The concept of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) developed out of the failure of the United Nations Security Council to act collectively, and effectively, in the face of mass atrocities in Rwanda and Kosovo. The progenitor of the concept, the 2001 report The Responsibility to Protect by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), sought to put in place a new normative framework for the collective use of force to prevent future failures of human protection by the United Nations. Paragraph 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome stipulates that any use of force to “protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” must be “in accordance with the Charter [of the United Nations], including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate.”Footnote 2 In this essay, we consider the future prospects for Security Council–authorized uses of force under the RtoP twenty years after the ICISS report and fifteen years after the World Summit Outcome. Our central argument is that trust and ambivalence (the space between trust and distrust) act as key enabling (but not determining) conditions of the use of force by the Council for RtoP purposes. The analysis develops in three stages. First, we set up a conceptual framework for theorizing the role of trust, distrust, and ambivalence in Security Council decisions to use force. Second, using the case of the intervention in Libya in 2011, we show how a focus on trust and ambivalence explains the position taken by member states in the Security Council. This innovative approach provides new insights into the puzzle of why Russia and China did not veto the U.S.–U.K.–French intervention and why seven of the nonpermanent members of the Council voted in favor of it. Third, we draw lessons from this case for the future against the backdrop of increasing great power conflicts, the collapse of U.S. leadership, and the decay of multilateral approaches to global security challenges.
Trust, Distrust, and the Space in Between
We define trust as “the expectation of no harm in contexts where betrayal is always a possibility.”Footnote 3 Trust is a mental or psychological state that cannot be observed directly but that enables actions toward others—trusting actions or behavior—that would not be possible in its absence. It is important to keep the concepts of trust and trustworthiness separate because individuals only enter a psychological or mental state of trust in relation to another individual or collective if they believe in the current and future trustworthiness of that actor. Trust is always in relation to someone or something with regard to something else (for example, X trusts Y in relation to Z), but this bounded nature of trust means that actors might trust Y in relation to one issue area but not trust them in relation to others. What, then, does X look for before placing its trust in Y in relation to Z? Trust researchers identify three key attributes that trustors (those doing the trusting) look for in trustees (those who are being trusted). Classic formulations in the trust literature single out “ability,” “benevolence,” and “integrity”—the so-called ABI model, made famous by Roger Mayer, James Davis, and F. David Schoorman in their 1995 article “An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust.”Footnote 4
We define distrust as an active belief that another actor cannot be trusted. Here, distrust provides a cognitive and affective mental map for managing uncertainty. There is a functional similarity between trust and distrust insofar as both are psychological processes for managing uncertainty. They do this by substituting the anxieties that uncertainty generates with certainties (albeit subjectively held) about either the peaceful (trustworthy) or malign (untrustworthy) intentions of others. There is a debate among trust researchers outside of the discipline of international relations (IR) as to how much trust and distrust are separate concepts, or whether they are opposite points on a continuum, where low trust is equivalent to high distrust.Footnote 5 Roy Lewicki, Daniel McAllister, and Robert Bies, in an important contribution to this debate, advanced the proposition that high levels of trust and distrust could coexist in the same relationship, which they called “the possibility of ambivalence.”Footnote 6 Mark Saunders, Graham Dietz, and Adrian Thornhill suggest that the concept of ambivalence might be usefully extended to encompass a situation where there is neither trust or distrust.Footnote 7 It is this notion of ambivalence that we use in this essay. In this position of ambivalence, actor X is open to the possibility that actor Y may be potentially trustworthy, but actor X is ambivalent, based on the existing evidence, as to whether to act in a trusting or distrusting way.
We use the 2011 intervention in Libya as a case study to show the value of ambivalence in explaining the abstentions of Russia and China that made possible a Security Council–authorized intervention. In making the argument that ambivalence was an enabling condition of the intervention, we recognize that Resolution 1973 also required nine affirmative votes, including from members of the ten elected states of the Council (E10). At the time, the E10 comprised of Belgium, Côte d'Ivoire, the Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Germany, Indonesia, Kuwait, Peru, Poland, and South Africa. The nine affirmative votes needed to come from states that trusted the United States, U.K., and France (three of the five permanent Security Council members, known as the P3) to fulfill the mandate given to them by the Council in Resolution 1973.
Libyan Intervention in 2011
The intervention in Libya has been widely interpreted as historic because it was the first time that the Council authorized the use of force to prevent mass atrocities without the consent of the government in question.Footnote 8 Within the RtoP literature, the authorization has largely been explained in terms of the following contextual factors: (1) the perception that the threat posed to civilians by Qaddafi's regime was real; (2) the regime's unwillingness to engage in diplomacy; (3) an isolated leader who notably did not have the backing of any of the five permanent members of the Security Council (P5), namely China, France, Russia, U.K., and the United States; (4) Anglo-French pressure within the Council to intervene with force to prevent an impending humanitarian catastrophe; (5) the legitimacy provided by the Gulf Cooperation Council and especially the Arab League, which was calling for intervention; (6) diplomatic will and skill on the part of the U.K., French, and U.S. governments, which orchestrated and led the military intervention; and (7) the perception among implementing governments that war would be relatively easy to win.Footnote 9 Although we do not disagree that these were important factors, the role of trust and the absence of distrust in making the intervention possible has been overlooked.
In the existing literature on the Libyan intervention, the concept of trust and trustworthiness is barely mentioned. When it is, it is in the context of the failure of the P3 to live up to the trust placed in it by other Council members, and the subsequent consequences of this perceived betrayal for future military interventionism in support of RtoP. For example, Simon Adams wrote of the “deep breach of trust between states leading the intervention and those who saw the RtoP as having been hijacked and compromised.”Footnote 10 Michael Doyle argued that the breakdown of trust over Libya had negatively impacted the Council's ability to respond effectively to the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria and that “trust in pillar 3 enforcement of the RtoP by the Security Council in controversial cases has also been eroded.”Footnote 11 The claims by Adams and Doyle reflect a dichotomous framing of the role of trust in the Libyan case between trust (at the time of the intervention) and distrust (in its aftermath), which is problematic.
The binary is misleading for three reasons. First, it does not take into account the abstentions in the Council on the resolution. Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Russia abstained but, crucially, neither Russia nor China vetoed the resolution. We argue that the five abstainers neither trusted nor distrusted the P3 regarding Libya; rather, they occupied a position of ambivalence.Footnote 12 Second, the binary fails to recognize how limited was the trust placed in the P3 by the seven states (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal, and South Africa) that voted in favor of Resolution 1973. Third, it overstates the level of distrust that emerged during the implementation of the resolution, as six of the elected ten members continued to support it (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Portugal). Due to space constraints for this essay, we focus predominantly on the first two of these reasons and only touch on the latter.
Ambivalent Abstainers
The Security Council was united in the conviction that Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi would not heed the demands for humanitarian protection of the Libyan people laid down by the Council in Resolution 1970, which was adopted on February 26, 2011. Given this shared assumption, the question facing those members who were uncertain about the intentions of the P3 was whether they were going to vote against a resolution authorizing the use of force by the only states on the Council willing to stop the massacres. The problem with the trust-distrust dichotomy framing of the case is that if Russia and China (known in this context as the P2) had trusted the P3's humanitarian credentials regarding Libya, it is plausible to imagine that they would have voted in favor of the resolution rather than abstaining. But conversely, if they had distrusted the P3's intentions and integrity, then vetoing the resolution would have been the most likely outcome. Set against this, it could be argued that Russia's and China's abstentions still reflected their distrust of the P3's intentions, but neither wanted to be seen as vetoing a resolution aimed at protecting civilians in Libya. However, if we look at statements regarding the resolution, there is no compelling evidence that Russia and China distrusted Western intentions concerning Libya.
The Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, acknowledged “serious concern” for the many civilian lives lostFootnote 13 and the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, was committed to improving U.S.-Russian relations during what the Obama administration called the “Reset years.” There is considerable evidence that Obama and Medvedev had developed a close personal bond and, as a result, a developing relationship of trust that had already yielded a major breakthrough the previous year with the agreement on the April 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). This is not to say that Medvedev trusted Obama regarding Libya, and the Russian Delegation in New York was also clear in the debate over Resolution 1973 that a peaceful resolution of the crisis was the priority, expressing concerns that the resolution was morphing beyond what had been proposed by the Arab League into something that “potentially [opened] the door to large-scale military intervention.”Footnote 14 Yet as Susan Rice notes, Russia's position was “ambiguous,”Footnote 15 which left U.S. vice president Joe Biden to predict that it would “veto any resolution.”Footnote 16 Nevertheless, the instruction from Medvedev was to abstain, a decision that subsequently would lead Putin to level the charge of naivete against him when the P3's strategy became one of regime change.
As for China, Beijing stated it was “deeply concerned over the turbulent situation in Libya. In our view, it is of the greatest urgency to secure the immediate cessation of violence, avoid further bloodshed and civilian casualties.”Footnote 17 Nevertheless, China shared Russia's concern about some of the provisions in the resolution, fearing the mission creep possibilities of a military intervention that had a mandate to “take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack in [the country],” even if it expressly ruled out “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of the Libyan territory.”Footnote 18 Given China's strong sensitivities on anything that erodes the nonintervention principle in international society, why did it choose to abstain and not veto the draft resolution? China's official justification for its abstention was that it attached “great importance” to the “position of African countries and the African Union.”Footnote 19 The Arab League had called for a no-fly zone over Libya and, along with the African Union, was advocating for greater intervention to protect endangered Libyans. China thus did not want to take a different position from these regional groupings of Global South states, a long-standing position of Beijing that has led it not to veto other armed interventions such as the U.S. intervention in Somalia in December 1992. According to Jason Ralph and Jess Gifkins, the defection of Libya's UN delegation to the rebel cause allowed China, as in the case of Somalia in 1992, to “square the call for intervention . . . with the principle of sovereign consent.”Footnote 20 Rosemary Foot notes that there were voices in Chinese government circles who “remained suspicious”Footnote 21 of Western intentions, but the available evidence does not indicate that China actively distrusted the P3's intent toward Libya, though it was certainly cautious and hesitant, the key indicators of an actor experiencing a state of ambivalence.
In short, the Russian and Chinese governments were open to the P3 living up to the mandate of humanitarian protection in Resolution 1973, but they were sufficiently uncertain about the P3's intentions that they worked hard during the drafting of the resolution to emphasize the limitations of the mandate, including opposition to regime change.Footnote 22
With regard to the abstentions by Brazil, India, and Germany, it would appear that these states did not question the intent and integrity of the P3's proposed military intervention, but they did question the chosen strategy. Germany knew the P3 had the material capability to militarily intervene but favored a “sanctions track.”Footnote 23 The fact that Germany went on to be a prominent champion of the intervention and defender of the P3 reinforces the idea that it was a matter of strategy rather than trust that led it to abstain. India and Brazil were certainly more reluctant and had expressed reservations about Resolution 1970.Footnote 24 When it came to UN Resolution 1973, they had serious reservations, including the use of the “all necessary measures” terminology,Footnote 25 but in the end, it would appear that neither state expressed a sense of trust or distrust in the P3 and in turn acted as ambivalent abstainers.
Over time, such ambivalence changed and the intentions of the P3 were called into question. Speaking as part of the informal interactive dialogue on the RtoP in September 2012, India's Permanent Representative to the UN stated, “In both places [Rwanda and Srebrenica] it was not [because of] the lack of information, but perhaps [the lack of] oil, that the important members of the international community decided not to act. And when they chose to do so in Libya, it was in the fulfilment of a larger objective.”Footnote 26 The statement indicates that at this point India was openly willing to question the P3's intent and integrity toward Libya once the strategy of implementation had revealed itself as regime change, whereas it had not questioned the trustworthiness of the P3 during the deliberations about the adoption of Resolution 1973.
Bounded Trust
As the Libyan government's violence continued against its citizens, there were growing fears that Qaddafi was about to engage in the mass killing of his opponents, especially in towns such as Benghazi. Consequently, the U.K., French, and crucially—given that its military capabilities were essential to any intervention—U.S. governments decided that, in U.S. national security advisor Susan Rice's words, there was a “moral responsibility to act.”Footnote 27 The seven states that voted in favor of Resolution 1973—called the “trusting authorizers”—trusted in the P3's intent, integrity, and ability (the three key attributes of trustworthiness noted earlier)Footnote 28 in relation to fulfilling the specific terms of the mandate set out in the resolution. Trust is always given to someone or something in relation to something else, and the seven states that voted in support of the resolution made clear the bounded limits of their trust.
South Africa was a critical player in the diplomatic negotiations that led to the P3 securing a mandate to use force, but it made clear in justifying its affirmative vote the limits of the mandate entrusted to the three Western intervening states. Ever mindful of the danger that legitimizing humanitarian intervention could weaken the principles of state sovereignty and nonintervention, the South African ambassador said: “As a matter of principle, we have supported the resolution, with the necessary caveats to preserve the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Libya and reject any foreign occupation or unilateral military intervention under the pretext of protecting civilians. It is our hope that this resolution will be implemented in full respect for both its letter and spirit.”Footnote 29 The South African position was supported by Nigeria, which maintained that “foreign occupation is not an option to secure peace in Libya. We acknowledge the language in resolution 1973 (2011) that specifically carves out that possibility, constraining the actions of States seeking to play a role in the quest for peace.”Footnote 30 This determination on the part of the African members of the Council to limit the P3's mandate was shared by Colombia. The Colombian representative was emphatic: “We did not vote in favour of the indiscriminate use of force or of the occupation of a State. . . Colombia believes that the new resolution that we have just adopted represents the continuation of a process involving gradual measures that is in keeping with the Charter and that we began with resolution 1970 (2011).”Footnote 31 What is clear from the preceding discussion is that while a number of states on the Council trusted the P3 to the extent that they were willing to support a resolution authorizing intervention, their trust was far from unconditional.
What Went Wrong?
As with the factors that facilitated the intervention in Libya, much ink has been spilt over the political fallout that followed. While E10 states such as Bosnia, Colombia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Portugal supported the P3's implementation, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) turned decisively against the intervention. What is of interest here is that this block was made up of one trusting authorizer (South Africa) and the ambivalent abstainers (Brazil, China, India, and Russia) that now switched to a clear position of distrusting the P3's intent and integrity toward Libya. William J. Burns, who was U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs at the time, reflects in his memoir that it was the regime change strategy that “Moscow had feared, and what we [the United States] had assured them would not be the case” that was the game changer.Footnote 32 However, Burns's assessment does not recognize the extent to which the P3 lost wider support than just that of Russia as a result of the regime change strategy. The question then is, could more have been done by the P3 to keep on board those that voted and abstained on Resolution 1973 as the intervention progressed? Or, once regime change became the goal of the intervention, was the coalition that made possible the authorization of use of force bound to fall apart? Our argument is a mixture of these two viewpoints.
On the one hand, the P3 failed to engage with the genuine concerns and worries of those that had supported Resolution 1973. These states acted with what some described as a “sense of superiority,” at times even refusing to respond to legitimate questions about the conduct and goals of the intervention. Essentially, the sense of superiority with which the P3 acted served as a catalyst to transform the initial ambivalent abstinence into full-fledged distrust.Footnote 33 In a study conducted by Gerrit Kurtz and Philipp Rotmann, the authors found that “the available evidence suggests that U.S., French and British policymakers did not even consider justifying their strategic choice of regime change as a means of protection.”Footnote 34 Consider that the P3 did not respond to key questions regarding how they were conducting their military campaign, even from those members that had voted in favor of Resolution 1973. On three separate occasions, South Africa asked the P3 to adopt a ceasefire, yet on none of those occasions did the U.K., United States, and France respond.Footnote 35 To be clear, South Africa was not calling for an end to NATO's campaign but rather a pause in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered. While one can debate the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, the critical point here is the P3's silence. Or, as Gareth Evans explains, the push for regime change came “without allowing any serious further debate.”Footnote 36 Based on interviews with UN officials and diplomats, Ralph and Gifkins argue that P3 diplomats alienated key stakeholders, thereby weakening the consensus behind the resolution.Footnote 37
But even if the P3 had been more empathetic to the concerns of the trusting authorizers—especially those of South Africa, which felt bitterly betrayed by the regime change strategy—we question to what degree they could have secured legitimacy for a regime change that had not been mandated in Resolution 1973, in which paragraph 4 excludes a “foreign occupation force of any form.”Footnote 38 The problem here, as Ralph and Gifkins also point out, is that a commitment to “regime change” was not an unreasonable response to the threat posed by Qaddafi. However, as the authors recognize, the strategy “had a profound impact on the willingness of the Council to trust P3 leadership.”Footnote 39 We share this judgment. Once the P3 got the green light, they showed little willingness to engage with those critical of the implementation, and ultimately, this fueled distrust of the P3's intentions among both the ambivalent abstainers, Russia and China, and South Africa, which previously had been supportive of the intervention.
The behavior of the P3 was damaging to the trust process because the apparent lack of accountability undermined perceptions of trustworthiness. Reflecting on Libya, Alex Bellamy and Stephen McLoughlin argue that “it is a basic principle of accountability that those authorized to undertake certain actions must be accountable to those that authorize them. It is when these lines of accountability are broken that trust breaks down and doubts and suspicions inhibit effective decision-making.”Footnote 40 As is now well documented, the political fallout over Libya was not just detrimental for the RtoP but for international relations more generally.Footnote 41 As a group of analysts claimed at the time, “Controversy surrounding the implementation of the protection of civilians mandate in Libya appears to have created a new level of mistrust among Council members that negatively impacted the Council's work, not only on protection of civilians issues, but also more generally.”Footnote 42 While we would interpret the fallout as a rise in distrust rather than a new level of mistrust, the detrimental implications remain the same.
Going Forward
The trust-distrust binary in the literature on the Libyan case suggests that in order for there to be future authorizations of use of force by the Security Council, the pendulum needs to swing back from distrust to trust. However, using the trust framework we developed at the outset, our analysis of the case shows that provided that the P2 continue to occupy a space of ambivalence (neither trusting nor distrusting), trust only needs to exist on the part of those states whose votes are necessary for a Chapter VII resolution to be adopted. This was enough in 2011 and it could be enough in the future. But how realistic is this? We raise three thematic points in closing.
Great Power Interests
Any future UN-authorized use of force will be dependent upon a set of contextual factors, as in the Libyan case, but underlying these factors, and a key enabling condition for action, will not only be a workable level of trust among the E10 but also the absence of distrust among the P5. The contrast between Security Council action in Libya and its inaction in Syria, as a result of Russia's veto-blocking actions, is a stark reminder of how distrust between Russia and the West can paralyze Council interventionism in humanitarian crises. Russia's actions over Syria have stemmed not from a position of ambivalence but rather from active distrust of U.S. intentions and integrity. If the mutual distrust continues, and indeed deepens across a range of strategic issues, the prospect for forging a future consensus among the P5, as happened concerning Libya, will become increasingly unlikely.
Holding the Intervenors Accountable
Even if the P2 could be relied upon in a future humanitarian crisis to act as ambivalent abstainers rather than distrusters, a workable level of trust depends on members of the E10 trusting in the intent, integrity, and ability (recalling the three attributes of trustworthiness proposed by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman) of a future intervention led by the P3. However, the behavior of the P3 in regard to Libya, juxtaposed with the catastrophic humanitarian results of the intervention, means that obtaining this trust will be far harder in the future.Footnote 43 Any states willing to act as future trusting authorizers will no doubt call for more limitations and caveats placed upon those implementing the chosen mandate. One important response to the fallout from Libya has been Brazil's Responsibility while Protecting (RwP) proposal, which is aimed at holding intervening states collectively accountable to the Security Council for their use of force. As Kai Kenkel and Cristina Stefan explain, the initiative stemmed from a “trust deficit” that “crystalized” after the Libyan intervention, as states from the Global South began to feel duped.Footnote 44 RwP can be understood as a response to long-term concerns about the Security Council's working methods. In relation to the use of force, these concerns can be traced back to the just war criteria enumerated in ICISS's 2001 report, which attempted to provide skeptical and/or concerned states with reassurance that RtoP would not be abused.Footnote 45 In the future, it is critical that intervening states are more accountable and transparent as they implement mandates. In this sense, Security Council authorization should not be interpreted as a green light that permits actors to go full steam ahead, but instead as an amber light that asks states to proceed with caution and be open to explaining and justifying new measures prior to implementation.
The call for greater transparency and accountability introduces two potential problems. First, it could disincentivize states to lead an intervention because they do not want to be constrained too tightly. Second, if the intervening states foresee that regime change is necessary in order to protect the population in question but a majority of states within the Council oppose it, then a dilemma might emerge between what the intervening states view as the best strategy, on one hand, and the wisdom of the crowd, on the other. The way forward here is for Security Council members to recognize their collective responsibility to deliberate in order to reach new shared understandings of rightful conduct.Footnote 46
The Importance of the Right Leaders
With few states willing or able to take on the mantle of leadership in relation to the use of force for human protection, the United States remains the unelected, and for some unwanted, leader of this type of liberal interventionism. Yet, as the last three decades have illustrated, we do not live in a world where U.S.-led coalitions of the willing are chomping at the RtoP bit; states, it would seem, are reluctant protectors. So much comes down to the leaders in charge. As the memoirs of Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice attest to, President Obama was reluctant to get militarily drawn into Libya at a time when U.S. forces were embroiled in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the moral impulse to save strangers won out. Nevertheless, Obama could have decided to keep out of a civil war occurring far from home, much like President Bill Clinton did with Rwanda in 1994. But it was perhaps the specter of another Rwanda, with Qaddafi invoking the same language of “cockroaches” that was used by the perpetrators of the genocide against the Tutsis, and promising to “cleanse Libya house by house,”Footnote 47 that swung the argument in the Obama White House in favor of intervention.
A critical enabling factor of intervention in Libya in 2011 was Russia's ambivalence toward the trustworthiness or untrustworthiness of the P3. This ambivalence depended crucially on the beliefs and attitudes of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who had told Vice President Joe Biden on March 10 of that year that Russia would likely abstain on Resolution 1973, a decision that would almost certainly have been different had Putin been president. Putin refrained from criticism at the time of the intervention, but as soon as the regime strategy became clear, he publicly rebuked Medvedev for the decision to abstain.Footnote 48 From Putin's perspective, his intuitions about the U.S.'s bad faith were confirmed by the United States overthrowing Qaddafi. Russia's decisions to veto tougher measures against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad can be traced, in part, to Russia's determination not to be tricked again, as Putin believes previously happened with Libya. Reducing the distrust in U.S.-Russian relations will be critical if pillar three of the RtoP is to be revitalized in the future.
Our sobering conclusion is that it is highly unlikely that the P5 will authorize the use of force to fulfill the RtoP anytime soon. As a result of Trump's tenure as president, the United States faces a massive trust deficit internationally. The challenge for President Biden is to change this narrative as part of his new vision for U.S. leadership. The bleak reality today is that few states would trust the United States to lead the RtoP agenda even if it were willing, and at present, no other states are able or willing to do so. If states cannot build trust around the use of force for humanitarian purposes authorized by the UN Security Council, then the whole of pillar three is in trouble, and, if this is the case, so is the wider edifice of the RtoP project.
