Human rights crises and international response: Framing Rwanda and Kosovo (Serbia)

My research examines how international organizations (state and non-state actors) understand and respond to human rights violations. How could the international community react to Rwanda and Kosovo so differently? In Rwanda, peacekeepers were pulled back and in 100 days over 800,000 people were hacked to pieces with machetes. In Kosovo, the West responded to “ethnic cleansing” by bombing Serbia. Institutional framing and structural openings help explain this difference. I argue that international actors' descriptions of violations and their institutional context constrain and enable the range of solutions and response considered. In Rwanda, most actors were institutionally unable to quickly understand the drastic shift in violence from the three-year civil war to the government-orchestrated genocide in order to prevent power sharing. In Kosovo, international actors realized some of the institutional inertia they had faced in dealing with Bosnia. They were able to bypass many structural constraints by shifting the center of the framing processes and decisions to regional organizations. These findings are critical in determining how the international community has often failed to respond adequately to cases of massive human rights violations even when provisions for intervention exist in International Law. I make specific policy recommendations and reform suggestions that can help states and intergovernmental organizations identify institutional constraints and structural openings.; This research combines constructivist and framing theories to examine international actors' institutional framing processes and the tension between actors' agency and institutional or structural factors. I surveyed document archives from major international actors including Intergovernmental Organizations (such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), major states (such as the United States, France, etc.) and Non-governmental Organizations (Human Rights Watch, International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent). I also included some interviews with key decision makers. I primarily relied on discourse and frame analyses to assess how these actors understood human rights violations and how they described the range of solutions considered.