Despite various existing international law enforcement motives, this task has become increasingly difficult over the past decades. The institutions and organizations established to stabilize and enforce international order after World War II often failed to fulfill their duties. For instance, in 2002, the United States ignored voting in the United Nations Security Council and launched a military operation in Iraq the following year (Mingst et al., 2019). On several occasions, the UN peacekeeping efforts failed utterly as UN forces could not prevent numerous civilian deaths. The most notable examples are the genocide in Rwanda, the Darfur crisis, and the operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Mingst et al., 2019). The root of the UN’s inability to enforce international law lies in anachronistic, overly state-centric models of operation. Effective dealing with contemporary issues like migration, terrorism, or WMDs requires a transnational jurisdiction and central direction. Instead, the UN operates via an array of agencies that have separate budgets and governing bodies (Weiss, 2009). Finally, an anachronistic design of the Security Council, where five member states can use a veto to lead any issue into a deadlock, cripples the UN’s law enforcement capacity even further.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN legal organ established to resolve disputes between states, suffers from similar flaws. ICJ lacks the transnational authority necessary for enforcing its rulings. In the case of national law, its sources are strictly specified in a constitution (Elrafei, 2015). As a result, a supreme court can enforce the law, making the parties legally bound to abide by the rulings. However, international law does not have a strict hierarchy of legislation, which renders the ICJ’s jurisdiction non-compulsory. Due to this problem, the ICJ rarely deals with major cases, such as the Vietnam War or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (Mingst et al., 2019). Given the ICJ’s weakness, a powerful country can disregard ICJ and justify its aggressive actions with customary law. For example, the international community accepts the belief that a state has a right to self-defense (Elrafei, 2015). A global power like the United States, China, or Russia may use that legal custom to justify full-scale “preemptive” wars, claiming that the target of invasion threatened their national security. While such claims may be completely false, the ICJ would be unable to persecute the offenders.
One may argue that religious ethics could fill the vacuum, acting as a moral compass of law enforcement where the UN and ICJ fail to serve justice. However, such a perspective would likely be overly idealistic, as one can see in the U.S. case, where Christian citizens embraced, tolerated, or ignored the controversial foreign policy of the United States. Christian thought contributed to the development of the just war theory that perceives war as a last resort (Mingst et al., 2019). Nevertheless, Christians may still consider war, alliances with dictators or non-participation in humanitarian action justified. Katherine Marshall mentioned a problem of religious mistrust toward secular development institutions (Berkley Center, 2015). Likewise, religious individuals may consider international institutions unethical and godless. In addition, certain perceptions of an opposing side may incentivize a religious mind to disregard the ethics of their religion. In the eyes of some Christian Americans, the values of compassion and mercy might have been inapplicable to godless Vietnamese communists and Islamic fundamentalists. As such, religion may contribute to the development of biased attitudes and support of controversial policies, which negatively affects its applicability to international relations.
References
Berkley Center. (2015). Katherine Marshall on religions and development [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Elrafei, H. (2015). International law explained | Sources of public international law [Video]. YouTube. Web.
Mingst, K.A., McKibben, H. E., & , ArreguĂn-Toft, I. M. (2019). Essentials of international relations (8th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
done in as little as 1 hour
Weiss, T. G. (2009). What happened to the idea of world government. International Studies Quarterly, 53(2), 253-271. Web.