1 Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1997), p. 44.

2 Quoted in Toni Erskine, ‘“Blood on the UN's Hands”? Assigning Duties and Apportioning Blame to an Intergovernmental Organisation’, Global Society, 18:1 (2004), p. 33.

3 Walter Carlsnaes, ‘The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis’, International Studies Quarterly, 36:3 (1992), p. 249.

4 R. J. Barry Jones, ‘The United Nations and the International Political System’, in Dimitris Bourantonis and Jarrod Wiener (eds), The United Nations in the New World Order: The World Organization at Fifty (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 26.

5 Ontology here is understood as the theory of being and the nature of the research object, whereas epistemology refers to the theory of knowledge and how a researcher and people in general can know about the world. See, for example, David Lazar, ‘Selected Issues in the Philosophy of Social Science’, in Clive Seale (ed.), Researching Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1998), p. 10.

6 Quoted in David A. Lake, ‘Beyond Anarchy: The Importance of Security Institutions’, International Security, 26:1 (2001), p. 132.

7 In social science, atomism means looking for the smallest observable units which cannot be broken down any further, such as individuals in society. See, for example, Mark J. Smith, Social Science in Question (London: SAGE, 1998), p. 76.

8 For example, on studies explaining the UN's failure in Rwanda in these terms, see Milton Leitenberg, ‘Rwanda, 1994: International Incompetence Produces Genocide’, Peacekeeping & International Relations, 23:6 (1994), pp. 6–11; Guy Vassall-Adams, Rwanda: An Agenda for International Action (Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 1994), pp. 56–8; Linda Melvern, The Ultimate Crime: Who Betrayed the UN and Why (London: Allison & Busby, 1995), pp. 1–22; Boutros Boutros-Ghali, ‘Introduction’, in United Nations, The United Nations and Rwanda, 1993–1996 (New York: United Nations, Department of Public Information, 1996), p. 19.

9 Robert O. Keohane and Lisa L. Martin, ‘The Promise of Institutionalist Theory’, International Security, 20:1 (1995), p. 39. Emphasis added by author.

10 Colin Wight, ‘Theorizing the Mechanisms of Conceptual and Semiotic Space’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34:2 (2004), p. 288.

11 This term is derived from the annual Cyril Foster lecture delivered by the former Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar at Oxford University in 1986, quoted in Marrack Goulding, ‘The UN Secretary-General’, in David Malone (ed.), The UN Security Council in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), p. 268.

12 Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, ‘The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations’, International Organization, 53:4 (1999), p. 716.

13 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A U.S. – U.N. Saga (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 23–6.

14 On the dependency of social mechanisms on particular socio-historical contexts see, for example, Jon Elster, ‘A Plea for Mechanisms’, in Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg (eds), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 45.

15 These negative experiences and the increasing unipolarity in world politics led to the tendency of states to bypass the Security Council by resorting to alliances and coalitions instead of collective security, for example in Kosovo (1999).

16 Roy Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 169–71.

17 The estimated number of deaths vary between 500,000 and 1,000,000 according to the method used. Alison des Forges provides a systematic analysis of numbers and suggests a figure of 507,000. See Alison Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p. 15. However, Howard Adelman notes that the number of bodies found in burial sites and at Lake Victoria are not included in the count conducted by the Human Rights Watch. See Howard Adelman, ‘Genocidists and Saviours in Rwanda’, Other Voices: The (e)Journal of Cultural Criticism, 2:1 (2000), p. 1. http://www.othervoices.org/2.1/adelman/rwanda.html. accessed on 11 March 2007.

18 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, 2nd edn (London: Picador, 1999), p. 4.

19 Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 38.

20 United Nations, ‘Facsimile from the Director of DPKO Hédi Annabi to Linda Melvern’. Extract from the Linda Melvern Rwanda Genocide Archive, The Hugh Owen Library, University of Wales, File: UN Secretariat/DPKO Kofi Annan.

21 Andrew Collier, An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy (London: Verso, 1994), p. 49.

22 Heikki Patomäki, Critical Realism and World Politics: An Explication of a Critical Theoretical and Possibilistic Methodology for the Study of World Politics (Turku: Department of Political Science, University of Turku, Studies on Political Science No. 12, 1992), p. 59.

23 Bhaskar, ‘A Realist Theory of Science’, p. 47.

24 See, for example, Scott R. Feil, Preventing Genocide: How the Early Use of Force Might Have Succeeded in Rwanda. A Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1998), p. 4. http://www.ccpdc.org/pubs/rwanda/rwanda.html. accessed on 3 April 2002; Alan J. Kuperman, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001), p. viii.

25 Heikki Patomäki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)construction of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 105.

26 Thomas Risse, ‘“Let's Argue!”: Communicative Action in World Politics’, International Organization, 54:1 (2000), p. 5.

27 Ibid., pp. 3–7.

28 See, for example, Ian Johnstone, ‘Security Council Deliberations: The Power of the Better Argument’, European Journal of International Law, 14:3 (2003), p. 476.

29 In this regard, critical realism could be called ‘depth-constructivism’ or ‘sophisticated constructivism’, because social constructivists tend to restrict enquiry to the level of phenomena by analysing the appearance of language games themselves without going deeper to the level of underlying mechanisms to examine the factors which generated the language games in the first place. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, for example, assert that ‘The phenomenological analysis of everyday life, or rather of the subjective experience of everyday life, refrains from any causal or genetic hypotheses, as well as from assertions about the ontological status of the phenomena analysed.’ Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 34. Thus, whilst social constructivists are inclined to make an uncompromising distinction between causal explanation and hermeneutical understanding, critical realism views them both as necessary in social science.

30 See Touko Piiparinen, Producing Images of Genocide: A Critical Realist Reflection on the Conflict Management Expertise of the United Nations in Rwanda. PhD thesis (Aberystwyth: University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2005).

31 This draconian communicative consensus has a long historical echo, as it recalls the Council's discussions on the humanitarian intervention by India in East Pakistan in 1971. In both cases, the legitimation of a rescue operation to save the lives of innocent civilians was severely impaired by certain underlying structures of the communicative action. Nicholas J. Wheeler has located them in the normative layer of international society with regard to the Indian case: ‘No member of the Security Council or General Assembly questioned the pluralist rules of sovereignty, non-intervention, and non-use of force; these constituted the space within which legitimate argumentation could take place.’ Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 74.

32 Ramesh Thakur, ‘Introduction’, in Ramesh Thakur (ed.), Past Imperfect, Future UNcertain (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 9.

33 Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), p. 13. Emphasis added by author.

34 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, 2nd edn (London: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 53.

35 Steve Smith, ‘Positivism and Beyond’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 11.

36 Hugh Lacey, ‘Neutrality in the Social Sciences: On Bhaskar's Argument for an Essential Emancipatory Impulse in Social Science’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 27:2/3 (1997), p. 224.

37 See, for example, Andrew Sayer, ‘Abstraction: A Realist Interpretation’, Radical Philosophy, 28:2 (1981), p. 9.

38 Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 1st edn (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 39–44.

39 Emphasis added by author. According to Rule 1 of the (Provisional) Rules of Procedure of the Security Council, the President of the Council can call a meeting of the Council ‘at any time he deems necessary’, at the request of any member of the Council (Rule 2), following a recommendation of the General Assembly (Rule 3) or following a request by the Secretary-General under Article 99 of the UN Charter. See Provisional Rules of Procedure of the Security Council, as Amended 21 Dec. 1982. UN Doc. S/96/Rev. 7; Sydney D. Bailey and Sam Daws, The Procedure of the UN Security Council, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 24.

40 Both the Secretariat and the UN Charter are considered here to constitute part of the ‘structural belt’, because the raison d'être of the former is the administration of UN institutions and the safeguarding of the principles established in the Charter. As the former Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding notes, ‘The political functions entrusted to the Secretary-General [under Articles 99 and 98 of the UN Charter] obliged him to be the guardian of the Charter, independent of all member states and impartial in his dealings with them.’ Goulding, ‘The UN Secretary-General’,p. 268.

41 Roy Bhaskar, ‘The Possibility of Naturalism’, 3rd edn, p. 170.

42 Ibid.

43 Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science (London: SAGE, 2000), p. 14.

44 Ibid., p. 15.

45 Bhaskar, ‘A Realist Theory of Science’, p. 34.

46 Bhaskar, ‘The Possibility of Naturalism’, 1st edn, pp. 124–37.

47 See, for example, Peter Wilenski, ‘The Structure of the UN in the Post-Cold War Period’, in Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury (eds), United Nations, Divided World: The UN's Roles in International Relations, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 437; Brian Urquhart, ‘The UN and International Security after the Cold War’, in Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury (eds.), United Nations, Divided World: The UN's Roles in International Relations, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 81.

48 Stephen Ryan, The United Nations and International Politics (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 65.

49 Roger A. Coate, David P. Forsythe and Thomas G. Weiss, The United Nations and Changing World Politics, 3rd edn (Oxford: Westview, 2001), p. 54.

50 Bhaskar, ‘A Realist Theory of Science’, p. 47.

51 Milja Kurki, Re-engaging with Aristotle: Evaluating Critical Realist Philosophy of Causation in Aristotelian Light. Paper presented to the Seventh Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism, the University of Amsterdam, 15–17 August 2003, p. 13.

52 UN Standby High Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG), composed of 4,000 troops from seven member states ready to be used by the Security Council for peacekeeping and preventive operations, is thus far the closest resemblance to Dutch Foreign Minister Hans Van Mierlo's vision of a ‘UN fire brigade’ and to Sir Brian Urquhart's concrete utopia of a 5,000-member brigade possessed by the Secretary-General independently of states. On SHIRBRIG, see Gareth Evans, ‘Cooperating for Peace’, in Ramesh Thakur (ed.), Past Imperfect, Future UNcertain (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 43. In the foreseeable future, however, the UN will most likely remain dependent on ad hoc commitments by states to send material and troops to UN peace operations.

53 On the definitions of the four Aristotelian causes and their relevance to IR theory, see Milja Kurki, ‘Causes of a Divided Discipline: Rethinking the Concept of Cause in International Relations Theory’, Review of International Studies, 32:2 (2006), pp. 206–9.

54 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 100.

55 By elaborating on the ontological reading of mechanisms suggested by Bhaskar, Colin Wight maintains that they can in fact be understood in two senses: as causal processes in general, and as control processes in particular. See Wight, ‘Theorizing the Mechanisms’, pp. 287–8. Both descriptions of mechanisms will be employed in this article. According to the former definition, a mechanism is simply a way of acting or working of a structured thing, for example, how bicycles or international organisations work in certain ways. See Tony Lawson, Economics and Reality (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 21. This generic type of mechanisms is referred to here as causal/synchronising/metaphysical mechanisms. In Hidemi Suganami's words, such mechanisms are simply ‘causal processes that work to bring about standardised outcomes’. In a more specific sense, mechanisms can be understood to constitute control processes which produce knowledge in order to monitor, for example, a security environment.

56 Colin Wight speaks of ‘differentiation’ between control and causal mechanisms. See Wight, ‘Theorizing the Mechanisms’, pp. 287–8. This study, by contrast, emphasises that the two groups of mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. Instead of ‘differentiation’, we should characterise the separation as ‘stratification’. That is because control mechanisms must comply with the same metaphysical ‘rules’ as any other (causal) mechanisms, although there is an emergent human attribute – an intentional plan or technique – embedded in control mechanisms that separates them from ordinary or natural (causal) mechanisms.

57 Martti Koskenniemi, ‘The Place of Law in Collective Security: Reflections on the Recent Activity of the Security Council’, in Anthony P. Jarvis, Albert J. Paolini and Christian Reus-Smith (eds), Between Sovereignty and Global Governance: The United Nations, the State and Civil Society (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 37.

58 Justin Morris, ‘UN Security Council Reform: A Counsel for the 21st Century’, Security Dialogue, 31:3 (2000), p. 266.

59 Anthony Parsons, ‘The UN and the National Interests of States’, in Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury (eds), United Nations, Divided World: The UN's Roles in International Relations, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 105–17.

60 Albert Bourgi and Jean-Pierre Colin, ‘Entre le Renouveau et la Crise: L'Organisation des Nations Unies en 1993’, Politique Étrangère, 58:3 (1993), p. 581.

61 Thierry Tardy, ‘Le Bilan de Dix Années d'Opérations de Maintien de la Paix’, Politique Étrangère, 65:2 (2000), p. 390.

62 Gareth Evans, Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 124.

63 On the ‘renaissance of the Security Council’ or what is also described in the literature as the ‘emergence of a new Council’ in the post-Cold War era, see Peter Wallensteen and Patrik Johansson, ‘Security Council Decisions in Perspective’, in David Malone (ed.), The UN Security Council in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), pp. 17–21.

64 Boutros-Ghali, ‘Unvanquished’, pp. 23–5.

65 Ibid., p. 26.

66 Ibid., p. 27. Emphasis added by author.

67 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping. Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to the Statement Adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992 (New York: United Nations, 1992), p. 13.

68 Quoted in Edward Newman, ‘Realpolitik and the CNN Factor’, in Dimitris Bourantonis and Jarrod Wiener (eds), The United Nations in the New World Order: The World Organization at Fifty (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 192.

69 Quoted in Michael G. Schechter, ‘Possibilities for Preventive Diplomacy, Early Warning and Global Monitoring in the Post-Cold War Era; or, the Limits to Global Structural Change’, in W. Andy Knight (ed.), Adapting the United Nations to a Postmodern Era (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p. 56.

70 Melvern, ‘The Ultimate Crime’, p. 10.

71 Kissinger, ‘Diplomacy’, p. 53. Emphasis added by author.

72 Koskenniemi, ‘The Place of Law in Collective Security’, p. 36.

73 Errol A. Henderson, ‘Neoidealism and the Democratic Peace’, Journal of Peace Research, 36:2 (1999), p. 203; Keohane and Martin, ‘The Promise of Institutionalist Theory’, p. 39.

74 Henderson, ‘Neoidealism and the Democratic Peace’, p. 205.

75 David Mitrany, The Functional Theory of Politics (London: Martin Robertson, 1975), p. 115.

76 Paul Taylor, International Co-operation Today: The European and the Universal Pattern (London: Elek Books, 1971), p. 55.

77 A. J. R. Groom and Paul Taylor, International Organisation: A Conceptual Approach (London: Frances Pinter, 1978), p. 244.

78 Mitrany, ‘The Functional Theory of Politics’, p. 96.

79 Ibid., p. 128.

80 Coate, Forsythe and Weiss, ‘The United Nations and Changing World Politics’, p. 76.

81 According to John Searle, the constitutive and regulative rules of a structure shape agents' expectations by informing them how to proceed or ‘go on’ in certain social contexts. Regulative rules take the form ‘Do X in context C’, whereas constitutive rules inform agents that ‘X counts as Y in context C’. See David Dessler, ‘What's at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?’, International Organization, 43:3 (1989), pp. 454–5.

82 Brent Fisse and John Braithwaite, Corporations, Crime and Accountability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 22.

83 See, for example, the ‘nonrecursive spiral model of the agent-structure reciprocal relationship’ by Walter Carlsnaes in Gil Friedman and Harvey Starr, Agency, Structure, and International Politics: From Ontology to Empirical Inquiry (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 27.

84 Ibid.

85 Moreover, states do not possess any pre-determined foreign policy because they are not only agents but also layered structures themselves, in which various agencies compete with one another and their interests may clash.

86 Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary (New York: Miramax, 2003), p. 150. Albright's aide describes that ‘I never saw Ambassador Albright so angry, up until that point. She was screaming on the phone, basically, down to Washington.’ Frontline, The Triumph of Evil: How the West Ignored Warnings of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide and Turned Its Back on the Victims. Interviews: Michael Sheehan. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/interviews/sheehan.html. accessed on 11 March 2007.

87 Particularly two US senators, Paul Simon and Jim Jeffords, became strong supporters of UNAMIR II (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda). See, for example, Roméo A. Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003), p. 372. Albright herself was a Czechoslovak refugee, whose family had fled Hitler's genocidal government.

88 In accordance with Article 27(3) of the UN Charter, any of the permanent members, the US, the UK, Russia, France, and China, has the power to veto a draft resolution or decision of the Council. The ten non-permanent members – six until the Charter amendment in 1965 – are elected for two-year periods by the General Assembly. As opposed to the mainstream literature characterised by the ‘blame game’ aimed at the ‘Permanent Five’, the recent investigations reveal the striking consensus prevailing in the Council on the way in which the Rwandan conflict was imagined and portrayed, a consensus that cannot be explained solely by the lack of political will or by the Realpolitik of permanent Council members. It can only be explained by certain underlying mechanisms which affected all members of the Council, Nigeria as well as the US. See Piiparinen, ‘Producing Images of Genocide’, p. 206. The veto of great powers cannot therefore provide a satisfactory explanation of the UN's failure in Rwanda.

89 An interview with Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on Africa, Professor Ibrahim Gambari at UN Headquarters, New York, on 2 December 2003.

90 The Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25) determined that if the US was to be involved in any UN operation, it had to have a direct bearing on US national interests. The restrictionist interpretation of PDD-25 believes that this condition was not satisfied by Rwanda. During and after the Cold War, the US had no military presence or interest in Rwanda. PDD-25 was signed by President Clinton just before the beginning of the Rwandan genocide, which explains the eagerness of the US to pull UNAMIR out of Rwanda as quickly as possible. See Alain Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (London: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 50. While this restrictionist position towards PDD-25 is evident in the mainstream literature, most notably in the work of Destexhe, more elaborate accounts point out that PDD-25 actually states that it is in the national interest of the US to support UN peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operations when there is ‘gross violation of human rights coupled with violence’ or ‘the threat of violence’. See Wheeler, ‘Saving Strangers’, p. 224; Oliver Ramsbotham and Tom Woodhouse, Humanitarian Intervention in Contemporary Conflict: A Reconceptualization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 141. Hence, although PDD-25 did cast the ‘shadow of Somalia’ over subsequent US policy on peacekeeping, it did not constitute an insurmountable obstacle to US involvement in Rwanda, as gross human rights violations were occurring there.

91 These potential powers of the UN in relation to US decision-making are well illustrated by the following statement from the Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs (1986–1994) in the US Department of Defense, James Woods: ‘If the UN had decided to make a vigorous response and had made an urgent request to the president [of the US] to airlift them [intervention troops] in, there would have been a very good chance that we would have responded positively […] However, both the U.S. and the UN would have had to have painted a much more realistic, which is to say, bleaker picture of the catastrophe, which was rapidly unfolding […] If the UN under those conditions, had said, “Let's reinforce our troops […] and try to put this thing down,” and called on the U.S. to play its own part, there would have been a good chance we could have been persuaded or shamed into participating.’ Frontline, The Triumph of Evil: How the West Ignored Warnings of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide and Turned Its Back on the Victims. Interviews: James Woods, p. 3. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/interviews/woods.html. accessed on 11 March 2007.

92 David Malone, ‘Introduction’, in David Malone (ed.), The UN Security Council in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), p. 3.

93 On this political realist image, see, for example, Astri Suhrke, ‘UN Peace-Keeping in Rwanda’, in Gunnar M. Sørbø and Peter Vale (eds), Out of Conflict: From War to Peace in Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1997), p. 102.

94 See, for example, Bruce Wallace, ‘The Rwanda Debacle’, Maclean's, 113:2 (2000), p. 34.

95 The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), p. xi; Adam Roberts, ‘The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention’, in Jennifer M. Welsh (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 94–5.