Procedural justice and global order: Explaining African reaction to the application of global protection norms
| Author | Matthias Dembinski |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116681059 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
research-article2016
EJ R
I
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
Procedural justice and global
2017, Vol. 23(4) 809 –832
© The Author(s) 2016
order: Explaining African
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116681059
DOI: 10.1177/1354066116681059
reaction to the application of
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
global protection norms
Matthias Dembinski
Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany
Abstract
Persistent tensions between the international norm of state sovereignty and emerging
human rights norms, including the Responsibility to Protect and the protection of
civilians during international peacekeeping, raise the question of when and under
what circumstances local and regional actors are more likely to respect global norms.
These tensions are particularly stark in Africa. On the one hand, African states and
regional organizations were among the first proponents of liberal protection norms
in the non-Western world. On the other hand, many African leaders view state
sovereignty as indispensable. Building on established empirical justice research in
neighboring fields, this article makes an important contribution to the literature
by demonstrating that African states are more likely to accept interventionist
human rights norms when standards of procedural justice have been observed. The
article demonstrates the relevance of procedural justice by examining the puzzle of
divergent African reactions to two similar instances of regime change in Libya and
the Ivory Coast that were enforced by extra-continental actors in the name of global
protection norms.
Keywords
Institutional justice, international norms, Responsibility to Protect
Corresponding author:
Matthias Dembinski, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Baseler Strasse 27-31, Frankfurt am Main, 60322,
Germany.
Email: dembinski@hsfk.de
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European Journal of International Relations 23(4)
In lieu of an introduction: The fall of two potentates and
the puzzle of Africa’s divergent reactions to the application
of emerging global norms
In the early hours of 20 October 2011, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air-
craft detected and attacked a convoy fleeing from the besieged city of Sirte, Libya. One
car carried Libya’s long-time leader Muammar el-Qaddafi. Colonel Qaddafi survived the
airstrike and sought shelter in a drainpipe. Upon his discovery by rebels, he was tortured
and executed. His corpse was displayed publicly in a freezer in the town of Misurata
(Human Rights Watch, 2012). This gruesome event temporarily ended a conflict that had
started in mid-February between rebels under the umbrella of a National Transitional
Council and forces loyal to the colonel. When Qaddafi’s troops gained the upper hand,
leading the international community to fear the imminent fall of the rebel stronghold in
Benghazi and mass atrocities, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) issued
Resolution 1973 on 17 March authorizing all necessary means to enforce a no-fly zone
and to protect civilians in danger. The resolution alluded to the emerging Responsibility
to Protect (R2P) norm and is widely held to be the first case of R2P application. Officially,
intervening states claimed that their use of force was restricted to pursuing the two
legally sanctioned aims of enforcing a no-fly zone and protecting civilians. However, the
actual employment of military force led most African and international observers to con-
clude that regime change was the true aim (Global Centre for the Responsibility-to-
Protect, 2012: 12f.).
Some 163 days earlier, another head of state in Africa experienced a less violent, yet
similarly coerced, overthrow. On 9 April, French helicopters and UN troops opened fire
on President Laurant Gbagbo’s residence in Abidjan, the Ivorian capital. After the first
salvos had driven most of the remaining presidential guards from the compound, French
tanks enabled opposition forces to enter the president’s hideout. Gbagbo was dragged
from his bunker, paraded in front of the international press, and eventually handed over
to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Prior to Gbagbo’s capture, French forces
under Operation Licorne and UN troops of the United Nations Operation in Cote d’Ivoire
(UNOCI) militarily decided a power struggle between forces loyal to the acting president
and those of his challenger, Alassane Ouattara, which the 2010 presidential elections had
triggered. UN and French troops intervened on the basis of UNSC Resolution 1975,
which had been adopted on 30 March 2011, just 13 days after Resolution 1973. Although
international bodies had noted Gbagbo’s electoral defeat, Resolution 1975 ordered
UNOCI to act impartially. The resolution authorized the UN force “to use all necessary
means to carry out its mandate to protect civilians under imminent threat.” The resolu-
tion thus invoked a related emerging norm that calls for the Protection of Civilians (POC)
in peacekeeping operations.1 France and the UN insisted that military operations con-
formed strictly to the UNSC’s mandate. Major Fréderic Daguillon, a French military
spokesman, even claimed that the French tanks deployed on the morning of 9 April were
responding solely to attacks on civilians: “We deployed along the strategic axis. One of
these was a road that led to the residence of Mr. Gbagbo” (The Guardian, 2011).
Again, few commentators in Africa and beyond believed that the ouster of Gbago was
an accident or an unfortunate by-product of the primary aim of protecting civilians. Yet,
Dembinski
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the reactions in Africa to the two events differed fundamentally. The African Union (AU)
and many African states, principally South Africa, denounced Western actions in Libya
as a betrayal of the UN, an abuse of the mandate, and even an outright act of neo-
colonialism. After the intervention, the AU and African states strayed from the R2P norm
and refused to back Western draft resolutions in the UNSC demanding an end to the mass
atrocities in Syria. In contrast, African reactions to the intervention in the Ivory Coast
were mostly favorable, in some capitals rather restrained, but almost nowhere hostile.
Moreover, after the intervention, African regional organizations and states continued to
support the POC norm and the UN’s leading role in implementing it in Africa.
Why did the majority of states in Africa denounce the forced removal of Qaddafi from
power in pursuance of the R2P norm? And did they accept or even support the forced
removal of Gbagbo in pursuance of the related POC norm? The divergence of their
responses to similar applications of related norms is a puzzle and the subject of this
article. I resolve this puzzle by arguing that African leaders accepted regime change in
the Ivory Coast but rejected it as illegitimate in Libya because they had been fully
involved in the process of applying the protection norm in the first case but had been
excluded in the second case. Although interesting in itself, this puzzle also suggests a
larger research program that would examine the influence of procedural justice on the
likelihood that local and regional actors comply with emerging, liberal norms. This
article makes a significant contribution by assessing the application of two important
norms in the crucial region of Africa.
The relevance of Africa’s mounting critique of R2P for the future of global govern-
ance can hardly be understated. Africa was the first non-Western region to embrace R2P.
Given the skepticism in other regions, including a “right … to intervene in a Member
State … in respect of grave circumstances (war crimes, genocide and crimes against
humanity)” in Article 4(h) of the AU’s Constitutive Act, adopted on 11 July 2000 and
thus even before the release of the path-breaking report of the International Commission
on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), seemed to indicate that core liberal global
governance norms would also flourish in non-Western parts of the world. Africa’s sting-
ing R2P critique following the intervention in Libya was interpreted as a historical
breach. It appeared not only to herald the end of R2P (Rieff, 2011), but also to fore-
shadow organized resistance from non-Western regions against principles of liberal
order. This impression was reinforced by similar developments in international criminal
justice. Here, too, African states and organizations were among the first proponents of
the ICC and the underlying norm of holding individuals accountable for mass crimes in
the non-Western world, and their support was crucial to the adoption of the Rome Statute.
Yet, early applications of the said norm — most importantly, the warrant for Sudanese
President Al Bashir — prompted the AU to question its support for the ICC and catalyzed
the search for an African version of international criminal justice (Magliveras and Naldi,
2013). Given these setbacks, the Ivorian case provides rare encouragement for propo-
nents of global norms and accentuates the puzzle concerning disparate African reactions
to applications of global norms.
Existing research on local reactions to emerging global norms mainly applies norm
diffusion theories. Two main strands of these theories would resolve this puzzle by point-
ing to the “fit” between the R2P and POC norms and pre-existing African traditions and
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