Impossible expectations? The UN Security Council's promotion of the rule of law after conflict

Abstract

Introduction Post-conflict interveners tend to invoke big, abstract, idealistic, intertwined, self-evidently good ideas to justify their interventions in foreign societies. Democracy, justice, liberty, human rights and security are just some of these concepts. Another is the rule of law. As with each of these ideas, it is difficult to argue in the abstract that efforts to build the rule of law could be anything other than a good thing. But the devil is in the detail. Just what is meant by the rule of law and whose law does it imply? As Grenfell explores elsewhere in this volume, is it a principle of international law or domestic law, or both? Is it Western, state-based law or indigenous customary law, or both? Over the last decade, the United Nations Security Council has increasingly sought to promote the rule of law in post-conflict environments by including the task of strengthening the rule of law in the mandates of UN peacekeeping operations. The combined approach of the Council, the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations and specific UN peacekeeping operations suggests that the rule of law is something that is commonly understood and can easily be (re)produced, (re)created or (re)constructed in any post-conflict situation. The implication is that the challenge is simply to get the strategy right: to identify a good blueprint, to adapt it to the particular circumstances of each situation and then to access and allocate sufficient human and financial resources to bring success.