How Selective Interventionism Trumps Human Rights Protection: A Configurational Analysis of the United Nations Security Council’s Disparate Response to Genocide

ABSTRACT: Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations Security Council (“UNSC”) has demonstrated a troubling inconsistency in its response to genocide. Its actions have been selective and uneven. This disparity raises a critical question: what national interests drive the Permanent Five (“P5”) members to intervene in cases of genocide? The methodology employed in this article integrates interdisciplinary approaches drawn from political science, international relations, and law. It combines qualitative and quantitative analysis, utilizing a range of specific methods. These include theoretical, comparative, and empirical approaches, as well as configurational analysis, to examine the relationships between elements within a system. The goal is to understand how these issues affect certain behaviors. Theoretically, the article provides a configurational analysis of the P5’s selective interventionism, incorporating explanatory variables from three theories of third-party military intervention. These theories are assessed using a comparative approach that examines twenty different cases where P5 members faced instances of genocide. The methodology employed is fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. This method is commonly used to identify and analyze patterns in cases with small to moderate sample sizes. The analysis reveals that the economic interests of P5 states are the decisive factor in determining when the UNSC intervenes militarily in instances of genocide. These results are highly consistent, accounting for 97 percent of the cases examined. The findings indicate that the UN’s response to the “ultimate crime” is not random but follows distinct patterns.