Choosing Who Intervenes: Regional Organizations and Human Rights

• In Event: International Cooperation and Resistance in Human Rights Promotion Campaigns

Abstract

For centuries, states in the Global South resisted imperial and colonial domination and, for decades after gaining independence, used their regional organizations to protect their sovereignty and promote non-intervention. However, in recent decades, these states have developed extensive interventionist mechanisms within their regional organizations to enforce compliance with international norms. This change has occurred alongside continued resistance to enforcement carried out by global organizations or at the initiative of Western states. What explains the decision by so many of these states to compromise on the principle of non-intervention? Why are they more willing to accept regional enforcement? I argue that states throughout the Global South expanded the power and authority of their regional organizations as part of a strategy to increase their international self-determination. Rejecting what they viewed as inappropriate and one-sided enforcement by former colonial and imperial powers, these states challenged the authority of powerful states by creating, accepting, and expanding regional enforcement mechanisms and simultaneously arguing that these powerful states should defer to regional enforcement. I assess this theory looking at the development of human rights enforcement mechanisms of the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.). I use a wide range of primary sources, including declassified foreign policy documents, meeting records, organizational documents, newspaper articles, and personal interviews; secondary sources; and quantitative data on delegation of human rights enforcement authority, ratification trends, and voting in international organizations. My findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between delegating sovereignty and having international authority imposed by a more powerful actor, along with the prevalence of subtle forms of resistance to this kind of imposition.

Author

• Katherine M Beall, University of California, Berkeley