Marcos Tourinho

Regulating intervention: Brazil and the responsibility to protect

In the last decade, Brazil has engaged with the idea of an international responsibility to protect (R2P) in a notable fashion. As a frequent member of the Security Council in the post-Cold War era, the country resisted suggestions of a responsibility to intervene in humanitarian crises, fearing it would serve to justify military action outside of the scope of the UN Charter and international law. Following the adoption of R2P in the 2005 World Summit, Brazil engaged with the concept more closely. This culminated in the ‘responsibility while protecting’, a proposed addendum that would ensure clearer criteria and greater accountability of UN-authorised military interventions. This paper describes Brazilian foreign policy perspectives through this period and analyses their contribution to the political and normative development of R2P. It argues that while Brazil has become more vocal and proactive in relation to the norm in recent years, its positions remained driven by some of its most traditional foreign policy arguments: the strengthening of the authority of the UN Security Council and the establishment of a multilateral order in which all states are treated equally.

“Responsibility while Protecting”: Reforming R2P Implementation

This article explores the political impact of the Brazilian proposal “Responsibility while Protecting” (RwP) on the normative evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). For much of the last two decades, public and policy debates about humanitarian intervention have been dominated by the question of whether and in what circumstances these measures were legitimate or acceptable in international society. The 2011 intervention in Libya sparked a different policy debate: a debate on how protection should actually be conducted. This article analyses debates on the “how” of the implementation of R2P by examining the substance and political impacts of the Brazilian proposal. RwP articulated the need for responsible means of protection, particularly when military force is used in the name of collective security and humanitarianism. This article argues that the proposal was able to raise important normative issues and contribute to change the terms of the humanitarian intervention debate. Yet, while RwP was extensively debated, it was never sufficiently developed to materialise into specific proposals that could address the problems of collective security and human protection in practice. As debates about the practical implementation of R2P gain renewed strength, the ideas articulated in the Brazilian proposal provide a useful starting point for advancing reform.

The Impact of the Libya Intervention Debates on Norms of Protection

Resolution 1973, which authorised military intervention in Libya, marked the first time that the United Nations Security Council explicitly mandated the use of force against a functioning state to prevent imminent atrocity crimes. While some hailed the resolution and the subsequent intervention in Libya as a victory for the concept of the international communitys “responsibility to protect” (R2P), others predicted its early death. This article argues for a more nuanced view on the impact of the Libya intervention on the debates on R2P. As we will show, the intervention in Libya demonstrated new areas of agreement and at the same time revealed persisting and new disagreements within the international community on the role of the use of force to protect populations.

Thinking about United Nations targeted sanctions

The use of targeted sanctions by the UN Security Council (UNSC) has gone through significant transformation over the past twenty-five years. Following the devastating humanitarian consequences of the comprehensive trade embargo imposed on Iraq in 1990, a substantial review of the design and implementation of sanctions took place. Albeit with some delay, as a response to that policy debacle, the UN Security Council decidedly shifted towards the imposition of targeted, not comprehensive sanctions. In only two instances (the former Yugoslavia in 1992 and Haiti in 1994), the Security Council imposed new comprehensive measures for a period (following targeted ones), but the last time a comprehensive trade embargo was imposed by the UN was in 1994. Today, most international and all UN sanctions are targeted sanctions. Despite this transformation in the use of sanctions, much of the scholarly, policy, and public discussion on the issue remains unchanged. Discussions often fail to distinguish between targeted and comprehensive measures and continue to concentrate exclusively on whether sanctions are able to change the behaviour of targets. Rarely is consideration given to other ways in which sanctions may affect the target or, for example, how they could influence the international norms they are being used to enforce. Explanations of how sanctions should influence a target remain focused on the political outcomes (gain) resulting from economic sanctions (pain), with the implicit assumption that more pain will yield greater gain. The perception that sanctions tend to be ineffective is also widely held, particularly in contrast with expectations about the use of military force. Given the reliance of international actors on targeted sanctions, it is important that conceptual, analytical, and empirical knowledge of sanctions keeps pace with these developments. In the broader context of international sanctions, UN sanctions play a particularly important role. Although unilateral and/or regional sanctions are often important, only those sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter are universally applied and legally binding. This is crucial, given that other countries and their commercial entities invariably diminish the impact of unilateral or regional restrictive measures. In addition, UN sanctions carry a legitimating power of their own.

The purposes of targeted sanctions

In order to deal with security challenges, the Security Council of the United Nations has resorted to sanctions on numerous occasions in recent years ranging from conflict resolution to human rights promotion. At the same time, sanctions have evolved from a comprehensive form, namely complete trade embargoes, to a more limited form wherein targets of sanctions are often individuals and non-state entities. The intense activity by the Council has brought new interest in understanding how sanctions work and what they are supposed to achieve, but the scholarly and policy debate remains focused on whether sanctions should attempt to change the behaviour of targets, to contribute to a behavioural change, and to achieve political objectives. The scholarly and policy debate has also not adequately explained the continued use of sanctions, despite the fact that the perception of this foreign policy instrument was often negative. David Baldwin suggested that the problem lay with scholars talking about different things, rather than talking about the sanctions themselves. The diversification in the use of targeted sanctions further underscores the need for more useful analytical tools, confirmed by the fact that the measures imposed on Al-Qaida were analysed in ways essentially similar to the sanctions applied to North Korea, Libya, or Sudan. In fact, each of these sanctions regimes has very specific characteristics that are scarcely engaged in the literature. If we are to understand sanctions, the reasons behind their imposition need to be clear: namely, what are the different purposes of sanctions? This chapter intends to investigate the purposes of targeted sanctions and to outline a typology that allows for a more precise comparison across time and space. In this work, ‘purpose’ refers specifically to the way in which sanctions intend to influence targets, which differs from its objective, that is the policy goal senders broadly want to achieve. The behavioural change criterion – the idea that sanctions are imposed to change the behaviour of targets – still dominates the debate. Sanctions are expected to impose an economic burden on targets, prompting them to change their behaviour in order to avoid the costs of sanctions. Although this expectation was termed the ‘naive theory of sanctions’ by Johan Galtung already in 1967, it still drives much of the debate about sanctions today.

For Liberalism without Hegemony: Brazil and the Rule of Non-Intervention

This chapter investigates Brazil’s approach to norms about foreign intervention in international society. It does so from the perspective of the relationship between the country’s foreign policy and what has been frequently called the contemporary “liberal international order.” In particular, it seeks to specify and locate more precisely the potential disagreements Brazil has had historically with the enforcement of liberal norms in an international context. In essence, it argues that Brazil’s primary concern with the emergence of liberal norms in international society has not been about the substance of those norms and liberal values in themselves, but rather is the product of a genuine normative concern with the hegemonic way in which these norms have historically been enforced and implemented.

Brazil in the global anticorruption regime

Brazilian anticorruption law and institutions were significantly transformed in recent decades. This article traces those transformations and explains how the international anticorruption and money laundering regimes contributed to their development. It argues that those international regimes were internalised in the Brazilian system through three mechanisms: inspiration and legitimation, coercion, and implementation support, and were critical to the transformation of Brazilian institutions.

UN targeted sanctions datasets (1991–2013):

Targeted sanctions are increasingly used by the United Nations (UN) Security Council to address major challenges to international peace and security. Unlike other sanctions, those imposed by the UN are universally binding and relied upon as a basis for legitimating both unilateral and regional sanctions measures. Encompassing a wide range of individual, diplomatic, financial, and sectoral measures, targeted sanctions allow senders to target a specific individual, corporate entity, region, or sector, helping to minimize the negative effects of sanctions on wider populations. This article introduces the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC) quantitative and qualitative datasets, which encompass all UN targeted sanctions imposed between 1991 and 2013, or 23 different country regimes broken into 63 case episodes for comparative analysis. Adding to existing datasets on sanctions (HSE, TIES), these new, closely interrelated datasets enable scholars using both quantitative and qualitative methods to: (1) differentiate among different purposes, types of sanctions, and target populations, (2) assess the scope of different combinations of targeted measures, (3) access extensive details about UN sanctions applied since the end of the Cold War, and (4) analyze changing dynamics within sanctions regimes over time in ways other datasets do not. The two TSC datasets assess UN targeted sanctions as effective 22% of the time and describe major aspects of UN targeted sanctions regimes, including the types of sanctions, their purposes and targets, impacts, relationships with other institutions, sanctions regimes, and policy instruments, mechanisms of coping and evasion, and unintended consequences.

Towards a world police? The implications of individual UN targeted sanctions

This article explores the normative and institutional implications of the long-term use of individual sanctions by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). It identifies the systematic and extensive use of individual sanctions as the most fundamental qualitative change in international sanctions policy during this century. It argues that policy is developing towards their use not only in order to address international crises and disputes of relatively limited scope and duration, but also to address enduring criminal activities, notably (but not exclusively) related to terrorism. While these sanctions remain associated with threats to international peace and security in the classic sense, they have in many cases transformed into long-term confiscations of individual assets, instead of temporary freezes. The UNSC, designed to address international crises on an exceptional basis, now engages in permanent sequestrations and is tasked with the monitoring of individual criminal activities on a massive scale. While individual sanctions have on some occasions proven effective, their systematic use by inadequate institutions complicates the Councils implementation of sanctions and undermines its legitimacy