Date of Award

Spring 5-16-2026

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Advisor(s)

Anjali Dayal, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Sarah P. Lockhart, Ph.D.

Abstract

The United Nations’ failures to prevent mass atrocities in Rwanda (1994), Srebrenica (1995), and Syria (2011) have sparked persistent calls for institutional reforms to overcome P5 veto gridlock and bureaucratic paralysis. This thesis asks the question: “what United Nations reforms could realistically enhance the UN’s ability to effectively intervene in cases of humanitarian crises?” To answer this question, this thesis employs rigorous counterfactual analysis to test whether three specific institutional reforms would have realistically prevented these humanitarian catastrophes: (1) providing the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) with limited binding authority under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, (2) the UN Secretary General being empowered to deploy humanitarian military intervention under humanitarian imperatives, (3) establishing new protective norms and standards beyond the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Through comparative analysis pairing each failure with a successful intervention case (Rwanda with East Timor, Srebrenica with Somalia’s UNITAF operation, and Syria with Libya), this thesis evaluates whether the proposed reforms would have altered authorization processes, deployment speed, mandate robustness, and operational effectiveness in each historical context. The findings reveal that reform effectiveness depends critically on the specific failure mechanism and the operational context of each crisis. In Rwanda, where the primary failure was political paralysis and delayed response, all three reforms would have been highly effective by enabling preventive deployment with robust Chapter VII mandate. In Srebrenica, where authorization existed but operational capacity was insufficient, the reforms would have been moderately to highly effective by mandating combat-ready forces rather than weak peacekeeping operations. However, the Syria case reveals the limits of institutional reforms: while the proposed changes would have successfully overcome the authorization hurdle created by Russian and Chinese vetoes, they would likely have worsened civilian suffering by triggering balanced counterintervention and prolonging the multi-sided conflict. These divergent outcomes challenge the conventional wisdom that authorization barriers are the primary obstacle to effective humanitarian intervention, demonstrating that overcoming the P5 veto gridlock is necessary but not sufficient for saving civilian lives. The thesis concludes that effective UN reform must be conditional and context-sensitive, coupling authorization mechanisms with institutionalized operational feasibility assessment to enable decisive action where intervention can succeed while preserving the wisdom to refrain where it cannot.

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