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""Blood on the UN's Hands''? Assigning Duties and ApportioningBlame to an Intergovernmental OrganisationToni Erskine

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Global Society, Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 2004

‘‘Blood on the UN’s Hands’’? Assigning Duties andApportioning Blame to an IntergovernmentalOrganisation

TONI ERSKINE1

The United Nations is frequently the object of blame for ‘‘failing’’ to act in response towhat are deemed to be ethical imperatives. Implicit in such condemnations is anunderstanding of the United Nations as a body that has moral duties, and possessesthe various capacities for deliberating and acting that would make this a reasonableconception. Yet this portrayal of the United Nations as a moral agent is one thatshould only be invoked with great care, and some qualification. By constructing amodel of ‘‘institutional moral agency’’, and examining whether the United Nationsmeets its criteria, this article aims to offer a preliminary account of the internalfeatures, and enabling conditions that would allow the United Nations to bear therelated burdens of duty and blame in international politics. It also suggests who—orwhat—might bear these burdens when the United Nations is incapable of acting.

Introduction

‘‘The Rwandan Blood on the UN’s Hands’’, a headline in a September 2000 issueof The Observer, provides a graphic image of an institution being held morallyresponsible for its failure to act.2 The particular act of omission for which blameis being apportioned is failure to intervene to prevent, and then suppress,the genocide in Rwanda. A number of very important—and controversial—assumptions are implicit in this condemnation. First, there is the assumptionthat an intergovernmental organisation such as the United Nations can be bothassigned duties and apportioned blame. Second, there is the set of assumptionsthat necessarily underpins this: that the United Nations is an actor in its own

1. Previous versions of this paper, written with the support of a British Academy PostdoctoralFellowship, were presented at the International Studies Association (ISA) annual convention in NewOrleans, 24–27 March 2002, and at the British Academy/ISA workshop on ‘‘Assigning Duties toInstitutions: Debating Hard Cases’’, held at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 10–12 May 2002.In addition to the participants in the workshop, I would like to the thank A.J.R. Groom, JeroenGunning, Joel Rosenthal, Nicholas Wheeler, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments onthe argument presented here. Finally, I am very grateful to Yuan Potts at the BBC for his assistancein accessing the interview with Kofi Annan cited below.

2. Linda Melvern, ‘‘The Rwandan Blood on the UN’s Hands’’, The Observer (3 September 2000), p. 19.

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22 T. Erskine

right, capable of gathering and processing information, deliberating over possiblecourses of action and their consequences, and acting on the basis of thisdeliberation. In other words, implicit in the charge that the United Nations has‘‘blood on its hands’’ is the belief that the United Nations is a moral agent.

Of course, explicit in this indictment is the assertion that the United Nations,among other actors, is to blame for the death of approximately 800,000 peoplein Rwanda in 1994. Where blame lies for the genocide in Rwanda is an importantand complex question. It is a question that has been addressed forcefullyelsewhere and it is not one that will be broached here.3 What will be consideredhere is the viability of the assumptions listed above—assumptions that onemust carefully consider before responsibility for specific acts of commission oromission can be pinpointed at all. Indeed, whether or not it makes sense tounderstand the United Nations as being capable of bearing duties independentlyof its constituents has profound implications for how we perceive the role ofthe United Nations in international politics—and whether we can coherentlyspeak of its ‘‘failure’’ to discharge duties in other circumstances.

In international politics, assertions of moral responsibility are made bothprospectively and retrospectively. When confronted with crises, whether in theform of famine, genocide, environmental harm, or the proliferation of ‘‘weaponsof mass destruction’’, politicians, policy makers, and ‘‘people on the street’’ speakof duties to avert or mitigate disaster. In the wake of such crises, we demand toknow who should have acted but did not, or who should have responded morequickly, more efficiently, or more robustly. We point fingers and apportion blame.The important detail that is often neglected, however, is that any meaningful asser-tion of moral responsibility requires that those who are called on to uphold duties,and those who are held to account for evading them, must be moral agents—entities that, by definition, possess capacities to contemplate, recognise thesignificance of, and ultimately execute different courses of action in the first place.

The United Nations is a prime example of a body that is frequently called onto act in response to crises—and often condemned for failing to do so. Yet, if theUnited Nations were incapable of purposive action, then drafting state policy,voicing condemnations and promises, and placating publics on the basis that itcan bear moral burdens could result in more appropriate actors being overlooked(or ‘‘let off the hook’’) and render even well-intentioned plans for action notexecutable. Blaming the same organisation for failing to act could undermineany clear analysis of what went wrong in the aftermath of crises and allowgenuinely responsible actors to escape censure. Conversely, assuming that theUnited Nations cannot respond to ethical imperatives and is vulnerable toneither praise nor blame if it were to possess the capacities necessary fordischarging duties has equally regrettable repercussions. In such a case, ourintuitions, at best, would allow us to overlook an important ‘‘agent of justice’’,

3. See, inter alia, the following: Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’sGenocide (London: Zed Books, 2000); Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention inInternational Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 7; Bruce D. Jones, Peacemaking inRwanda: The Dynamics of Failure (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001); Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to aGenocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Daniela Kroslak,‘‘The Responsibility of Collective External Bystanders in Cases of Genocide: The French in Rwanda’’,in T. Erskine (ed.), Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and InternationalRelations (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 159–182.


‘‘Blood on the UN’s Hands’’? 23

and, at worse, render us willing to endorse apathy in the face of crisis.4 Divorcingdifficult questions of moral agency from those assertions of responsibility regu-larly voiced in international relations variously results in incoherent policymaking, the creation of ‘‘scapegoats’’, the effective evasion of duties despitenominal calls to action, and, perhaps most regrettably, the missed opportunityto learn from past mistakes.

Motivated by these dangers, this article will begin to address the question ofwhether the United Nations is a moral agent. After proposing a model of‘‘institutional moral agency’’ in order to respond to this question, I will confrontclaims that one of its fundamental requirements—that an institution have anidentity that is distinct from its constitutive parts—cannot be met by inter-governmental organisations such as the United Nations. Although I will makea qualified claim that the United Nations can be an agent in its own right, I willalso propose that both its internal structure and the external circumstanceswithin which it is expected to act must carefully be considered in determiningwhether it is, even then, open to the assignment of specific duties and to theapportioning of blame for particular acts of omission. Finally, I will raise thequestion of where—if anywhere—duties to respond to human tragedies such asgenocide are situated in cases in which the United Nations lacks either theorganisational structure or the enabling conditions necessary to respond, and itsmember states, along with other agents, are incapable of acting independently.

A preliminary point should be made regarding the scope of this article.Although it is intended to preface a more detailed study of cases in which theUnited Nations’ ability to respond to ethical demands in international politicscan be tested, for now, the aim of identifying particular features—and weak-nesses—of the United Nations that affect the degree to which it can meetrequirements of moral agency will be given priority.5

A Model of Institutional Moral Agency

The anthropomorphic nature of the headline ascribing blame to the UnitedNations is revealing. We understand specifically moral agency first and foremostin the context of individual human beings. Extending this designation to groupsis both complex and contested. Indeed, some critics would maintain that anyallusion to groups bearing duties or being apportioned blame could only beshorthand for referring to the actions of individual human beings. For these‘‘individualists’’, collectivities such as states can be considered neither agentsnor moral agents and any similar claim regarding ‘‘collectivities of collectivities’’in the form of intergovernmental organisations like the United Nations mustequally, and emphatically, be dismissed.6 According to this position, (misguided)

4. Onora O’Neill coins the phrase ‘‘agents of justice’’ in an article by the same name, published inMetaphilosophy (special issue on Global Justice guest edited by Thomas Pogge), Vol. 32, Nos. 1/2( January 2001), pp. 180–195.

5. This study will be pursued in a book project provisionally titled Assigning Duties BeyondIndividuals: Institutional Moral Agency and International Relations.

6. ‘‘Individualism’’ is a label that is used for a number of different theoretical positions. Here, Iam referring to both ‘‘methodological individualism’’, according to which all social facts must beexplained exhaustively in terms of the actions, beliefs and desires of individual human beings, and‘‘ontological individualism’’, according to which only human beings are ‘‘real’’ and, therefore, possibleagents.


24 T. Erskine

accounts of group action are always reducible to descriptions of the actions oftheir individual human constituents. Prescriptions and evaluations of actionmust also refer to these fundamental moral units.

This rejection of the idea that groups might be moral agents leaves certainconcerns unaddressed, however. It seems unlikely that the indictment citedabove of the United Nations’ failure to act in response to the genocide in Rwandawas intended to be read simply as a reproach of the individual human actorswho held positions within the organisation. It would be surprising if thisadmonishment of the United Nations were not accompanied by harsh criticismsof individual actors.7 Nevertheless, such criticisms can be understood as inad-equate on their own to capture the complete picture of perceived failing. Formalorganisations might be blamed for wrongdoing, misjudgement, neglect or harmthat is not deemed attributable on the same scale to particular individuals withinthe organisation. The coherence of making such a move must be carefully, andcritically, examined. It does not, however, warrant being rejected out of hand.

As the concept of moral agency tends to be invoked in the context of individualhuman beings, this seems a logical place to start in asking what it would meanto speak of an institution as a moral agent.8 Although philosophers rely on quitedifferent standards in identifying those specific features of individual humanbeings that define them as moral agents, they agree, in general terms, that toqualify as such the individual must possess capacities both for understandingand reflecting upon moral requirements and for acting in such a way as toconform to these requirements. Importantly, for the individual to then exercisemoral agency, and be able to discharge specific duties, an additional conditionmust be satisfied. He or she must possess not only the capacity to act in responseto moral requirements, but also the freedom to do so. In other words, the exerciseof moral agency requires that one enjoy some degree of independence from otheragents and forces.9

The question of when—if ever—a group is a moral agent has been largelyneglected by theorists of international relations. It is necessary, therefore, to lookoutside the discipline of International Relations (IR) to find an example of howone might extend moral agency beyond the individual. Writing in the area ofbusiness ethics, Peter French challenges what he identifies as an ‘‘anthropo-centric bias’’ in our moral reasoning and aims to illustrate that the corporationcan be a moral person.10 In this pursuit, he identifies features of what he labels

7. For example, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Secretary General during the genocide in Rwanda, hasbeen criticised for not presenting information to the Security Council that might have clarified thenature of the crisis and led to the Security Council authorising intervention. According to the modelof institutional moral agency that I will present below, holding the United Nations responsible forthe failure to act to prevent or suppress the genocide in Rwanda would in no way minimise Boutros-Ghali’s own responsibility, or that of any other individual acting within the United Nations. (Indeed,one might note that Boutros-Ghali’s particular role within the United Nations imbued him withgreater capacities—and obligations—for action than other individuals.)

8. The approach of drawing on parallels between individual human capacities and those of insti-tutions is taken by Onora O’Neill, in ‘‘Who Can Endeavour Peace?’’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy,suppl. 12, Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Disarmament, David Copp (ed.) (1986), pp. 41–73, to establishan account of ‘‘institutional agents’’ able to respond to ethical reasoning and nuclear dangers. Thisimportant article, and discussions with its author, have greatly influenced my position here.

9. O’Neill sets out this final condition in ‘‘Who Can Endeavour Peace?’’, op. cit., p. 51.10. Peter French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press,

1984), p. 46.



‘‘conglomerate collectivities’’, or those groups that he suggests are ‘‘full-fledgedmembers of the moral community’’.11 A brief overview of some of these featuresprovides the starting point for identifying criteria that can usefully be invokedin explaining whether certain organisations in international relations—such asthe United Nations—qualify as moral agents.12

‘‘A conglomerate collectivity’’, French maintains, ‘‘is not exhausted by the con-junction of the identities of the persons in the organization.’’ Put simply, it is morethan the sum of its constituents; it has what might be called a ‘‘corporate’’ identity.French offers the following examples of collectivities whose identities are inde-pendent of their particular memberships: ‘‘the Democratic Party, the Congress,the Rolling Green Country Club, the faculty of Yale University, the Gulf Oil Cor-poration, the Honeywell Corporation, the U.S. Army, and the Red Cross’’.13

Another characteristic of French’s conglomerate collectivities is that theyhave ‘‘internal organizations and/or decision procedures’’.14 The idea that hiscorporate moral person must have a central decision-making function is impor-tant for two reasons. First, it stipulates that the group be able to deliberate, arequisite feature of moral agency outlined above. Second, it entails a degree ofdecision-making unity that would allow the group in question to arrive at apredetermined goal, rather than simply displaying the spontaneous convergenceof individual interests that one might experience in a crowd or a mob, forexample.

A feature that French does not mention, but that seems fundamental to anygroup that would qualify as a moral agent, is an executive function linked tothis decision-making capacity. It is not enough for a group to be able to considermoral guidelines and weigh the consequences of different courses of action; thegroup must also be able effectively to translate decisions into action.15 Structuresmust be in place to allow decisions to be realised. These features of decision-making procedures and structures for carrying out resulting resolutions cometogether to ensure that a group has a capacity for purposive action.

Outside his discussion of conglomerate collectivities, French observes that‘‘persons’’ are generally understood to have an identity over time. They areconsidered to be ‘‘project-making things that can ‘conceive of themselves ashaving a past accessible to experience-memory and a future accessible to inten-tion’’’.16 Those that qualify as members of the moral community must havecontinuity. This is a feature that would seem to apply equally to groups. Anotherrelated criterion, implicit in the way that French describes persons as being ableto ‘‘conceive of themselves’’ as having an identity over time, might be added to

11. French, ibid., pp. 13–14, 32.12. In presenting this overview, I draw on my account of French’s position in ‘‘Assigning

Responsibilities to Institutional Moral Agents: The Case of States and Quasi-states’’, Ethics & Inter-national Affairs, Vol. 15, No. 2 (October 2001), pp. 67–85 (pp. 69–72); reprinted in Erskine, Can InstitutionsHave Responsibilities?, op. cit., pp. 19–40 (pp. 21–24).

13. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility, op. cit., p. 13.14. Ibid.15. O’Neill emphasises the importance of agents who would respond to ethical reasoning being

able ‘‘to integrate capacities to reason and to act’’, in ‘‘Who Can Endeavour Peace?’’, op. cit., p. 51.Emphasis in the original.

16. Ibid., p. 85. French is quoting from David Wiggens, ‘‘Locke, Butler and the Stream of Con-sciousness: And Men as a Natural Kind’’, in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 161.


26 T. Erskine

this list: To be a candidate for moral agency, groups must be self-asserting. Thisis not meant to demand that they be self-aware or ‘‘conscious’’. Rather, thiscriterion requires that they not be merely externally defined, thereby disqualify-ing groups that do not see themselves as units.17

Drawing selectively on French’s account of ‘‘conglomerate collectivities’’—aswell as adding to and elaborating upon some of its espoused features—I proposethat a group qualifies as a moral agent if it possesses the following: an identitythat is more than the sum of identities of its constitutive parts; a decision-making structure; an executive function linked to this decision-making structurethat allows policies to be implemented; an identity over time; and a conceptionof itself as a unit. I will refer to groups that have these characteristics as‘‘institutional moral agents’’.

Fulfilling the criteria outlined above is not, however, enough to determine thata particular institution can be blamed for failing to act in response to a moralimperative in a specific set of circumstances. Significantly, even those entitiesthat we can call moral agents cannot be expected to discharge duties for whichthey are unable to perform requisite actions. As with individual moral agents,institutional moral agents might be prevented from responding to particularethical guidelines for two sets of reasons. First, the group in question mightpossess capacities for deliberation and action that allow it to qualify as a moralagent but that are, nonetheless, limited in some respects. The suggestion thatthese capacities can be limited, but apparent, leads one to ask whether theattribution of moral agency to institutions is necessarily an ‘‘all-or-nothing’’exercise. I suggest that it is not. Rather, each of the criteria posed in this articlefor determining which groups qualify as moral agents can be met in degrees.18

Second, an actor might face external limits to discharging particular duties.Perfect freedom from other actors and influences is neither achievable nornecessary for exercising moral agency.19 However, to be considered vulnerableto the apportioning of blame if particular duties are abrogated, institutionalmoral agents must be able to pursue their own objectives relatively free from

17. Keith Graham posits the existence of what he calls ‘‘invisible collectives’’, in ‘‘Morality, Individualsand Collectives’’, in J.D.G. Evans (ed.), Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Problems, supplement toPhilosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1–18 (p. 9). He defines these as ‘‘collec-tives which engage in corporate actions of a kind not ascribable separately to their members, but whosemembers are unaware that this is occurring’’. He also acknowledges that ‘‘more than one phenomenonmight be placed under the heading of invisible collectives’’ including, inter alia, cases in which ‘‘anumber of people might be entirely unaware that they constituted a collective’’ or in which ‘‘theymight be aware of this, but entirely ignorant of the nature of the acts performed by the collective’’.I mean to disqualify those groups that would fall into Graham’s former category. I fully accept that agroup that qualifies as a moral agent can be made up of individual actors that know that they comprisea unit, but that are to some extent unaware of the scope or nature of their actions as a group. (This isa compelling reason for assigning responsibility for actions at the level of the institution as well as atthe level of the individual.) It is groups whose supposed members would not conceive of themselvesas constituting a unit that could not be understood to be moral agents within the model that I amproposing.

18. I first proposed this qualification in applying the above criteria to states in ‘‘Assigning Duties toInstitutional Moral Agents’’, Ethics & International Affairs, pp. 77–79. I argue that although thoseinstitutions often labelled ‘‘quasi-states’’ tend to have, for example, weak decision-making structures,unlike ‘‘failed states, they can, nevertheless, satisfy the criteria for moral agency and be held accountablefor some actions at the corporate level of the state.

19. Here, again, I am following O’Neill. See her ‘‘Who Can Endeavour Peace?’’, op. cit., p. 65.



external impediments. Some obstacles faced by institutions in internationalrelations are disenabling: certain states are constrained by the financial demands(and imposed policies) of foreign creditors; certain intergovernmental organisa-tions are designed to perform functions, and are delegated responsibilitiesaccordingly, but are not provided with the resources necessary to fulfil them.That such external factors can undermine an institution’s ability to exercisemoral agency in particular cases, and thereby render unreasonable expectationsthat certain duties be discharged, follows on from the understanding of indi-vidual moral agency offered above.

A caveat should be offered here to avoid misunderstanding about the proposalthat institutions can be moral agents. The moral agency of institutions in no wayprecludes or undermines the moral agency of those individual human actors, andpossibly sub-groups, that comprise them. Moral agency is understood here toexist simultaneously at different levels. This means that the assignment of duty orthe apportioning of blame for actions at one level—at the level of a multinationalcorporation, for example—does not allow those agents that comprise it—share-holders, branch companies, employees, CEOs—to evade either moral expectationsor censure for those discrete actions that are ascribable separately to them. Rather,moral agents at all levels can be responsible for concurrent, complementary, oreven co-ordinated acts of commission and omission.

Underlying this model of institutional moral agency is the proposal that somegroups—namely those that are agents in themselves and possess sophisticated,integrated capacities for deliberation and action—are analogous to the individualhuman moral agent in ways that make assigning them responsibilities a coherentendeavour. Yet, even if one accepts that institutions can, in theory, qualify as moralagents, whether or not a specific institution satisfies the criteria that would allowit to be described as such is a separate question. I will now turn to the factors thatrender the United Nations a ‘‘hard case’’ to which these criteria might be applied.

Why the United Nations is a ‘‘Hard Case’’

The United Nations is a particularly challenging candidate for institutionalmoral agency, in part because of the structure of the organisation itself. TheUnited Nations consists of a number of interconnected and semi-autonomousorgans, including the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Secretariat.Moreover, the United Nations was created by, and its membership is comprisedof, individual states. As an association of units and subunits, testing the UnitedNations against criteria concerning unified decision making and corporate iden-tity must involve careful consideration of the relationships between thesedifferent parts, and of the capacities and functions of the association that theytogether constitute.

The United Nations is also a hard case because any suggestion that it mightbe considered a moral agent, despite its complex structure, is precluded by theassumptions of many of those who theorise about its nature and role incontemporary international politics. Indeed, one important, albeit ancillary,implication of examining the potential moral agency of the United Nations isthat it provides a response—and perhaps a challenge—to certain theoreticalclaims largely accepted, but unexamined, within the discipline of IR.

A number of movements within IR rely on assumptions regarding the onto-


28 T. Erskine

logical status of states that, nevertheless, fail to stimulate analyses of their ethicalrole. To put it simply, states are assumed to be agents in international relations(often the agents), yet are somehow seen to evade specifically moral agency.20

However, prevalent assumptions about the nature and role of intergovernmentalorganisations such as the United Nations present an even more difficult positionagainst which to suggest the possibility of moral agency. Unlike the ‘‘individual-ist’’ critics mentioned above—who deny that any group can act—these would-be detractors of the notion that the United Nations can be a moral agent areunconcerned with the portrayal of certain groups as agents. They do not,however, accept that the United Nations, as an intergovernmental organisation,can be an actor independent of its member states.

The same statist ontology within the discipline of IR that paradoxically co-exists with such reticence to consider the state to be a moral agent, militatesagainst the possibility that intergovernmental organisations might be eitheragents or moral agents. From the perspective of ‘‘neo-realists’’ and ‘‘neo-liberalinstitutionalists’’ alike—occupiers of supposed opposite sides of an academicdebate particularly prominent in North American IR—intergovernmental organi-sations are not agents in their own right; they lack ontological independence.21

Instead, they are generally portrayed as vehicles within which states are able tofurther their own interests.22 This perspective is commonly employed in analysesof the United Nations. In the words of Thomas Weiss, David Forsythe and RogerCoate, ‘‘[t]he United Nations is primarily an institutional funnel through whichmember states may channel their foreign policies’’.23 In other words, the UnitedNations is a framework within which agents act; it is not itself a purposive actor.

The implications of this view are straightforward in terms of the presentinvestigation: intergovernmental organisations, lacking the requisite status of

20. This combination of an uncritical acceptance of the state as an agent and rejection or evasion ofits possible role as a moral agent is a feature of, inter alia, realist and neo-realist positions. AlexanderWendt’s constructivist approach provides an exception to this tendency on one count. He examines,and defends, the state’s status as an agent, arguing that ‘‘states are people too’’. However, while givinga perfunctory nod to the ‘‘practico-ethical’’ motivation for his work, he explicitly refrains from engagingwith ethical issues in his analysis. See Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 215–224, 21–22.

21. Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore make this observation in ‘‘The Politics, Power, andPathologies of International Organizations’’, International Organization, Vol. 53, No. 4 (1999), pp. 699–732.

22. I do not mean to imply that neo-realist and neo-liberal institutionalist approaches present inter-governmental organizations in exactly the same way. Proponents of each approach tend to shareimportant assumptions of states as rational egoists (taken from microeconomic theory) and of inter-national anarchy. However, while I would argue that neo-realists see intergovernmental organizationsas mechanisms defined exclusively by the wills of their member states, neo-liberals paint a slightlydifferent picture. Neo-liberals understand organizations such as the United Nations not only asresulting from a convergence of interests, but also as facilitating co-operation and providing a structurethat impacts upon—and modifies—these interests. Importantly for the present discussion, however,neither treats such organizations as actors in their own right.

23. Thomas G. Weiss, David P. Forsythe and Roger A. Coate, The United Nations and Changing WorldPolitics (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), p. 13. Emphasis mine. These authors do acknowledge thatsometimes ‘‘the UN’’ might be used to refer to ‘‘actor’’ rather than simply ‘‘framework’’; namely, whenthis ‘‘phraseology’’ in fact ‘‘refers to important behaviour by independent persons representing theworld organization’’ (p. 14). This is telling. Here we are back to the individualist position that I describeabove: groups simply are not agents and any even partially coherent reference to them as such is nomore than (unfortunate) shorthand for the actions of individual human beings.



agents, cannot be considered moral agents. The consequences of this, in turn,are both far reaching and somewhat worrying: The United Nations cannot beassigned duties and, therefore, cannot coherently be blamed for its perceivedfailure to discharge them. It cannot, even metaphorically, be left with ‘‘blood onits hands’’. This is a position that received some backing from Kofi Annan in arecent interview. Carefully replying to charges of United Nations ‘‘inefficiency’’,Annan suggested that ‘‘[w]hen we talk of the UN, sometimes we forget that theUN is its member states’’. The message here is that blame for inaction ismisdirected if it is placed with the United Nations. The United Nations, claimedAnnan, is quite simply ‘‘a convenient whipping boy . . . a good alibi’’.24

If these assumptions denying agency to intergovernmental organisations suchas the United Nations are not closely examined, but nonetheless accepted, thereis a danger that this could lead to incorrect and regrettable conclusions regardingtheir ethical roles—or lack thereof. If it is, on the other hand, confirmed thatintergovernmental organisations do lack agency, then this should motivate us toquestion the logic of both blaming the United Nations for acts of omission andtransferring responsibilities to it prospectively.

Institutional Moral Agency and the United Nations

Identifying the United Nations as an institutional moral agent depends funda-mentally on providing a compelling, affirmative answer to the question ofwhether it is an agent in its own right—capable of knowing and acting in a waythat is distinct from its constituents. This is, however, precisely what is beingdenied by those who present intergovernmental organisations rigidly and exclu-sively as frameworks or funnels within which agents act. To speak meaningfullyof the United Nations ‘‘deliberating’’ and ‘‘acting’’, we must not merely be relyingon rather sloppy shorthand for characterising the contingent convergence ofdiscrete interests and actions on the part of its members. If speaking of delibera-tion and action with regard to the United Nations were no more than this, thenit would be perfectly accurate to describe the United Nations as a vehicle forstate preferences and to deny it any attribution of agency, or, indeed, moralagency.

The focus of this part of the discussion will be on whether the United Nationscan even begin to meet the first criterion identified above, that of possessing acorporate identity, or an identity that is more than the sum of identities of itsconstitutive parts. Nevertheless, all five criteria for institutional moral agencyare intimately related and it should prove useful to begin by reflecting, evenbriefly, on whether the other four are met. Although different institutions mightsatisfy each criterion to various degrees, all five features must be identified inorder for an institution to qualify as a moral agent.

An institutional moral agent must have an internal decision-making structure.This criterion automatically disqualifies the ‘‘international community’’, forexample—an entity that is often, problematically, called upon to respond to

24. Kofi Annan, ‘‘United Nations’ Kofi Annan is in Britain’’ (BBC Interview, 19 June 2001). AlthoughI take this statement to be illustrative of one understanding of the United Nations and its lack ofagency as a corporate entity, it is not an understanding that Annan himself has consistently upheld.I address below instances in which he has taken an opposing view.


30 T. Erskine

ethical imperatives and blamed for its failures. Such assertions of duty andculpability can only coherently refer to the specific agents that constitute the‘‘international community’’—or, perhaps, to the intergovernmental organisationthat is often understood to represent it. Regardless of assumptions of solidaritythat allegedly define the ‘‘international community’’ as such, it lacks the structurenecessary to contemplate existing circumstances, prescribed guidelines and theprojected consequences of actions, and then to determine an informed responseto these considerations in a way that even loosely resembles the individualmoral agents’ arrival at an intended course of action. The United Nations,however, does possess such a deliberative capacity.

The United Nations has a decision-making structure that is effectively dividedbetween the General Assembly and the Security Council. Functions of theGeneral Assembly, the main deliberative organ within the United Nations,include discussing and making recommendations on all matters within the scopeof the Charter, and any matter impacting on international peace and security,with the exception, in both cases, of questions currently being discussed bythe Security Council.25 The Security Council, with primary responsibility formaintaining international peace and security, makes executive decisions onbehalf of the member states.26 Both organs have sophisticated—albeit sometimescontroversial—procedures for deliberation and decision making.27 Moreover,while the Security Council and the General Assembly are governed by strictprinciples that demarcate their respective roles, each site of decision making candetermine policy that guides the United Nations as a whole.

The capacity to act on decisions is another defining characteristic of theinstitutional moral agent. The United Nations might act by variously dispatchingpeacekeeping forces, imposing economic sanctions, providing mediation to dis-puting parties, issuing ceasefire directives, or, in extreme circumstances, resortingto armed force. The executive decisions behind these actions are generally madeby the United Nations through the Security Council (although, in exceptionalcircumstances, the General Assembly can recommend action when the SecurityCouncil fails, due to decision-making deadlock, to respond to ‘‘a threat to thepeace, a breach of the peace, or an act of aggression’’).28 The United Nations canact through the Security Council (or the General Assembly) in a declaratory senseby issuing ceasefire directives (or recommendations), for example. However, forthe performance of many actions (such as dispatching peacekeeping forces,engaging in collective military action, or imposing trade embargoes), the UnitedNations relies on the member states. In this respect, capacities to reason, reach

25. Charter of the United Nations, Articles 10, 11 and 12.1, available:\http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter[.

26. Charter of the United Nations, op. cit., Article 24.1.27. Particularly controversial is the ‘‘veto’’ provision granted to the five permanent members (P5)

of the Security Council. I will argue below that the existence of this provision—as distinct from itsexercise in specific cases—neither undermines the United Nations’ decision-making capacity, nor theviability of describing it as an agent in its own right.

28. This is under the ‘‘Uniting for Peace Resolution’’, adopted by the General Assembly in November1950. See United Nations General Assembly Res. 377 (v), UN GAOR (302nd plen. mtg.), A/Res/377(v)A(1950). Under such conditions, the General Assembly has the authority to make recommendations tomember states for collective measures. In cases of actual breaches of the peace or actual aggression,the General Assembly may recommend the resort to force if this is deemed necessary ‘‘to maintain orrestore international peace and security’’.



a decision, and act are clearly integrated and set out in the UN Charter. Accordingto the Charter, the Security Council has the authority to make decisions uponwhich its member states are obligated to act:29 all members states agree both ‘‘toaccept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance withthe present charter’’.30 More broadly, members agree to ‘‘give the United Nationsevery assistance in any action it takes in accordance with the present Charter’’.31

Even though these procedures for executing decisions are in place, the linkbetween the United Nations’ deliberative and decision-making functions and itsability to see that actions are carried through with consistency might be consid-ered tenuous. This limitation, however, need not prevent the United Nationsfrom meeting this criterion for institutional moral agency. Rather, it might affectconsideration of the conditions under which it can, as a moral agent, be reasonablyexpected to discharge specific duties. (I will return to this point.) In short, theUnited Nations possesses the organisational structure and procedures that allowit to arrive at a decision and execute actions accordingly, even if circumstancesrender decision making and concerted action difficult—or indeed impossible—in specific cases.

Another requisite feature of the institutional moral agent is an identity overtime. A group that lacks this simply cannot be an entity to which one couldassign duties in a way that is irreducible to its constituents. An illustrativeexample can be found in the idea of ‘‘coalitions of the willing’’, or groups ofstates (possibly including regional associations of states), that come together torespond to specific crises. The members of such a coalition might have duties totake certain actions and might be blamed for inaction (or acting inappropriately).Indeed, they might, conceivably, be blamed for an act of omission if they wereto fail to form a coalition in the absence of other actors able to respond to aparticular ethical imperative.32 Duty and blame, however, must remain at thelevel of those agents that comprise the temporary association. Such an associationitself cannot be assigned duties prospectively: it does not exist prior to the eventthat its constituents band together to confront.33 Nor can it, as a group, incurblame retrospectively for failing to discharge duties that it could not have beenassigned in the first place. The United Nations, by contrast, does possess anidentity over time. Indeed, it exists prior to the crises to which it is charged withresponding, and its existence outlives any response.

The fourth criterion for institutional moral agency—that a collectivity mustsee itself as a unit—poses an interesting problem for the case of the UnitedNations. Kofi Annan, in response to a particular assertion of blame, might havedenied that the United Nations is anything more than the sum of its parts.Nevertheless, the Charter by which this organisation defines itself, and, signifi-

29. General Assembly recommendations, by contrast, are not binding in this sense, but, nevertheless,carry the weight of what might be called ‘‘moral authority’’. Put simply, states deviating from theserecommendations seem compelled to justify their actions.

30. Charter of the United Nations, op. cit., Article 25.31. Charter of the United Nations, op. cit., Article 2.5.32. See note 53 below.33. Adopting a different approach, Chris Brown intriguingly describes ‘‘coalitions of the willing’’ as

possessing ‘‘informal agency’’. See Chris Brown, ‘‘Moral Agency and International Society’’, in CanInstitutions Have Responsibilities?, op. cit., pp. 51–65 (p. 60). I would argue that in addition to lacking anidentity over time, ‘‘coalitions of the willing’’ are also deprived of an identity that is greater than thesum of their parts—these temporary associations are not agents in themselves.


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cantly, Annan’s own acknowledgement of the United Nations’ institutionalfailure in the cases of Srebrenica and Rwanda, tell a very different story.34

Although it would be misleading to suggest that any of these criteria arestraightforwardly met when confronted with the case of the United Nations,each is fulfilled to the degree that would allow the United Nations to beconsidered a moral agent—if one other criterion is also met.

A Corporate Identity?

To qualify as an institutional moral agent, a group must also have an identitythat is irreducible to the identities of its constitutive parts. Exploring whetherthe United Nations meets this criterion requires confronting two positions thatpresent the United Nations as no more than the sum of its constituents, or, inFrench’s terminology, no more than an ‘‘aggregate collectivity’’.35 According toone position, the United Nations is too amorphous and diffuse to be definedother than as a system that loosely encompasses autonomous, agency-possessingbodies that perform discrete functions.36 The other position maintains that theUnited Nations is defined exclusively by the identities and self-interests of itsmember states. I will address each claim in turn.

That the United Nations cannot be described exhaustively as a single organisa-tion is beyond dispute. The United Nations contains within it separate organisa-tions and myriad sources of individual and collective agency. Moreover, themultifarious bodies within the United Nations are likely to represent differentviews on particular issues, support multiple agendas, and possess divergentvalues. Indeed, they may possess ‘‘distinct internal cultures’’.37 However, theconclusion that the United Nations, therefore, cannot be considered to have anidentity that is independent of these component parts does not necessarilyfollow. Principal organs within the United Nations, such as the Secretariat, theSecurity Council and the General Assembly, not only perform functions that arecomplementary (despite possible tensions and compromises between differentagendas, values and ‘‘cultures’’), but that are only meaningful and effective aspart of a whole. Administrative, deliberative, and executive tasks are dividedamongst these constitutive organs of the United Nations in such a way thattheir combined capacities for deliberation and action create a corporate identity—and allow the resulting agent to know and act in ways that satisfy the broadercriteria for institutional moral agency.38

This is not to say that every part of the ‘‘UN system’’, or what has been calledthe ‘‘UN family’’, combines to establish this corporate identity. Although tied to

34. See Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35 (1998): SrebrenicaReport, available: \http://www.un.org/peace/srebrenica.pdf[, and the Secretary-General’s State-ment on Receiving the Report on the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the1994 Genocide in Rwanda, available:\http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sgm_rwanda.htm[.

35. French contrasts ‘‘aggregate’’ with ‘‘conglomerate’’ collectivities in Collective and Corporate Respon-sibility, op. cit. See, for example, pp. 5, 13.

36. I am grateful to Cornelia Navari and Nicholas Wheeler, among others, for presenting me withthis position.

37. Barnett and Finnemore, op. cit., p. 724.38. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) adds a judicial function to those listed above—one that

enhances the United Nations’ capacity to be self-reflective and consider its own role and standing, asit did in the Reparations Case discussed below.



the United Nations by special agreements, the ‘‘specialised agencies’’—includingthe World Bank, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF)—are distinct, autonomous organisations whose secret-ariats are directed by the executive heads of the agencies themselves. It makessense to treat these specialised agencies, and the other related agencies within‘‘the system’’, separately from the entity that is being proposed as a candidatefor moral agency. If one understands the United Nations in terms of its principalorgans, then it becomes conceivable to suggest that it is an agent for whomspecific actions can be described in ways that are irreducible to these componentparts. However, the charge that the United Nations remains defined by theidentities and self-interests of its member states casts doubt on such a claim toagency and presents a further obstacle to meeting the criterion of corporateidentity.

Chris Brown, for one, dismisses the possibility that the United Nations couldhave an identity greater than the sum of the identities of its member states:‘‘These [the United Nations and the UN Security Council] are not bodies thathave some kind of collective existence apart from their members.’’39 There ismuch in his argument that is compatible with the approach taken in the presentdiscussion—and that would concur with a proposal that the United Nationspossesses a corporate identity. Brown implicitly acknowledges that a funda-mental feature of a group’s status as an agent is an identity that is independentof its parts, and he puts the United Nations to the test on these grounds.Moreover, he makes the statement cited above in the context of an argumentthat one can only see either the United Nations or the Security Council as agentsof ‘‘international society’’ with considerable difficulty. His position is simply thatwe cannot expect states to refrain from acting in accordance with their ownindividual interests in order to defer to the common good of internationalsociety—at least not without a great deal of hesitation and inconsistency. This isa sound argument. However, what is problematic is any assumption that theUnited Nations’ failure to represent international society with consistency andcommitment precludes the possibility of its possessing (even intermittently) anidentity that is independent of its constituents.

The United Nations may not represent international society, or the often-invoked although ever-elusive ‘‘international community’’, but this does notmean that it must be reduced to the individual identities of its member states.Rather, there is reason to suspect, contra Brown, that the United Nations doeshave an identity—in the context of some actions—that is irreducible to the statesthat comprise it. Indeed, the United Nations itself might act out of ‘‘self-interest’’,or on the basis of its own purposes and preferences. Significantly, two quitedifferent challenges have been made to assumptions that intergovernmentalorganisations such as the United Nations are mere ‘‘instruments’’ or ‘‘funnels’’of state preferences. Both champion the view that these bodies do possess thepower and autonomy to be purposive actors in their own right. Detailed analysesof these two positions are beyond the scope of this article. Highlighting their

39. Brown, ‘‘Moral Agency and International Society: Reflections on Norms, the UN, the Gulf Warand the Kosovo Campaign’’, in Can Institutions Have Responsibilities?, op. cit., p. 57. This piece was firstpublished in Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2001), pp. 87–98; however, the cited passageappears only in the subsequent book version.


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potential to contribute to a claim that the United Nations possesses a corporateidentity might, however, prove useful.

A Constructivist Approach: The United Nations as a Purposive Actor

Responding to a hole in the literature on intergovernmental organisationssurrounding questions of their autonomy, power, and ontological status, MichaelBarnett and Martha Finnemore rely on sociological approaches to organisations—rather than the economic approaches shared by neo-realists and neo-liberals.They present an alternative understanding of entities such as the United Nationsand in doing so describe themselves as developing a ‘‘constructivist approach’’.Much of their position draws specifically on Max Weber’s work on bureaucraciesto argue, inter alia, that the rational-legal authority that organisations such asthe United Nations embody ‘‘gives them power independent of the states thatcreated them’’.40 By this understanding, the United Nations is far from being anempty shell for the exercise of individual state objectives.

There are a few points that remain unclear is Barnett and Finnemore’sargument—particularly with respect to its application to the United Nations.Among these is the matter of exactly how Weber’s work on bureaucratisation isbeing applied—or, more specifically, where the important features of legitimateauthority and control over technical expertise and information that they takefrom Weber are located when discussing the United Nations. Indeed, theimportance of the Secretariat as such, the bureaucratic organ in the UnitedNations, is not explicitly addressed. A convincing argument can be made thatrational-legal authority is invested in the United Nations’ principal organs.Moreover, the sophisticated bureaucratic structure that sustains this associationcan be argued to provide not only the expertise that allows it to function inways that its member states individually cannot, but also a culture that rendersindividual state preferences vulnerable to being differently defined whenaddressed by their proponents as constituents of the United Nations. Thesepoints require further detail and elaboration in the context of the theoreticalframework proposed by Barnett and Finnemore. Nevertheless, Barnett andFinnemore’s suggestions that intergovernmental organisations develop theirown purposes, are imbued with enhanced capacities, and are perceived asembodying authority in international relations in ways that distinguish themfrom their member states are deeply compelling and lend support to the claimthat the United Nations can achieve a corporate identity.

An International Law Approach: The United Nations as the Bearer of ‘‘InternationalLegal Personality’’

Barnett and Finnemore’s claim that the United Nations is a purposive actor isreinforced by the interpretation under international law that the United Nationspossesses ‘‘international legal personality’’.41 A fundamental condition for label-ling an intergovernmental organisation a ‘‘person’’ under international law is

40. Barnett and Finnemore, ‘‘The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations’’,op. cit., p. 699.

41. I am very grateful to Mitch Robinson for directing my attention to this literature.



that it have an identity that is distinct from the identities of its constituents.42

The arguments by which international lawyers arrive at this conclusion is,perhaps unsurprisingly, radically different from that of Barnett and Finnemore.The two positions, nevertheless, share an emphasis on the United Nations’unique capacities and authority vis-a-vis its member states.

Particularly valuable in terms of the present discussion is that leading judi-cial authority on the legal personality of international organisations rests spe-cifically on consideration of the case of the United Nations. Faced with thequestion of whether the United Nations has international legal personality,and deprived of a statement to this affect in the UN Charter,43 the InternationalCourt of Justice (ICJ) deduced an affirmative response from the special capaci-ties and functions assigned to, and demonstrated by, the United Nations.44

Moreover, significance was given to the way in which the United Nations isdefined in relation to its member states: it is portrayed in the Charter as anindependent entity that can enter into agreements with its member states, andto which these states are required to give assistance. Importantly, this advisoryopinion maintains that ‘‘[t]he Charter has not been content to make the Organ-ization created by it merely a centre ‘for harmonizing the actions of nationsin the attainment of . . . common ends’’’ as indicated in Article 1(4). In otherwords, it is not content to render the United Nations merely a frameworkwithin which states realise their collective goals. In addition to this portrayalof the United Nations in the Charter, ‘‘[p]ractice . . . has confirmed this charac-ter of the Organization, which occupies a position in certain respects in detach-ment from its Members . . .’’45

Moral agency and legal personality are very different concepts, as are thehomologous notions of moral and legal responsibility. One by no means impliesthe other. Nevertheless, exploring the justifications for attributing internationallegal personality to an institution is useful in determining whether it can beunderstood to have a corporate identity. Both this judgement under internationallaw and the argument by Barnett and Finnemore suggest that the United Nationscan meet the criterion for institutional moral agency that descriptions of actions(and inactions) be, in some cases, irreducible to its component parts. However,in making this claim, it is important to emphasise that just because some actionscan only be understood at the institutional level of the United Nations does not

42. Indeed, according to Rosalyn Higgins, in Problems and Process: International Law and How We UseIt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 46, if an international organization is not deemed to possessindependent legal personality, ‘‘such an institution is, at the end of the day, indistinguishable fromthe states that create it’’.

43. Often, the treaty by which an international organization is created will state that the organizationhas international legal personality. This is not the case with the United Nations; the Charter is silenton this issue.

44. Reparation for Injuries Suffered in the Service of the United Nations, ICJ Reports (1949). The impetusfor this case was the United Nations’ desire to recover damages for the murder of one of its employees,Count Folke Bernadotte, who was acting as UN mediator in Palestine in 1948. The ICJ was asked todetermine whether the United Nations could bring such a legal suit, an act that requires internationallegal personality. Useful accounts of the implications of this case for determining the legal personalityof international organizations can be found in the following: Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public Inter-national Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 647–670; Higgins, pp. 46–48; and PeterMananczuk, Akehurst’s Modern Introduction to International Law (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 92–96.

45. ICJ Reports (1949), pp. 178–179.


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mean that descriptions of other actions are not more accurately made at thelevel of its member states, for example. Nor does it mean that agents at bothlevels cannot be simultaneously responsible for acts of commission and omission.In any contemplation of either retrospective or prospective responsibility, therelevant, responsible actor must be identified in the context of a specific actbefore it is then assigned duties or ascribed blame.

Can the United Nations Have ‘‘Blood on Its Hands’’?

According to this preliminary analysis, the United Nations meets the criteria forinstitutional moral agency. Nevertheless, important qualifications must be madeto this conclusion—one with regard to the nature of the United Nations’ standingas a moral agent, and two with regard to limitations that must be acknowledgedwith respect to assigning duties to the United Nations and to holding itaccountable when perceived duties are not met.

First, the argument as it stands only supports the claim that the UnitedNations can be a moral agent—when it satisfies the criterion, among others, thatit is an actor in its own right, with an identity that is greater than the sum ofthe identities of its constitutive parts. The position being presented is not thatthe United Nations always meets this criterion; indeed, I would suggest that itdoes not. One reason for this qualification is that although the decision-makingstructure of the United Nations allows deliberation over possible courses ofaction and the translation of decisions into policy, the exercise of the vetoprovision by one of the permanent five members of the Security Council canresult in paralysis of these functions. When such a stalemate is experienced, itwould be difficult to characterise the Security Council as an actor independentof its constituents.46 The problem is not one of disagreement within the mainexecutive organ of the United Nations. Disagreement and compromise arefundamental features of moral deliberation for any actor and define institutionalmoral agency.47 Rather, the problem is that the exercise of the veto allowsdecision making to be undermined; it prevents the United Nations from behaving

46. The argument presented here is as odds with Chris Brown’s rendering of the implications of theveto provision. In ‘‘Moral Agency and International Society’’, in Can Institutions Have Responsibilities?,op. cit., p. 56, Brown argues that the veto provision means that the P5 members ‘‘have not transferredtheir capacity to act as agents to the SC’’. Brown’s assertion that the permanent members of theSecurity Council withhold from the Security Council their individual capacities for action, and thatthis undermines the viability of accepting the United Nations as an agent in its own right, is problematicin terms of the model of institutional moral agency being applied in the current discussion. Accordingto this model, individual agents within an overarching institution do not need to transfer their capaci-ties to act to the institution that they comprise in order for it to be considered an agent. Indeed, sucha transfer is not possible. Agency at the institutional level simply does not negate the agency of itsconstituents. Furthermore, taking Brown to mean simply that the very fact of the permanent members’veto provision reinforces the independent identities of these actors and resists a corporate identitythat would encompass them, this need not be understood as a necessary implication of the veto power.Rather, one can distinguish the existence of the veto provision from the implications of its use inspecific cases.

47. Erskine, ‘‘Assigning Responsibilities to Institutions and Moral Agents’’, Ethics & InternationalAffairs, op. cit., p. 75; and Frances V. Harbour, ‘‘Collective Moral Agency and the Political Process’’, inCan Institutions Have Responsibilities?, op. cit., pp. 69–83.



in a way that is independent of its constitutive states.48 (Abstention, on the otherhand, does not halt deliberation or decision making.) The tentative conclusionhere is that when the veto is exercised, the United Nations cannot be defined asan agent. This is very different from saying that the United Nations acts‘‘irresponsibly’’, or should be condemned for an act of omission. Indeed, arguingthat the United Nations ceases to be an agent when the veto is exercised precludessuch a judgement. If, at times, the United Nations does not qualify as a purposiveactor in its own right, it cannot be a moral agent and can be neither assignedduties nor held accountable for their abrogation. It is interesting to considerwhether the absence of a moral agent in the form of the United Nations grantssome licence to, or even imposes a requirement on, states and other bodies(acting either independently or as part of a coalition) to take action unilaterallythat would otherwise be deemed to fall solely within the jurisdiction of theUnited Nations. This, however, is a question for another discussion.

Second, even when the United Nations does qualify as a moral agent, itscapacities for deliberation and action are not without shortcomings. The UnitedNations’ internal features render it a moral agent with limits. For example,although the United Nations can deliberate in the sense of being able to accessand process information—potentially to a degree not achievable by its memberstates individually—its complex structure is not always conducive to the effectivetransfer of information (or, stated differently, its complex structure is conduciveto obfuscating the transfer of information). Colin Keating, president of theSecurity Council and representative of New Zealand during the genocide inRwanda, lamented that ‘‘We were kept in the dark. The situation was muchmore dangerous than was ever presented to the council. With better information,the council might have proceeded quite differently.’’49 It seems that there was abreakdown of communication specifically between the Security Council, chargedwith making a decision about how to respond to the situation in Rwanda, andthe Secretariat, upon which the non-permanent members of the Security Councilin particular relied for information.50 Should the United Nations be blamedbecause it did not discharge the duty to respond to genocide at a time whenthere was ample evidence on the ground to support such a move, or excusedbecause its internal structure did not allow vital information to reach its decisionmakers and thereby acted as an impediment to informed deliberation? Thenotion of the United Nations as a moral agent with limits gives some supportto the latter interpretation. However, the argument that the United Nations asan institutional agent could not deliberate effectively at a particular point intime and, therefore, might be spared blame, neither excuses actors at other levels(states or individuals) who had information and could have acted, nor exoneratesthe United Nations’ inaction subsequently when the members of the Security

48. It is important to note that under the ‘‘Uniting for Peace’’ provision (see note 28 above) delibera-tion might, nevertheless, resume in the General Assembly and a recommendation for action may bemade by this body. The exercise of the veto would then not prevent the United Nations from deliberat-ing and acting. That this capacity remains, in theory, suggests that my assumption that the UnitedNations’ moral agency is undermined by the exercise of the veto is, perhaps, too hasty. It also meansthat my opposition to Brown’s argument might be even more forcefully made. This is, however, oneissue that requires further consideration in the context of concrete cases.

49. Quoted by Melvern, ‘‘The Rwandan Blood on the UN’s Hands’’, op. cit., p. 19.50. See Wheeler, op. cit., pp. 220–221.


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Council had access to the knowledge that the ‘‘unrest’’ in Rwanda constitutedgenocide.

Finally, external conditions can prevent the United Nations from exercisingmoral agency. One point supported by Barnett and Finnemore and those whoargue that the United Nations is an entity with ‘‘international legal personality’’is that intergovernmental organisations are sometimes able to achieve somedegree of power and autonomy vis-a-vis their constitutive states. However, theargument that the United Nations still lacks the positive freedom to act on itsdecisions in many instances—despite the formal structure and procedures thatprovide it with the capacity to do so—is a convincing one. As Annan argues,

When things are hopeless and governments cannot do it [respond tocrises] or they don’t know what to do because things are so absolutelyhopeless, they give it to the UN and tell their populations, ‘‘We haveacted, we have acted—we have sent it to the UN.’’ But the resources andthe material support do not always follow.51

Even with the capacities to respond to ethical guidelines, such as the imperativeto act in order to prevent or suppress genocide, action is not possible if an agentlacks enabling conditions requisite to realising these capacities.

The implications of the last two points—that the United Nations is a moral agentwith limits and that it is also frequently deprived of the opportunity to exercisethis agency—are significant. On each count, there must be an acknowledgementthat the United Nations as a moral agent is not able to discharge some specific duties.It is incoherent to blame either an individual human being or an institutional moralagent for abrogating duties that he, she or it is not able to discharge. Responsibilityfor acts of omission in such cases must be directed elsewhere.

Just because the United Nations is unable to discharge specific duties doesnot mean that states, individuals or other actors are somehow exempt fromblame for abrogating the duties that they are capable of discharging. However,importantly, and worryingly, there might be crises that neither the UnitedNations nor its member states can reasonably be expected to prevent. The UnitedNations might lack either the internal organisation or the external conditionsnecessary to act; individual states might lack the power to act on their own.Apathy in these cases could not be deemed an abrogation of duty; or be blamed.No one, it seems, would have ‘‘blood on their hands’’. Or, is there another wayof looking at such instances?

A Duty to Empower the United Nations?

The inability to discharge duties renders one immune from blame in the contextof certain acts of omission. However, when individual human beings, states ornon-state actors have the capacity to fulfil a duty (such as responding togenocide) by engaging in a prior act involving co-operation and organisation,this act, I will suggest, also carries the status of a duty, given certain conditions.This argument draws on a position articulated by Virginia Held.

The question that Held set out to answer in an often-cited 1970 article isreflected in its title: ‘‘Can a Random Collection of Individuals be Morally

51. Annan, ‘‘Kofi Annan is in Britain’’, op. cit. Emphasis mine.



Responsible?’’52 Held is concerned with cases of retrospective responsibility, andparticularly responsibility for acts of omission. The types of groups that shewishes to hold up to scrutiny are those that contingently share a time and place,but do not have a decision-making structure or an identity greater than the sumof their constitutive parts. In other words, the groups that she addresses arethose that have been portrayed in the present discussion as failing to qualify asinstitutional moral agents.

Held makes two claims with respect to these groups. First, she maintains that,in some circumstances, a random collection may be held responsible for notacting. Second, she suggests that even in cases in which a random collectioncannot be held responsible for failing to perform an action, it may be heldresponsible for not forming itself into an organised group capable of thendeliberating and acting.

Held’s first argument is somewhat misleadingly presented. A random collectionis not an agent, and, as such, cannot be blamed. Held does acknowledge, aftermaking her case, that blame here is distributive. In other words, she is referringto the apportioning of blame to individual human actors—not groups. The catch issimply that when individuals can act together to accomplish something that theycould not do separately, they can each be blamed for not acting if the necessaryaction is obvious, requires no prior deliberation or special co-ordination, and isnot open to disagreement. This position is not conducive to an analogy withindividual states where it is difficult to imagine collective action that requires nodeliberation or co-ordination.53 Held’s second argument, however, is instructivein the context of the current discussion—especially in the worrying cases whereneither the United Nations nor its member states can be expected to discharge aduty in response to crisis and we seem to be left in a moral stalemate.

With obvious reference to Held’s position, Larry May and Stacey Hoffmanmaintain that

If a group is lacking in an organisational structure, and hence unablecurrently to do anything but remain passive, we might still be justifiedin holding the group responsible for not forming itself into the kind ofgroup that could have done something else.54

As with Held’s own articulation, the wording here is somewhat ambiguous.55

52. Virginia Held, ‘‘Can a Random Collection of Individuals be Morally Responsible?’’, Journal ofPhilosophy, Vol. LXVII, No. 14 (1970), pp. 471–481.

53. Nevertheless, this position might be seen to have some relevance with regard to the establish-ment of ‘‘coalitions of the willing’’ in IR. The actors within such temporary associations must deliberateand co-ordinate their individual actions, but they do not depend on formal organization or the creationof formal decision-making structures. In fact, they arise when institutions with such structures appearineffective. Held’s principle that individual actors can be blamed individually for not acting togetherto accomplish something they are incapable of doing separately, in response to a crisis the urgency ofwhich ‘‘is not open to disagreement’’, would seem to lend some support to the establishment of theseoften very disparately constituted collections of states.

54. Larry May and Stacey Hoffman, ‘‘Introduction’’, in Larry May and Stacey Hoffman (eds.), Collec-tive Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics (Lanham, MD: Savage, Rowman& Littlefield, 1991), p. 7.

55. Held makes the following assertion: ‘‘The judgment then, that ‘Random collection R is morallyresponsible for not constituting itself into a group capable of deciding upon an action’ is sometimesvalid when it is obvious to the reasonable person that action rather than inaction by the collection iscalled for’’ (‘‘Random Collection’’, p. 479). What Held is actually arguing is that the individuals thatcomprise random collection R are morally responsible in this case.


40 T. Erskine

When co-operation and organisation are possible but not attempted, it is not agroup that is held responsible: The ‘‘random collection’’ lacks agency and theco-ordinated group that would possess it exists in potential only. What we arejustified in doing according to this argument is holding the members of thegroup responsible individually for not forming themselves into the kind of groupthat could have done something besides remain passive. In this sense, KofiAnnan (in the statement cited above) is correct to distribute blame among theUnited Nations’ members and shy away from accepting blame at the institutionallevel. But neither this stance, nor the analogy that I am drawing that might seemprima facie to support it, are quite so straightforward for two reasons.

First, the United Nations is not—no matter how disorganised and disparatelyconstituted—anything like a random collection of individuals. This means thatif Held’s argument suggests that agents with no prior or ongoing association can beblamed, individually, for failing to create the type of group capable of respondingto a crisis, then we can assume that agents that already constitute an associationhave the duty to strengthen and further empower an existing, but arguablydeficient, institution. In other words, and in support of Annan’s position, thereis an even stronger argument for blaming the individual agents in the currentexample than in Held’s. But the corollary to this argument is very important—and grants much less support to Annan’s stance. While blame can, and perhapsshould, be distributed between the members of the collectivity—both for indi-vidual acts of omission when they were capable of acting and for failing toestablish or empower a collective body when they were not—this does not meanthat the United Nations as an institution escapes all blame. The fact that anassociation already exists—and that this association possesses (perhaps imperfectbut nevertheless discernable) capacities for deliberation and action—revealsanother viable bearer of retrospective responsibility.

Second, where Annan is wrong, and where we might similarly be wrong onour reflections on the United Nations, is where he, and we, variously act, argue,propose policies and pontificate on the pretence that the United Nations is aunified, capable actor, and then hide behind its weaknesses and incapacitieswhen it fails to live up to our expectations and things go disastrously wrong.The United Nations habitually accepts roles that, for their successful fulfilment,presuppose fundamental capacities for deliberation and action. Furthermore,UN officials often insist on its relative autonomy from the various pulls andpreferences of the ‘‘great powers’’.56 States, on the other hand, implicitly acceptthe United Nations’ nominal autonomy and capacity to act in response to moralimperatives. In this sense, the United Nations becomes a ‘‘fig leaf ’’ to coverstate-level inaction in instances when, as Annan describes, ‘‘they cannot do it[respond to crises] or they don’t know what to do’’. As Anthony Lang Jr suggestsin a recent study of UN responsibility for the fall of Srebrenica, when the UnitedNations defines itself as a moral agent, it must take on some responsibility, at thecorporate level, for acts, and acts of omission, that result in harmful con-sequences.57 When states tacitly accept this definition, they reinforce their obliga-tion to see that these capacities are more than just nominal.

56. Barnett and Finnemore, op. cit., p. 709.57. Anthony Lang Jr, ‘‘The United Nations and the Fall of Srebrenica: Meaningful Responsibility

and International Society’’, in Can Institutions Have Responsibilities?, op. cit., pp. 183–203.



Conclusion

Assumptions of what we might call the ontological nature of the UnitedNations—or simply refer to as the question of whether the United Nations is anactor or a framework within which other agents operate—have produced deeplydivided positions. Indeed, there is a theoretical disjuncture between much ofthe IR literature on the nature of intergovernmental organisations and recentindictments of the United Nations regarding its failure to act in response tocrises, such as those in Bosnia and Rwanda. This literature denies that the UnitedNations is an agent; recent indictments make strong assumptions that the UnitedNations is a moral agent, a standing that is impossible without agency. There arefar-reaching implications for each position in terms of the viability of assigningduties to the United Nations, holding the United Nations responsible for certainacts of commission and omission, or distributing duty and blame between theUnited Nations’ member states. Drawing on this preliminary discussion, I willpropose two tentative conclusions.

Examining the nature of the United Nations as a moral agent has led me tosuggest the circumstances under which the United Nations can be blamed foracts of omission. It has also motivated me to reflect upon, and refine, my originalmodel of institutional moral agency. In a previous study of states as potentialmoral agents, I concluded that the criteria for institutional moral agency can bemet in degrees.58 In this preliminary look at the United Nations as an institutionalmoral agent, I am inclined to add that moral agency—in the case of institutions—need be neither a static nor singular nor always stable attribute. This qualificationis different from my point that labelling an institution a moral agent does notmean that all actions involving the institution must be described in a way thatis neither divisible nor reducible to other actors. (By this I mean simply thatmoral agency at the corporate level does not negate the potential moral agencyof an institution’s constitutive parts.) The suggestion that institutional moralagency, particularly in the case of intergovernmental organisations such as theUnited Nations, might be a transient attribute is potentially more unsettling.

This possibility would, arguably, render the assigning of duties a moreprecarious endeavour and the apportioning of blame more complicated thanwhen addressing individual human actors. (Neither would be impossible.)However, it does allow for some conceptual reconciliation between those whowould argue that blame for acts of omission cannot be placed on the ‘‘shoulders’’(or revealed on the ‘‘hands’’) of the United Nations, but must rather be appor-tioned exclusively to its member states, and those who assume that the UnitedNations is necessarily a moral agent in and of itself. In different contexts, eachmight be correct. If this were so, it would be vital to recognise that the imagethat applies in a particular case is a matter of neither preference nor policynor pretence. Rather, it is discernable with regard to the specific actions andcircumstances in questions. Taking serious account of these variables is the onlyway to speak coherently about the United Nations and responsibilities—eitherprospectively or retrospectively, in theory or in practice.

Diverging slightly from this argument, I have also suggested that in a situationin which the United Nations does lack the organisational structure or the

58. Erskine, ‘‘The Case of States and Quasi-states’’, op. cit., p. 79.


42 T. Erskine

external conditions to respond to human tragedies such as genocide, and itsmember states, along with other agents, are incapable of acting independently,there are still important duties to consider. Any agent with the capacity to create,reform, rehabilitate or otherwise enable an institution with the wherewithal torespond to ethical imperatives (such as that people be rescued from massacre),but that fails to make such an attempt, is metaphorically left with blood on his,hers, or its hands. In the context of the genocide in Rwanda, one might suggestthat moral responsibility be apportioned not only to institutional moral agentsat both intergovernmental and state levels for failure to prevent or suppressmassacre (in cases where we can make the argument that they were capable ofdischarging relevant duties), but also to myriad other actors who failed to ensurethat an institutional structure existed to respond more confidently, more quickly,and more effectively to the crisis.

This, it should be noted, gives some support to another of Annan’s statementswith respect to the United Nations and the burden of responsibility for acts ofomission. Responding to his own question of why no one intervened in Rwanda(until it was too late), he asserted the following: ‘‘The question should not beaddressed only to the United Nations or even its Member States. Each of us asan individual has to take his or her share of responsibility.’’59 To say that thisstatement has some salience in the context of one of my concluding points is notto condone what Barnett has called ‘‘relocating responsibility by ‘‘democratising’’blame’’;60 nor is it to invoke what Hannah Arendt would have called ‘‘universalresponsibility’’.61 Relevant agents cannot evade responsibility by either transfer-ring blame somewhere else or somehow diluting blame in an infinite pool ofindividual actors. My point is simply that while holding institutions such as theUnited Nations and its member states responsible for failing to act, we canalso, concomitantly, hold other actors—individuals and groups—responsible forfailing to provide the conditions within which effective action might have beenpossible.

59. ‘‘Secretary-General Reflects on ‘Intervention’ in the Thirty-fifth Annual Ditchley FoundationLecture’’, UN Press Release (6 May 1998), SG/SM/6613. Cited by Barnett in Eyewitness to a Genocide,op. cit., p. 154. Emphasis mine.

60. Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide, op. cit., p. 154.61. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility’’, in Collective Responsibility,

op. cit., pp. 273–283.


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