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Crafting constraints: Latin American support for humanitarian-intervention norms

Abstract This article explores why, by 2005, most Latin American countries supported the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a doctrine modifying limits on the use of force to address atrocity crimes. I group existing explanations of why Latin American countries apparently changed their long-standing defence of non-intervention following the main explanatory factor they focus on: power asymmetries, government preferences or coalition politics. I find that these accounts downplay a fundamental dimension informing the approaches of Latin American supporters: how to limit interveners. Drawing on Republican security theory (RST), I argue that Latin American supporters faced a dilemma in the R2P debates, especially after the intervention in Iraq in 2003. Latin American supporters favoured crafting solutions to humanitarian problems that simultaneously addressed crises and prevented arbitrary uses of force. I use the Brazilian and Chilean case studies to explore this argument. Brazilian and Chilean governments concluded that their conventional interpretations of limits on the use of force did not offer answers for both humanitarian emergencies and arbitrary uses of force. As a solution, they modified but did not abandon their diplomatic traditions. These governments calculated that humanitarian-intervention norms could be constraints, even if imperfect, on interveners arbitrarily using military force.