast doubt upon the ability of military interventions to combat and prevent international terrorism. The reignited debates have cut across the political spectrum. On the left, the obvious question has been about the relationship between these interventions and imperialism: whether we can characterize such interventions as imperial and what such characterization means in terms of lending or withholding support for them (Achcar 2011; Ovenden 2011). On the right, the debates have focused on
The foundations of this paper were laid at several of the Glasgow Conversations in International Law, so my thanks to Akbar Rasulov for organizing them and for his scathing but pertinent criticisms. My thanks also go to Alex Anievas for inviting me to present a version of this paper as part of the Historical Materialism and International Relations seminar series at Oxford, as well as to the audience. I have presented versions of this paper at the Third World Approaches to International Law conference at the University of Oregon and the Eighth Historical Materialism conference: my thanks go to the co-panellists, organizers and audiences of these events. Finally, I owe a great deal of thanks to Owen Taylor and the three anonymous reviewers of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs for their useful and astute comments on this article. As ever, all errors and omissions of style and substance remain mine alone.
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112 Robert Knox whether or not such interventions further the national interest of those intervening, or whether they undermine regional allies (Delingpole 2011; Hannan 2011). The centrist debates, which have been the predominant character of public discussions, have focused more generally on the possibility and desirability of spreading democracy and human rights through intervention (Horton 2011 and Freedland 2011). As evidenced by the term reignited, these debates are not new. However, the debates took on greater salience in the wake of the end of the Cold War. With the end of history and the rise of liberal democracy and human rights to their unparalleled dominance, claims of intervention couched in these terms could more plausibly be presented as disinterested. Accordingly, a number of postCold-War interventions involved a signicant component of state-building and humanitarian justications. All of these developments have found their reection in the intellectual and academic eld, with the questions of imperialism and war becoming central to a number of political and theoretical works. This perhaps began with Hardt and Negris book Empire (2000) and the various works contesting their arguments,1 and spiralled to include a number of works characterizing the contemporary scene as imperial or disagreeing with such a characterization.2 The question of empire and imperialism has also brought the racialized nature of these interventions to the fore, since the various justications for the use of military force all imply and rely upon a stark distinction between various regions of the world. This is a familiar story to any student of international relations. However, what is perhaps less well known is the role of international law in these debates. For whilst military interventions obviously involve questions of force, power and political economy they also involve questions of law. Apart from a few exceptions,3 military interventions are always accompanied by some attempt to justify them as being legal. This is even more clearly the case in the contemporary scene, with humanitarian intervention and the war on terror being essentially legal claims that were put forward and opposed in legal terms. Given this, it is unsurprising that legal scholarship has become increasingly concerned with mapping the connections between empire, race, war and law.4 First and foremost in this endeavour has been the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement. These scholars have challenged the prevailing consensus within the international legal discipline, which essentially treated international laws relationship to imperialism as purely historical and contingent. Against this, TWAIL scholars have insisted on the continued and inextricable relationship between international law and imperialism.5
For two examples specically focused on Empire see Balakrishnan (2003) and Passavant and Dean (2003). 2 See Callinicos (2009); Harvey (2003); Kiely (2010); Wood (2003); Milios and Sotiropolous (2009). 3 There are occasions when states will frame their actions as being consciously against the prevailing international legal regimesee Berman (2005). 4 The literature here is voluminous, but for a few examples see: Alvarez (2009); Bartholomew (2006); Bowden (2005); Bowring (2008); Byers and Nolte (2003); Krisch (2005); ville (2005); Rasulov (2010); Simpson (2004); Zolo (2009). Marks (2003); Mie 5 There is a great deal of TWAIL literature, but for a representative sample see: Anghie (2005a); Chimni (2006); Gathii (2007); Mutua (2001); Okafor (2008); Rajagopal (2003).
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Civilizing interventions? 113 The rst section of this article begins by reconstructing the TWAIL account of the law on the use of force. It argues that this scholarship is underpinned by a particular racialized concept of imperialism. Imperialism is seen as being driven by a logic of racial othering, which continually creates a distinction between the civilized and uncivilized. As far as this concept is concerned, race is both binary and primary. It is binary because the racial logic of imperialism is understood to erect a division between civilized and uncivilized and this division is primarily deployed to the detriment of the uncivilized. It is primary because this logic is seen as the central driving force of imperialist expansion. The second section illustrates the limits of this approach by exploring the changing legal justications advanced for the use of force. It focuses the major military incursions of the 1990s and 2000sbeginning with the 1991 invasion of Iraq. It is argued that the difference between the legal justications for the rst invasion of Iraq and the later invasions cannot be accounted for by the concept of racialization outlined above. Whereas the 1991 invasion was justied by reference to Security Council authorization under Chapter VII of the United Nations (UN) Charter, the later interventions were justied by claims of humanitarian intervention, implied Security Council resolutions and self-defence. It is argued that one can only understand this shift from Security Council based justications to forms of legal argument that did not require this as the manifestation of interimperialist rivalries within the Security Council. The third section then attempts to show how inter-imperialist rivalry has shaped the racialized character of legal argument. How uncivilized! This section analyses how TWAIL scholars have understood the role that race has played in the legal arguments around the use of force. Although a number of scholars have addressed this, the most systematic examinations of the law on the use of force have been carried out by Antony Anghie and Makua wa Mutua. Accordingly, this article will engage closely with their accounts in an attempt to draw out the broader logics at play. Pre-emption as civilizing mission For Anghie (2005b), the legal logic of the war on terror can be traced back to the early colonial idea of the civilizing mission. Anghie begins by examining the socalled Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence. As is by now well known, this doctrine was framed as a way of refashioning self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. According to the United States (US) government, the novel threat of global terror meant international law would need to be radically transformed.6 Okafor and Baxi both note that these claims of newness already rely on a racialized and Eurocentric historical narrative. This is achieved through a denition of terrorism which excludes the historical violence that was inicted upon the non-European world in the colonial period (Baxi 2005, 24). More pertinently, it occludes the fact that the non-European world was subject to
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National Security Strategy (2002).

114 Robert Knox paramilitary violence throughout the Cold War, often under the direction of the US and its allies (Okafor 2005, 186; Baxi 2005, 23; Blum 2003). The most important aspect of the Bush doctrine was the form that this new vision of self-defence was to take. Traditionally, states are understood as being able to act in self-defence when another state has already attacked them, or if such an attack is imminent. Under the customary rules derived from the Caroline affair, imminence was dened as a situation where although the threat had not yet materialized the necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation. The Bush administration argued that in the changed conditions of the post-9/11 age, where terrorists and terrorist-supporting states could acquire weapons of great destructive power and might attack at any time, such an approach could not work. Whereas a conventional military attack could be predicted by a build-up of troops or intelligence, attacks under the new conditions simply could not be anticipated. As such, the US could let the smoking bomb turn into a mushroom cloud (Blitzer 2003) and would have to intervene pre-emptively.7 Of course, if one takes international laws universality seriously, a problem follows from this. Since all sovereign states are supposed to be formally equal, and consequently possess the right of self-defence, the doctrine of pre-emption should also apply to everyone. On this reading, one could argue that both North Korea and Iran have a legal right to attack the United States (Anghie 2005b, 49). One response here would have been to have accepted this as a purely juridical problem, but acknowledge that in factual terms such an attack would be unlikely. Yet this was not the legal argument that was advanced by the Bush administration. Instead the doctrine of pre-emption was accompanied by another, that of rogue states. It was argued that the threat that generates the need for preemption is not caused by all states. Instead it is caused by a small number of irresponsible, terrorist-supporting states that either threaten the world by their existence, or are incapable of properly controlling populations that dwell within them. By consequence, these states cannot possibly possess the legal right to intervene pre-emptively. Moreover because of their role in promoting terrorism these states form the target for such interventions. Anghies argument is that this doctrine is an almost direct reproduction of the colonial international law of the nineteenth century (Anghie 2005b, 51). This colonial international law relied on a distinction between civilized and uncivilized states: the particular basis of civilization varied at different historical periods religion, culture, political or economic organizationbut what remained constant was the fact that it largely excluded the non-European world. Civilized states were full members of the international Family of Nations and consequently possessed the right to wage war, whereas uncivilized states existed only as objects to be acted upon (Anghie 2004, 327). The connections between nineteenth-century colonial international law and the Bush doctrine run deeper than this. Since rogue states are the source of
7 Much of the relevant law was dealt with by the UNs High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in its report A more secure world A/59/565 of 2 December 2004.

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Civilizing interventions? 115 instability within the international order, merely intervening with military force is not sufcient. Instead, it is necessary to transform them into liberal, democratic and stable states. It is for this reason that the rhetoric of the war on terror has always been accompanied by arguments for regime change and the promotion of democracy and human rights. As such, humanitarian arguments are inextricably connected withfused withself-defence, rather than seen purely as alternative and adjunct arguments (Anghie 2005a, 298). Here one can very clearly see the way in which the racial character of the war on terror is revealed. It is not simply that violence can be used against the uncivilized rogue and failed states, but rather than this violence can be used in order to transform them into civilized states. As such, the war on terror represents a set of principles and policies that reproduces the structure of the civilizing mission, the doctrine that directly animated the expansion of Europe into the non-European world (Anghie 2005a, 309). For Anghie this is a specic example of the general way in which the civilizing mission recurs in international law. He argues that international laws key problematics were formed in the colonial encounter between Europe and the nonEuropean world. This encounter did not end with formal decolonization and the enduring legacy is that international law is structured by a dynamic of difference, which posits a dichotomy between the civilized and the uncivilized (2005a, 4). Within this process international lawyers continually create a gap between two cultures, demarcating one as universal and civilized and the other as particular and uncivilized, and seeking to bridge the gap by developing techniques to normalize the aberrant society (Anghie 2005a, 4). Hence, in Anghies account, international law involves continually creating racialized others and then attempting to transform these others through the civilizing mission, the war on terror just being one way in which this is realized.8 Here, race is at the core of the law of the use of force. This concept of the racialization of international law is a very specic one, with two important characteristics. Firstly, international law is driven by this racial logic. It has primacy inasmuch as it serves as the organizing principle that structures international legal argument. Secondly, the particular way in which this racialized logic functions is to create a binary distinction between the civilized and uncivilized.

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Savage humanitarianism One of Anghies great successes is to show the fundamental unity that characterizes the language of humanitarianism and the war on terror.9 Yet even outside this nexus TWAIL scholars have argued that the language of humanitarian intervention represents a racialized and imperialist doctrine. In
This is reective of the fact that Anghielike other TWAIL scholarsdraws upon postcolonial theory, particularly Said and Bhabha (Anghie 2005, 9). Obviously, one of the key theoretical moves of postcolonial scholarship has been to argue that there is an endless push towards consolidating the European self through the creation of a non-European other. See Said (2003) and Bhabha (2004). 9 See Nesiah (2004) for an account of the relationship between the logics of militarism and humanitarianism.
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116 Robert Knox Savages, victims, and saviors: the metaphor of human rights, Mutua argues that the spread of human rights discourse in general, and humanitarian intervention in particular ts a historical pattern in which all high morality comes from the West as a civilizing agent against lower forms of civilization (2001, 210). For Mutua, the substance of the international human rights movement is rooted in European historical events and philosophical traditions, yet the primary target of its interventions is the Third World (Mutua 2001, 214 216). However, the problems run deeper than this. Mutua argues that the language of humanitarian intervention is marked by a tripartite, racialized metaphor of savages, victims and saviours. In the rst part of this metaphor, non-European culture is said to be the cause of mass human rights abuses. Hence, the rst step in the metaphor interpellates (some) non-Europeans and their cultures as savages, who need to be civilized (Mutua 2001, 219 227). These savages need to be civilized because of the second part of the metaphorthe victim. The victim is portrayed as an innocent who has been arbitrarily abused. Essentially, the victim is posited as powerless before the savage culture and hence requires outside intervention to overcome the conditions of victimization (Mutua 2001, 229). This is explicitly racialized, since [t]he face of the prototypical victim is non-white (Mutua 2001, 230). These two steps set the stage for the nal part of the metaphor, that of the saviour. It is here that the Eurocentric universalism Mutua initially problematized is most fully realized. In order to save the powerless victims from their savage culture it is necessary that a saviour intervene. As such, Western states and institutions are portrayed as fundamentally good agents that need to civilize the savages in order to rescue the victims (Mutua 2001, 233 243). For Mutua, like Anghie, the law on the use of force is structured by a racialized logic of the civilising mission. The racialization of international legal argument Thus, for both Anghie and Mutua, some the most prominent justications for the use of military force over the past twenty years operate according to a racialized, imperial logic. However, it is not simply that these scholars agree that the law on the use of force is racialized; they also share an understanding of the particular way in which this racial logic functions. For both, the racial logic underpinning the law on the use of force is primary and binary. The racial logic is primary because it is understood as the driving force behind international law. Both Anghie and Mutua argue that the drive to other some groups and then attempt to civilize them is an intrinsic tendency in international law and the prime mover in its articulation. Hence the question of race is directly foregrounded as structuring international legal argument. The logic is binary for two reasons. Firstly, it operates with a classical notion of colonial Manichaeism, whereby the primary division is between the civilized and the uncivilized (Fanon 1963, 41). In this vision, the importance of the law lies in designating uncivilized areas as outside the Family of Nations and positing them as legally inferior and thus open for intervention. Secondly, this Manichaean logic is seen as determining the particular way in which racialization occurs. Hence, one explains the process of racialization as operating primarily against those who will be the target of the interventions.

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Civilizing interventions? 117 What this ultimately means is that the form in which racialization occurs is determined by this relationship between an advanced core and an exploited periphery. The logic of civilization is deployed as part of a process whereby this core is enabled to exploit and oppress the periphery. Although this is an understanding that is perhaps best exemplied in TWAIL scholarship, it is also one widely shared by a number of contemporary scholars. Thus, both the war on terror and humanitarian intervention have been understood as doctrines enabling the US to legitimate its interventions into peripheral territories.10 Whilst there is much to recommend in such accounts, they suffer from a problematic conception of imperialism and its relationship to race. Underpinning the above accounts of racialization is an implicit vision of imperialism in which a dominant, unied imperialist core exploits an oppressed periphery. In such a vision, the logic of imperialism is immediately racial, and racialization (both in terms of its form and in terms of its target) can be explained purely according to the logic of the core exploiting the periphery. The problem with such an account is that is incapable of explaining the shifts in the specic legal arguments that have been deployed to justify military interventions. As will be argued below, over the past twenty years one can distinguish between at least three different types of legal argument that have been deployed to justify military intervention. Specically, at the beginning of the 1990s it appeared that the US and its allies would be able to legitimate their interventions through action taken under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. It was only when they faced determined opposition in the Security Council that other legal justications began to be used. Yet if the law on the use of force is directly driven by a racial logic that serves simply to legitimate expansion into the Third World, it seems difcult to understand why these different legal justications have been deployed at all. War and law The Charter regime In order to understand the racial logic of the law on the use of force, looking at humanitarian intervention and the war on terrorism is insufcient. Instead they must be understood in light of the other, more traditional, legal arguments for the use of military force. In particular, it is necessary to situate them in the trajectory of the wave of military interventions that followed the end of the Cold War, especially the rst invasion of Iraq. This part of the article will briey reconstruct some of these interventions and the legal arguments used to support them. The post-1945 law on the use of force was designed to be sufciently restrictive to prevent a repeat of the great military conicts of the rst half of the twentieth century (Gordon 1985). As such, the aim was to limit the situations in which military force could be used and centralize this usage in international institutions,
10 Richard Seymour (2011, 2 3) explicitly invokes the notion of binary stratication, the war on terror being seen as rationalizing imperialist violence. A number of other scholars rely on the binary account; for example: Amin (2006); Bartholomew (2006); Bowring (2008); Chimni (2004, 16 17); Vitalis (2000).

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118 Robert Knox primarily the UN. Under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, states are obliged to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The two relatively uncontroversial exceptions to this prohibition are contained in Article 51 and Chapter VII. Article 51 concerns self-defence, as described above. Chapter VIIthe collective security regimedeals with Security Council authorizations of the use of force. If the Security Council determines that there has been a threat or breach of the peace or an act of aggression (under Article 39) it can authorize the use of force under Article 42 (using the phrase all necessary means). Since these authorizations are decided in the Security Council, they can be prevented by a veto by any of its permanent members. Throughout the Cold War this collective security regime was paralysed (De llar 1989). Owing to the rivalries between the Western countries and the Soviet Cue bloc, both of which had permanent members on the Security Council, any attempt at authorizing military force was vetoed. There were only a few exceptions to this. Perhaps the most famous was the 1950 Korean War, which occurred because the Soviet Union (USSR) had elected to abstain from the Security Council from January 1950, in protest at the exclusion of the Peoples Republic of China (Blum 2003, 48 49). The rst invasion of Iraq It was because of this background that the 1990 intervention in Iraq was dubbed by George HW Bush the beginning of a New World Order in which an effective UN could guarantee international peace and security (Bush 1990). In 1990 the Iraqi military invaded Kuwait, claiming that Kuwait had been stealing Iraqi oil, as well as relying on an older irredentist claim that Kuwait was a part of Iraq. The Kuwaiti government immediately asked its allies for help, invoking a claim of collective self-defence. However, the main legal justication for the invasion of Iraq was authorization by the Security Council under Chapter VII. Resolution 660 declared that there had been a breach of international peace and security and, under the now infamous Resolution 678, the Security Council authorized member states to use all necessary means to enforce Resolution 660. The political discourse that accompanied this event depicted Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi state as essentially uncivilized barbarians (Said 1994, 353 355). This was reected in the international legal logic of the argument. The Security Council declared Iraq to be a source of instability in the international order, meaning it would have to be contained. The reason that it had to be stopped was that it had attacked powerless Kuwait. In other words, this was a racialized form of legal argument, indeed one reminiscent of Mutuas account of humanitarian interventionwith savage Iraq attacking the victim Kuwait and the international community serving as a saviour. However, the particular form that the legal argument took was that a breach of international security under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The particular form that this legal argument took is important because Security Council authorization under Chapter VII is one of the most legally uncontroversial ways in which a military intervention can occur. It does not incur the problems of thresholds that have to be reached in the case of self-defence,

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Civilizing interventions? 119 such as whether the amount of force is sufcient to constitute an armed attack or whether the attack has occurred or is imminent. Equally, acting under a Security Council resolution means that one is not limited to respond in a proportionate way to an armed attack, but instead can take all measures necessary to restore international peace and security (Schachter 1991, 460). Yet despite the manifest advantages that were gained in adopting this form of legal argument, it was not the most common used to justify the military interventions that followed the First Iraq War.

Kosovo The next important part of this story is the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations (NATOs) humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. The facts surrounding this intervention are controversial but for the purposes of this argument it is only necessary to have a schematic account. Essentially, in 1998 the government of Serbia removed the autonomous status of Kosovo. Following this, there were allegations of repression on the part of the government and terrorism on the part of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The Security Council passed Resolution 1199, characterizing the situation as a threat to international peace and security. Crucially, however, it did not call for the use of all necessary measures to restore the peace and hence did not prima facie authorize the use of military force. Consequently, when the US-led NATO coalition declared it might intervene, it could not directly reference Chapter VII. Instead, the legal justications advanced were forced to take several forms. The rst argument was that although the Security Council had not explicitly called for intervention this was implied in its determination that the situation in Kosovo was a threat to international peace and security (Lobel and Ratner 1999, 152). This was reinforced by the fact that the Security Council was once again paralysed by the geopolitical wrangling of the permanent members. On this basis, it was argued that intervention was the only way the will of the UN and the international community could be upheld. The logic of this argument was taken further by advocates of unilateral humanitarian intervention. Their argumentexplicitly advanced by the United Kingdom government (and especially beloved by Tony Blair; see Blair (1999)) and some legal commentators11was that the international legal order had changed. In the language of the (later) International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, states were no longer the possessors of untrammelled sovereign rights (2001, 11 19). Instead, owing to the development of the international human rights movement, states had a duty, or responsibility, to protect their nationals. As such, the argument ran, when states failed in this duty, it was necessary for the international community to intervene, ideally through the UN, but otherwise through regional organizations of responsible law-abiding states (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001, 51 55). Finally, one surprisingly popular response amongst legal commentators was that although the actions may have been technically illegal, they remained close
11 With varying degrees of ambivalence see Henkin (1999), Wedgwood (1999) and Reisman (1999).

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120 Robert Knox to the law and fullled a legitimate and moral purpose (Simma 1999). In this formulation, whilst the intervention may have been prima facie unlawful, legality had to be weighed against protecting innocent civilians and upholding the stability of the international order. Afghanistan and the war on terror The legal arguments justifying the war on terror followed a similar pattern. The war on terror has largely been justied in terms of self-defence. The pattern for this was set by the intervention in Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks. Following these attacks the Security Council passed Resolution 1368, reafrming the inherent right of self-defence against terrorism. In framing terrorism as an issue of self-defence (as opposed to a criminal matter), the door was left open for military incursions against terrorists under Article 51, without Security Council approval (Frederking 2007, 160). This was the prime justication deployed by the US in its invasion of Afghanistan. Such a doctrine involved modications to the traditional account of selfdefence. A large part of this concerned the idea of imminence. The argument was advanced that terrorism represents a continuous threat and so generates the right to intervene in self-defence on a continuous basis. The doctrine also ran into the problem that in the traditional understanding of self-defence there also needed to be a connection between the armed attack suffered and the state against which force was used.12 This was negotiated in various waysthrough the idea that there was a right of self-defence directly against non-state actors (Trapp 2007) or that rogue or failed states were incapable of controlling terrorism and hence needed to be intervened in (Murphy 2002, 50).13 Whilst this is known as the Bush Doctrine, it has also been the primary legal justication of the Obama government. Hence Harold Koh, then legal advisor of the Department of State, stated, we continue to ght a war of self-defense against an enemy that attacked us on September 11 . . . and that continues to undertake armed attacks (Koh 2010). This has been the foundation of the intensied campaign of drone strikes against targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan (DeYoung 2011). One intervention not mentioned in the above accounts, but one that created a great deal of legal debate, was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Although the debate around the invasion has been exhausted almost entirely, it does t with the logic described above. Some argued for pre-emptive self-defence (Sofaer 2003). Others made a humanitarian argument. Neither of these was an ofcial government legal position. Instead the argument was that the Security Council had implicitly authorized the use of force. It was argued that Resolution 1441, which declared Iraq was in material breach of its international obligations under Resolution 687, had revived Resolution 678 and with it the authorization to use force (Gray 2008, 358 366).
Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v US), 1984 ICJ 392 (26 November). 13 This was directly reected in the 2002 National Security Strategy, which stated that the US would make no distinction between terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or provide aid to them (National Security Strategy 2002).
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Civilizing interventions? 121 Rivalry and hegemony Of vetoes and rivalries These examples allow us to pose an essential question. Whilst all of these interventions operated according to a racialized imperial logic, relying on the idea that peripheral territories are a threat to the international order which must be civilized, the particular legal form that this racialization takes has varied. Crucially, given the uncontroversial nature and broad scope of Chapter VII resolutions, why has this been a relatively rare form of legal argument? Generally, the examples closest to this have been the various attempts to argue for implied Security Council resolutions, with all the controversy that such arguments generate. The importance of this question is that it undermines the primary and binary account of racialization. The war on terror and humanitarian intervention are racialized forms of legal argument, but this racialization could have been carried out through other, more uncontroversial legal constructs. If one simply analyses racism as enabling the core to exploit the periphery, one cannot explain why these uncontroversial legal arguments were not used. One obvious point about the interventions following the rst invasion of Iraq described above is that they were framed in such a way as to avoid the possibility of a Security Council veto. In the case of implied Security Council resolutions this is obvious. Yet, equally, expanded claims of self-defence under the auspices of ghting terrorism, or claims of unilateral humanitarian intervention, are not subject to the possibility of a Security Council veto. Although this may seem a rather banal observation, and indeed one that many have pointed out (Byers and Nolte 2003), it is nonetheless important. At the time of the rst invasion of Iraq, the Cold War had just ended. The then Soviet Union was reeling from a series of reforms and upheavals, had pledged itself to cooperation the West and was increasingly dependent on Western aid (Brenner 1991, 132; Bennis 1991, 114; Farnsworth 1999, 236). China was similarly reeling from this breakup and in any case had not assumed the crucial global economic role it currently occupies. As such, the geopolitical rivalry that had paralysed the Security Council had momentarily abated. What the historical record shows us is that this was in fact a relatively rare situation. In the whole period following the creation of the UN the Security Council was paralysed and, as is shown from the brief considerations above, it remained so for much of the period following the rst invasion of Iraq. These facts take on a great deal of signicance in the light of the various debates about the nature and scope of imperialism, perhaps best known within (but not limited to) the Marxist tradition. As previously noted, the primary/binary accounts seem to rely on an understanding of imperialism which foregrounds the relationship between a core and a periphery in which the former dominates the latter. Although the language of core and periphery is particular to World Systems theory, the idea of such a divisionthat there are more and less advanced regions of the global economy and that the former dominate the latter in some wayis central to most accounts of imperialism. Simultaneously, there has been erce disagreement over the relationship amongst the advanced powers. In particular, the debate has turned on the question of whether there is a unied core of imperialist powers whose interests coincide, or

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122 Robert Knox whether this imperialist core is composed of rival imperialist states seeking to monopolize the benets of imperialism in their own interest (Brewer 1990, 89). In the classical accounts of imperialism, this debate was central. The original theorists of imperialismprimarily Hobson and Hilferdingtook rivalry between European powers to be the main feature of imperialism. On the eve of the First World War, this equation was increasingly challenged. On the one hand, there was Kautskys account, in which the tendency of imperialism was seen as towards creating a single world trust (1970). Against this, Lenin and Bukharin insisted that the tendency was towards creating intensied military and political competition between rival imperialist powers, pushing the world towards largescale military conict (Bukharin 1972, 133 143; Lenin 1970, 112 118). In the period of decolonization attention shifted away from rivalry and instead began to focus more strongly on the question of development and the ways in which the international system promoted the underdevelopment of peripheral social formations (Brewer 1990, 88 89). In present times the debate about rivalry has resurfaced. In these debates, the question is no longer about a single unied trust of imperialists, but rather about the development of the US into the worlds sole superpower. Here the question has been whether the strength of US imperialism is such that it has no rivals and is instead able to dominate the globe through its overwhelming military and economic power, with other states allying with the US in the global order. Other accounts argue that the US protects the interests of a capitalist class not tied to any nation state.14 In such accounts, much has been made of the above doctrines of humanitarian intervention and the war on terror. The use of the legal doctrines of humanitarian intervention and the war on terror is seen as a sign of the unopposed dominance of US hegemonic ambitionwhereby the US is able to carve out legal doctrines that enable it to intervene (Amin 2006, 112 113; Wood 2003, 143 165). These debates have also extended to the question of whether this hegemonic power is in decline. In particular, commentators have argued that the rising power of China has been matched by the waning power of the USwith the centre of international political gravity shifting eastwards (Arrighi 2007; Li 2008). These accounts interpret the doctrines of humanitarian intervention and the war on terror as imperial overreach, in which the US has attempted to supplement its declining economic power through displays of military dominance. The debate around the decline extend far beyond the Marxist tradition, encompassing various scholars of international relations15 and the intelligence community, the National Intelligence Council publishing a report in 2008 arguing that the world in 2025 would be characterized by a relative decline in the military, economic and political power of the US (National Intelligence Council 2008, 113). The account in this article would seem to support the position that the international order is characterized by rivalries between the US and other
14 Hardt and Negri (2000; 2004) to some degree set the scene for arguing against geopolitical rivalry. Similarly, see Robinson (2004). For accounts stressing US hegemony more strongly, see Panitch and Gindin (2003) and Wood (2003). Against this are accounts that have stressed the continued importance of rivalries, such as Callinicos (2009). 15 This debate has long roots and resurfaces periodically. For some more recent examples see Cox (2007) and Reus-Smith (2004).

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Civilizing interventions? 123 imperialist powers, as well as the narrative of US decline. Whilst there was a brief period in which the particular imperialist coalition led by the US was able to act through international institutions without being challenged by other economically and military powerful states, this was short-lived.16 Hence, in the brief period around the end of the Cold War, when Russia and China were at their weakest, it was possible to rely on arguments through the Security Council. Yet, as the position of these states in the international order was strengthened, they were able to plausibly threaten the power of wielding their veto. In all of the interventions described above, the resort to legal justications outside the Security Council was driven by the knowledge that within the Security Council a veto was likely forthcoming. In the case of Kosovo, it was widely understood that given Russias traditional closeness with Serbia, and political interests in the region, it would veto any attempt at authorizing the use of force (Chinkin 1999, 842). Indeed, both Russia and China attempted to pass a resolution condemning the NATO bombing (Gray 2008, 42). This meant that the divergent interests occasioned by inter-imperialist rivalry split over into the Security Council, leading the US to articulate a doctrine that allowed it to avoid this. The war on terror is of course a more complicated process. Following the September 11 attacks, there was a great deal of international sympathy for the US. Russia and China both had an interest in defeating the Taliban, which supported secessionist movements within their borders (Frederking 2007, 168). However, even at that time the Chinese government was sufciently assertive to attempt to impose conditions on any military mission. The aim was to authorize the particular intervention, but prevent it from spreading into a more generalized US military offensive. It is likely for this reason that the US instead sought to rely on the argument of self-defence, as opposed to seeking further Security Council resolutions in support of the invasion (Frederking 2007, 165). By the time of further interventions under the rubric of the war on terror, Russia and China had grown sufciently assertive to render any Security Council resolutions unlikely. This was underlined by the furore around the Second Iraq War, where Russia, China and France threatened to veto any Chapter VII resolution (Gray 2008, 357 358). As a result of these challenges, US policymakers articulated legal doctrines that enabled them to secure their interests against emerging rivalries. The pattern has been one of relatively short periods of overwhelming US dominance, or temporary coincidences of interest with rival states, punctuated by a more general picture of inter-imperialist rivalry.
16 There is a period lasting for approximately 7 years when a number of interventions were authorized by the Security Council in inter alia Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Rwanda, Albania, the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone. However, throughout this period there were tensions, particularly over the no-y zones in Iraq (Operation Provide Comfort) and Operation Desert Fox, an operation against Iraq for failing to comply with UN weapons inspectors. In these latter instances, a combination of implied Security Council authorization, self-defence and humanitarian intervention claims was employed. See Gray (2002).

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124 Robert Knox Legalized hegemony as hegemony of weakness Viewed from this perspective, we can begin to see further commonalities in the way in which racialized legal argument has functioned. Essentially, in the cases surveyed above a similar pattern of argument has occurred. In every instance, the US and its allies had an interest in military intervention. However, these interests clashed with those of other imperialist states, in particular China and Russia, and on some occasions Western European states. So as to preserve their interests in the face of moves to the contrary, these states threatened to block any military action through the Security Council veto. In order to guard against this, it was necessary for the US government to articulate legal arguments enabling the US to act, whilst also excluding the possibility of rivals pursuing similar arguments. These legal doctrines all followed a common argumentative structure. They began by positing that an event, or series of events, represented a threat to the international system as a whole (the Kosovo crisis, Iraqs weapons of mass destruction and the general threat of terrorism). Following this, it was asserted that, owing to rival states acting against the interests of the world order, the normal channels of international law were blocked. As such, the argument proceeded, it was necessary for a select group of states to act as guardians of the system, acting outside its normal channels in order to protect it. This structure of legal argument bears a great deal of similarity to what Gerry Simpson has called legalized hegemony. In Great powers and outlaw states Simpson argues that the international legal order is characterized by Great Powers, a powerful elite of states whose superior status is recognized by minor powers as a political fact giving rise to the existence of certain constitutional privileges (Simpson 2004, 68).17 Simpson argues that the mark of these Great Powers is that they are able to legally entrench their status (and hegemony) in law. In so doing, they grant themselves rights greater than those of normal states, which enable them to act in order to preserve the international system in their own interest. For Simpson, the mark of Great Powers is that special juridical rights and privileges ow to them. Although Simpsons argument contains much in common with that outlined in this paper, there are important divergences. Central is that, for Simpson, Great Powers are only such when they act in concert, since it is only collectively that powerful states can be imagined to have an interest in maintaining the international order. Consequently, he understands juridical privileges as being directed not against rival Great Powers, but rather at subordinate members of the international legal order. Thus, for Simpson, the Cold War period was one in which there were no Great Powers, simply superpowers vying for dominancelacking any commitment to long-term collective action that would maintain the system (2004, 75). Simpsons account very much mirrors the binary account outlined above and shares with it an inability to explain the changing forms of legalized hegemony. Further, his position seems unable to account for the fact that contemporary attempts to articulate legalized hegemony were asserted over the objection of other Great Powers. This is important because for the majority of the post-1945 period there has been discord amongst the major powers, which was reected in the paralysis
17

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Italics omitted.

Civilizing interventions? 125 of international organizations and in attempts to argue for special rights that would allow Great Powers to act outside these organizations. This would suggest that the majority of attempts to articulate legalized hegemony were in fact marked by discord between the Great Powers. If we understand the linkage between attempts to articulate legalized hegemony and inter-imperialist rivalry a different picture emerges. Rather than seeing legalized hegemony as a sign of unied strength, we can now see it as a sign of weakness.18 In the face of rivals that are able to articulate their agendas through the normal channels of the international legal order, powerful states attempt to create legal doctrines that embed their special rights to intervene, under the rubric of upholding the international order. Hence, the doctrines of humanitarian intervention and the war on terror are an attempt by the US to entrench its ability to intervene in the peripheries, in the face of rivals whose power is reected in the international legal order. A necessary component of this is also that these rivals cannot use these doctrines. The racialized nature of these doctrines needs to be seen in this light. Most obviously, we can no longer see race as the primary issue. The drive to create others (or even an explanation focused around exploiting the peripheries) cannot explain the particular forms that racialization takes. Instead we need to look to the changing material structures of imperialism, the conjunctures in which these structures are realized and the rivalries these relations generate. More important are the problems with the binary aspect. In the binary account, the focus is solely on the denigration of the target of intervention and the legitimation of the intervening state. It pays no attention to those states which are not the target of intervention, but equally are cast as not possessing the special right to interventionthat is to say, the rivals threatening to block action. But these states are also cast in a racialized role. They are posited as irrational or selsh, holding particular national interests in higher esteem than the values of the international community as a whole. The purpose of this is both to justify acting outside the Security Council and also to prevent these states from relying on these doctrines. Crucially, these arguments are not designed to justify direct military intervention against the rival states. In this way, the civilized/uncivilized dichotomy that is relied on above is problematized because there is a widerand more fragileattempt to articulate a hierarchy within the advanced capitalist countries: attempting to stratify and divide rivals. One pertinent example is the attempt to divide between Old Europe and New Europe in the run-up to the Second Iraq War. However, the most important examples in this respect are Russia and China. In both of these cases, accusations of selshness or irrationality are tied together with criticism of their non-liberal
18 Carty (2004) articulates a similar vision, drawing heavily on Marxist literature. However, he unfortunately frames the issue in terms of structural pressures that cause the US to break international law. This misses the ways in which the US is specically attempting to articulate particular legal doctrines in serious legal terms, as opposed to simply violating the law, and precludes an understanding of the forms these doctrines take. Wood (2003, 143 165) makes some reference to the idea of the war on terror as being driven by potential rivalry. However, she argues that there are no competitors, and sees the war on terror as an indirect display of force so as to cow potential competitors (Wood 2003, 157). This account entirely fails to take account of the way in which the US has been forced to act outside the Security Council by the legal power of other states.

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126 Robert Knox and non-market regimes. Hence in the 2002 National Security Strategy speech, alongside the idea of rogue states there were heavy references to Russias uneven commitment to the basic values of free-market democracy and to China following an outdated path of threaten[ing] its neighbors.19 Even in Obamas liberal 2010 National Security Strategy, there are references to promoting a strong, peaceful, and prosperous Russia that respects international norms, supporting efforts within Russia to promote the rule of law, accountable government, and universal values and supporting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russias neighbors.20 Similarly, the US would welcome a responsible China, working with it, encouraging China to make choices that contribute to peace, security, and prosperity as its inuence rises and remaining candid on our human rights concerns.21 More bluntly, in November 2011 Obama demanded that China act like a grownup (meaning it is currently acting like a child), whilst outlining his plans to expand and consolidate US inuence in the Asia Pacic region (The Guardian 2011). The function of such language is to portray the closest imperial rivals of the US as unable to assume the mantle of guarding the fundamental values of the world order. Hence, we can argue that inter-imperialist rivalry has been central to the racialization of the law on the use of force in two respects. Firstly, the particular legal form that the racialization of the peripheries takes is driven by the need to undercut imperial rivals. Secondly, these rivals are themselves directly racialized, so as to prevent them from utilizing these doctrines. Georgia as legal crisis These issues were all at play in the 2008 RussiaGeorgia war. Although this event has receded somewhat from public consciousness, it nonetheless remains an important turning point. In brief, there had been tensions between Georgia and Russia for several years. Citizens living in Abkhazia and South Ossetia had long claimed to be mistreated by the Georgian government, with South Ossetia declaring independence from Georgia in 1990, an act never recognized by Georgia. The separatists were backed by Russia in these claims: for reasons of solidarity (South Ossetia shares language and ethnicity with North Ossetia, part of the Russian Federation, and Abkhazia had autonomy in the Soviet period) and realpolitik attempts to destabilize Georgia. Additionally, the Russian government had begun to feel increasing geopolitical insecurity. In the aftermath of the Kosovo intervention, Kosovo had (eventually) unilaterally declared independence from Serbiawith the approval of US-aligned statesand NATO was expanding into former Warsaw Pact areas (Georgia was a leading candidate for NATO membership) (Asmus 2010, 70). There were mutual accusations of a military build-up (Illarionov 2009, 64 72) and in early August, alleging that Georgian villages had been attacked, the Georgian military moved into South Ossetia, attacking the separatist capital of Tskhinvali. In response to this, the Russian military launched a full-scale assault, driving the Georgian military out of South Ossetia, but expanding beyond this to attack various locations, ending up only hours away from the capital Tbilisi
19 20

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National Security Strategy (2002). National Security Strategy (2010, 44). 21 National Security Strategy (2010, 43).

Civilizing interventions? 127 (Asmus 2010, 179 189). Given the closeness of Georgia to NATO, there was consternation about this. However, what is ultimately surprising is how little condemnation there was. The US took a relatively hard rhetorical line, but did not go beyond this, and much of Western Europe took a soft linemotivated in no small part by their energy dependence on Russia (Callinicos 2010, 97). Callinicos has argued that this event exposed the fact that the power of the US had been severely weakened over the previous decade, with Iraq and Afghanistan sapping its strength (2010, 4). Thus, alongside the 2008 economic crisis, which weakened the US and its allies, there was a concomitant geopolitical crisis, which was the culmination of a series of tendencies towards international rivalry (Callinicos 2010, 110). Importantly, this also represented a legal crisis. In its defence of South Ossetia and further invasion of Georgia, one of the main legal justications that Russia relied on was that of humanitarian intervention. The Russian government argued that in their attack on South Ossetia (a territory that remains part of Georgia) the Georgian military had committed grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law; even genocide was alleged (Traynor and Black 2008). It appears, then, that Russia was attempting to usurp the imperial legal prerogative that the US had carved out for itself and its allies. The response of the US government to this was therefore telling. President Bush declared that Georgia was a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected (Schwirtz et al 2008). Here one should resist the urge to allege rank hypocrisy. Vitally, Bushs argument was not that there was no humanitarian crisis, or to disagree on the facts; instead it was simply not contemplated that Russia had the right to make this argument. In other words, the doctrine was conceived in such a way as to exclude Russia, as a rival, from being able to invoke it. The fact that Russia was able to do so without particularly adverse consequences points to the renewed vigour in this rivalry, as well as the continuing decline in the power and inuence of the US. Conclusion: Libya and the new(er) military humanism? The argument of this article has been relatively simple. It began by examining some prominent accounts of the relationship between racialization and the law on the use of force. It was argued that, although these were persuasive, their focus on the primary role of race as well as its binary nature could not explain the changing forms of racialization in law on the use of force. Following on from this, the article examined several key interventions in the twentieth and twenty-rst centuries. It was argued that despite the efcacy of the use of Security Council resolutions, such Resolutions were not the most common legal form that racialization took. The article then argued that what drove the changes in legal argument was the need of the US and its allies to avoid the Security Council. This was because several of the USs key rivals were sufciently powerful that they could translate their opposition into legal terms. Doctrines such as the war on terror and humanitarian intervention were not representative of the power of US unilateralism, but rather represented a position of relative weakness. Consequently, any understanding of the global colour line must recognize its complexity. Whilst there is a fundamental racialized division, founded on the differentiation between advanced imperialist powers and peripheral formations, this shifts according to a series of

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128 Robert Knox conjunctural imperatives. At the same time, there are a number of other lines that intersect with it as imperial powers attempt to stratify their rivals. What of more recent events? This article began with a discussion of the way in which the intervention in Libya had pushed the language of humanitarianism back into the headlines. The example of Libya might be said to cut against the above argument. Libya was one of the few examples of a humanitarian intervention authorized under Chapter VII. However, it already seems that this cs put it well when he noted that [c]lass may have been an aberration. Luka solidarity in the capitalist classes is only possible when they look outwards cs 1972, 49). To translate this, imperialist states act in solidarity when there (Luka is a fundamental threat to the system. Such a threat was present in the movement that has now been dubbed the Arab Spring. Whatever the political outcomes of these uprisings, they fundamentally threatened the stability of the region and governments friendly to various imperial powers. Moreover, none of the imperial powers had been able to nd much of a foothold in the popular movements. Libya represented an opportunity for imperialism to reinsert itself in the region. Even within this broad purpose there were differences and some states stood to gain more than others from the intervention. The US government saw a successful intervention in Libya as a way to re-legitimate doctrines of humanitarian intervention (Calabresi 2011). In contrast, the Russian and Chinese governments feared such an outcome, insisting that any mandate should simply be for the protection of civilians through the imposition of a no-y zone (Murphy 2012). The ambiguity between opposed imperial interests and the necessity of intervening in the revolutionary process was reected in the fact that Russia and China merely abstained rather than veto or vote positively for Resolution 1973.22 Consequently, the Libya intervention has hardly ushered in an era of multilateral humanitarianism. Whilst it may have re-legitimated military humanism, the question of intervention in Syria has already come up against inter-imperialist rivalry. Russia, traditional ally of the Baath Party, felt tricked by Resolution 1973 and will only back a resolution on Syria if regime change is explicitly ruled out (Murphy 2012). Both Russia and China are being denounced, in at times distinctly racialized terms (The Guardian 2012). However, one of the corollaries of the above argument is that one must be extremely suspicious of those claiming to uphold the UN as against US unilateralism. This has been a very strong tendency amongst both liberal (Sands 2006) and left/ critical international lawyers,23 and the broader public more generally.24 As this article has argued, even the most normal and uncontroversial multilateral interventions remain racialized and imperialist.25 The prime reason driving the US
S/RES/1973 of 17 March 2011. In Bartholomew (2006) a great deal of the analysis essentially centres on the defence of the UN as against US imperialism; Bowring (2008) puts forward a more radical critique that reaches the same position. 24 Rasulov has argued that those scholars who argue that US imperialism has created an imperial law that runs against the UN are analogous to the feudal socialists criticized by Marx, since much of their argument concerns the superiority of European domination to upstart US imperialism (Rasulov 2010, 466). 25 ville has argued persuasively that unilateralism is simply one strategy China Mie adopted by imperialist powers in given situations, and that multilateralism can be just as ville 2008). brutal and imperialist (Mie
23 22

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Civilizing interventions? 129 away from the Security Council is not its disdain for multilateralism but rather the threat of other imperialist states. As the Georgia example shows, these states will also willingly adopt this language as and when it becomes convenient for them to do so. Thus one cannot simply counterpose the imperialist, unilateral and racialized uses of force of the US to the UN Charter regime. To do so is to miss the way in which that regime itself is bound up with the imperialist system as a whole, of which rivalry is a structural feature.26 Notes on contributor Robert Knox is a PhD candidate in law at the London School of Economics. His thesis explores the way in which the concept of imperialism has operated in Marxist and Third World approaches to international law. His main interests are in the elds of legal theory (especially Marxist and critical legal theory) and public international law (particularly the law on the use of force). He is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. Email: robertjknox@gmail.com References
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