Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, discusses how Latin America has been a protagonist in the development of human rights law, not just a victim of global politics. And as war wages in the Ukraine, she gives us her thoughts on how international law has virtually put an end to what she calls “aggressive interstate wars” in Latin America.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the author of many books, including Evidence for Hope, Making Human Rights Work in the 21st century. Welcome Kathryn.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You know, many of us who are news junkies are closely following the situation between Russia and Ukraine. And this kind of tension reminds me of a time that I was reporting in Latin America in which countries were constantly invading each other for things like access to the ocean or even a war sparked by a soccer game. So I was really interested in your analysis of why these types of what you call aggressive interstate wars have virtually stopped in the region. Could you talk a little bit about this fascinating work?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Well, this is about an as-yet unpublished work, an unpublished paper that's currently under review that looks at trying to explain why there's been a decline in international war. So I'm an international relations scholar, and international relations scholars have for a long time kept a database about different types of war, including international war and civil wars. And one dramatic trend in the international war data is that it's been declining significantly, but we don't have a good explanation for it. We've explored all different explanations, democracy, trade, nuclear weapons, but it turns out no one has ever looked seriously at whether international law itself has contributed to this decline.
Kathryn Sikkink:
So that's what I do with my co-authors, my very capable co-authors, especially Averell Schmidt, one of my PhD students here at the Kennedy School. And we find that international law does make a difference. What does that mean? Basically states since the interwar period, since after World War I, states have been working to use law to diminish war by such treaties, such famous treaties as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and of course the UN Charter. The UN charter has as its main purpose to end the scourge of war.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Most observers think that this is just cheap talk. They think it hasn't made any difference at all, but they do not realize this trend in declining war. So we are trying to test the impact of law on that trend.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You chose quantitative statistical analysis for a lot of this paper. Is that unusual for you? And what challenges did you face?
Kathryn Sikkink:
I am not the quantitative expert on this paper. That's why I mentioned Averell Schmidt's name, but also Arup Mukherjee, the two more quantitative. But this is the second time I've really turned to quantitative research. In my research on transitional justice around the world, I also helped construct a database and do quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of human rights prosecutions and truth commissions.
Kathryn Sikkink:
I did that with transitional justice and now with war, because I discovered that if you make an argument like war is declining, or like law contributes to war declining, they don't believe you. Likewise, when I worked on transitional justice, I said the amount of transitional justice in the world is increasing as I'm seeing from my work in Latin America. And a lot of people said, "Well, in Argentina, there's a lot of trials, but no place else." And that's when I started building my database to try to be more persuasive.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Do you feel that people believe you once you have those numbers?
Kathryn Sikkink:
I have long used qualitative research and historical research, and I continue to use the qualitative and historical. What I think helps is the combination of the two. And that is to get a lot of information from the qualitative work as I got from my work on transitional justice in Latin America, but then to add the quantitative, to really test the hypotheses that I'm generating from my qualitative research.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Could you tell some of our listeners who may not be familiar with these treaties, what they are?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Okay. So as I said, after World War I, the world was truly shocked with the carnage of the war and there was a huge peace movement in the interwar period, including efforts by states to pass law prohibiting war. And one of those was the Kellogg-Briand Pact done by Kellogg and Briand, the foreign minister and secretary of state of the US and France. But people ignore that a lot was happening in Latin America at the time, so here we get to the DRCLAS piece of it.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Latin American countries had been working on this issue even before the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and particularly Latin American countries had really stressed the need for conciliation and arbitration, legal means to deal with territorial disputes that were rampant to the region as an alternative to wars. Latin America was one of the regions that had made most use of arbitration to deal with these territorial disputes.
Kathryn Sikkink:
But most famously, the most ignored of the Latin American treaties is a treaty called the Saavedra Lamas Pact, or the Anti-War Treaty of Conciliation. In 1933, that gained a lot of traction in the region, but also outside the region. A number of countries outside the region, especially in Europe, also ratified the treaty.
Kathryn Sikkink:
And so we look not only at these treaties from the global north, but we also look for the first time at the impact of the Saavedra Lamas Treaty on peace.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Can you tell us a little bit more about that treaty
Kathryn Sikkink:
First, anyone listening to a DRCLAS podcast will know that Argentina was kind of famous for its aspirations to regional leadership, and for its conflict with United States in its opposition to US kind of imperialism in the region. So in Argentina, they weren't wild about the Kellogg-Briand Pact, because even though it said that you were going to abolish war, both the US and the UK made it clear that they didn't see that was going to affect their wars in their spheres of influence.
Kathryn Sikkink:
So Britain said, "Oh yeah, we are going to abolish war, but this doesn't apply to the colonies." And the US Secretary of State in testimony in the Senate about the Kellogg-Briand Pact said, "Oh yeah. And it doesn't affect the Monroe Doctrine," which Latin Americans know is a way of saying it doesn't affect our ability to intervene in the region. So Argentina did not ratify the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Many other Latin American countries did.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Argentina proposed an alternative that they felt could also address war, but did not have those imperial overtones to it. And that was the Saavedra Lamas Pact. It advocated, one, abolishing not all war but aggressive war, but it didn't define aggressive war. In other words, not wars of self defense, but aggressive war. It called for conciliation as an alternative to war. So it called for using a legal means as an alternative.
Kathryn Sikkink:
The interesting thing is that Saavedra Lamas and Kellogg-Briand both received Nobel Peace Prizes in different years for their work on these treaties. And so Saavedra Lamas's work was recognized at the time as important. It was the first Nobel Peace Prize from Latin America, but it was later forgotten or even dismissed.
Kathryn Sikkink:
So when I first talked about Saavedra Lamas, my Argentine friend was like, "Oh, Saavedra Lamas." He did work for an authoritarian regime, the [inaudible 00:07:44] government in Argentina. And so I think they didn't take into account this kind of quite progressive international stance and international activity with regard to ending war.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I'm a little confused here, but you're talking about these treaties, which go back to the first part of the 20th century. And yet in the sixties and the seventies, we see a lot of countries invading each other. We see the Falklands, the Malvinas. So what's the missing piece here?
Kathryn Sikkink:
There are a couple of missing pieces. The first thing, no one thinks that law works immediately. Those of us who work on laws and norms know that laws and norms are not products but long historical processes. So what our research tries to capture is that there's a long process. There's a hundred year process now of states trying to abolish war. And we're trying to do research that looks at this whole hundred year period.
Kathryn Sikkink:
So I've spoken at these two treaties, but then we look at the UN Charter, which is a very important treaty for ending war, but you can't use it alone to test the impact of war because all countries are members of it. So there's no variation. And then we actually look at the Rome Statute, which is the most recent development in this body of law that criminalizes aggressive war and allows for prosecution of individual state leaders who initiate aggressive war. So we're looking at a big spread of time and trying to figure out how to test the impact of law developed over a long time.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You talk about alternatives to war, like arbitration conciliation. Can you give us a couple of examples of how this has worked in Latin America?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Yeah, I will, but I want to do it as I kind of finish answering your last question. In terms of war in Latin America, the last major international war in Latin America was the Chaco War, which was between 1932 and 1935 between Paraguay and Bolivia. It's estimated somewhere about a hundred thousand battle deaths, most of those, many of those, were indigenous people from Bolivia and Paraguay who fought a very brutal war.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Since that time, there have been four or five international wars which is, in international terms, not very many. One of them is as you mentioned, the Falklands-Malvinas War. One of them is the Soccer War you mentioned, the so-called Soccer War. It wasn't just about soccer. It did start between Honduras and El Salvador with some conflict in a soccer match, but it was a war very much about what Salvadorian thought was the mistreatment of Salvadorian individuals in Honduras. So there was kind of a human rights concern behind it.
Kathryn Sikkink:
And then there were some border disputes between Ecuador and Peru that did rise to the level of war. When I say rise to the level, usually international relations specialists code a war at a thousand battle deaths a year. But as you see, all of these wars since the Chaco War have had very low levels of battle deaths, and they've lasted a very short time. I think the Soccer War lasted five days, for example. Why? Because the OAS and these negotiators are rushing in to use these alternative mechanisms, conciliation, arbitration, mediation, to try to deal with these wars.
Kathryn Sikkink:
So as opposed to the Chaco War, which is going on three years, just terrible deaths in the battlefield, you have quite short wars that do lead to death, but are nothing compared to some of these long deadly wars of the past. And I say one of the reasons for that, we say qualitatively, historically, we see arbitration, but quantitatively we see this decline as well.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Can you give an example concretely of how arbitration, reconciliation has worked in Latin America?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So in the paper, we talk about wars and almost-wars or not wars. And there's a very interesting case between Chile and Argentina during the dictatorships in both countries over the Beagle Islands. Chile claimed them. Argentina claimed them. There was an arbitration, and the arbitration court awarded them all to Chile. It had to do with where the main Beagle Channel ran.
Kathryn Sikkink:
But Argentina did not accept the arbitration, and during the dictatorship, they were poised, they literally were poised to send troops to the islands. The troops were mobilized. But at the last minute General Videla who, we know that this junta later was quite warlike in the Malvinas. But General Videla goes to the papal nuncio in Buenos Aires and says, "We're getting ready to invade these islands." It's not the kind of thing governments do. They don't advertise to the pope's representative that they're going to invade.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Why does Videla do this? It seems to me, the only good explanation for it is that he needs to prevent the war. That the move towards war is [inaudible 00:12:29], he was known as more of a hardliner. And I think Videla knew that if Argentina went to war, it would uniformly be seen as a war of aggression. Chile had had this arbitration, had been awarded these by arbitration. And Chile and Argentina both, but Argentina in particular was already under international condemnation for its human rights practices. They didn't need more condemnation as a country launching a war of aggression. And the Pope stepped forward. The Pope named someone immediately to negotiate. They did negotiate. The final agreement did not come until after re-democratization in Argentina in '83, but the war was stopped. And that's an example of how these norms and law and arbitration can block some wars.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's a fascinating example. I know you don't have a crystal ball. I can't see one there, but would you predict this is going to be the trend of the future in Latin America?
Kathryn Sikkink:
The question I wanted you to ask was, "Okay, fine about the Beagles, but why does Argentina to go to war?" If it's so concerned about wars of aggression, why does it go to war in the Malvinas shortly after it doesn't go to war in the Beagle Islands? And the argument we make is that the Argentine case was in a different frame, and that was a decolonization frame. That the Malvinas had been under observation by the UN as a decolonization issue for many years. They passed resolutions all the time. The Argentine believed that it would not be treated as a war of aggression more generally, but it would be treated as a decolonization war. And there was some, not legal support, but kind of normative support that decolonizing countries could at times when pushed use violence.
Kathryn Sikkink:
As you know, they didn't succeed. They got condemned by the UN Security Council, but they did not get condemned as roundly in the General Assembly. They actually got a lot of support in the General Assembly, and they got a lot of support from other Latin countries who did see it as a decolonization issue. And so I think there are some exceptions. There's still exceptions to when you can go to war. And one of them is decolonization is an exception. And another one is this emerging issue of humanitarian intervention. And so we look at both the laws, but you also look at sometimes there's exceptions in these two cases of human rights and decolonization,
June Carolyn Erlick:
You've talked a bit about decolonization, but could you please explain and put in context for Latin America, this concept of humanitarian intervention?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Latin American countries do not support the idea of humanitarian intervention. And that is they do not support the idea that you could ever use military intervention to confront a grave human rights violation. But globally, there has been some support for this idea. It's called responsibility to protect. Responsibility to protect has been misunderstood. It's not a green flag for military intervention under any guise, but it is saying sovereignty is supposed to be used to protect your population, not attack it. Countries who fail to do that, the international communities should assist them in making sure that their population is protected, not abused. And when all else has been tried and nothings succeeds, you still can go to the UN Security Council and try to get military intervention.
Kathryn Sikkink:
That's the actual language of R2P. It's become understood as justifying unilateral military intervention. Some people think that Iraq, for example, the United States invaded Iraq illegally in violation of the laws I'm talking about, in part using this R2P, responsibility to protect, justification.
Kathryn Sikkink:
But there is some support, as we know, in the world when we see terrible genocide occurring, a lot of people thought the world should have gotten military involved in Rwanda to stop the genocide there. Many African states called for that and felt that the world had ignored them, and the world didn't care about genocide in Africa, because it did not respond militarily to genocide in Rwanda. And so there's a global debate going on still about under what conditions international actors might sometimes respond militarily to mass atrocity.
June Carolyn Erlick:
But why do you think Latin American? States aren't in favor of this?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Latin American states have seen too much abuse of this, mainly by the US historically. So they say the US is always claiming to support humanitarian issues as it's invading Grenada or invading Panama, or historically invading Haiti or supporting covert intervention into Guatemala. There's always the expressions of good intentions. And so they say we've got to draw the line. We've got to say, "No, you cannot use military invention for any reason, including to promote human rights."
June Carolyn Erlick:
Okay. Now I'm going to ask you to get out your crystal ball for Latin America.
Kathryn Sikkink:
I believe that we will continue to see very, very few if any international war in Latin America. I think that the trend will continue that Latin countries will continue to have disagreements, including very substantial disagreements over territory, but that they will mainly resolve their difficulties through law and through courts. As an example, I want to use example of Belize and Guatemala.
Kathryn Sikkink:
Guatemala, I don't know if you remember, there used to be a time you went to Guatemala and you saw a map of Guatemala that just included Belize. Right? Guatemala just pretended that Belize was part of Guatemala. They saw it as a decolonization issue like the Malvinas. They said that Britain should have passed Belize to Guatemala.
Kathryn Sikkink:
But Belize did not want to be part of Guatemala. And when Belize got independence in the early 1980s, Guatemala lost most of its support for its claims. I mean, many Latin countries supported Guatemala's claims to Belize, but once Belize was independent, this shows the influence of this law, you couldn't support Guatemala's claims that it might invade Belize to support its decolonization claims. And so now that case has been a long time before the ICJ, the International Court of Justice. It's still pending, I just checked. But I think Guatemala is not going to invade Belize and we're going to get a judgment out of the ICJ, and they're going to basically agreed to those borders.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Thank you. You study international relations and global politics. In your work you seem to emphasize the role of Latin America, not mainly as a victim of global politics, although you've just named lots of invasions, but also as a protagonist. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So there's a bit of a trend and some of it comes out of critical legal studies, and some post-colonial critical studies, to stress domination of the global south by the global north. I recognize and embrace some of that. I think it's important never to forget the history of US intervention in Latin American, and especially some tragic examples, like our intervention in Guatemala in '54 or in Chile in '73. So I don't want to minimize intervention by the global north in the global south.
Kathryn Sikkink:
What I worry about is when the global south is characterized always as a victim, and sometimes by scholars based in the global north who haven't bothered to do research in the global south. And so they miss these really important historical developments that show this ability of countries in the global south to resist, to push back, to propose, and to succeed in getting legal and political developments.
Kathryn Sikkink:
In Latin America, my research has pointed to the role that Latin American countries played in developing human rights law in the first place. When I was in Argentina or Uruguay in the seventies, these military governments wanted to say that human rights was all cultural imperialism by Jimmy Carter. Well, the [inaudible 00:20:11] had interest in erasing the history of Latin American activism for human rights. But if you go back and look at the drafting of the UN Charter, the UN Charter would not include human rights if it weren't for the actions of 20 Latin American states that were present in San Francisco and who worked together with NGOs. And I promise you, the UK and the US tried to block getting human rights issues into the UN Charter, a binding legal agreement.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So could you talk a little bit more about how Latin America has contributed to human rights law?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So first the UN Charter. 50 countries were at San Francisco where the UN Charter was drafted. 20 were Latin American countries. They had a big plurality. They at the time were mainly democratic and they worked together to advocate for human rights. Next, the first intergovernmental declaration of human rights in the world is the American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man. Now that should be called the Latin American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man. It was 19 Latin American states and the US. It was passed in Bogota, Colombia in April, 1948.
Kathryn Sikkink:
In other words, it was passed eight months before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is usually given credit as the document for the birth of human rights. Everyone ignores the American declaration. When I went back and did the research I thought maybe they ignored the American declaration because basically the two were on the same track and the Latin Americans just got there first. But the full draft of the American declaration was being circulated to states from the Inter-American Juridical Committee in 1946, before there were as a full draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Kathryn Sikkink:
And you should read the draft, 50-page draft, 1946, from the Inter-American Juridical Committee on why we needed a declaration of human rights and what rights would be included and why they'd be included. And people who don't read that and who think that human rights began in 1970 because Jimmy Carter insisted on it, it's just deeply ahistorical to ignore that. The dictatorships had a reason to make us forget it, but these scholars should not embrace that position of the dictators, that Latin Americans wouldn't have thought about human rights if it weren't due to cultural imperialism from the global north.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You just came back from Uruguay, could you tell us what you were working on there?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Partly I'm in Uruguay because I go to Uruguay every year and partly I was on vacation. But the thing I am working on in Uruguay right now with scholars at the University of the Republic in Montevideo is a survey. We're doing a survey working together also with scholars in Brazil and Chile, a regional survey that focuses a lot on regional identity. Do Latin Americans have a sense of regional identity? And is that sense of regional identity higher in Latin America than it is in other regions of the world?
Kathryn Sikkink:
So I'm working with something called the Region's Cluster at the Weatherhead Center, which brings together regional scholars from all parts of the world. And we are having surveys in Latin America, in Asia. We hope also in the Middle East and maybe in Africa. So I've gotten some support from DRCLAS to work with these colleagues in Brazil and Chile and Uruguay to launch these surveys. There will be a survey Mexico. In fact, the survey in Mexico has already been conducted. We already have that data.
Kathryn Sikkink:
So this relates, if you wish, to my research on the war issue. And that is that there was this sense of Latin American commonality with regard to the need to abolish war and the need to use legal means. So I'm curious now, in a global perspective, whether Latin America has more regional identity than other regions.
June Carolyn Erlick:
And when you say Latin America, are you including the Caribbean? Are you including Central America?
Kathryn Sikkink:
We're including all of Spanish-speaking Latin America. So that would include the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, but not the English-speaking Caribbean. And of course, Brazil, no one's leaving out Brazil, but earlier research, there has been one excellent survey before. It showed that the Brazilians had the lowest level of a sense of regional identity. They don't think that themselves as Latin Americans. And interestingly enough, the Chileans had a very high level of regional identity, of saying they do think of themselves as Chileans, but of course also as Latin Americans.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You've written extensively about human rights, about transitional justice. How does human rights activism engage with your scholarly pursuits? Are there contradictions or do they reinforce each other?
Kathryn Sikkink:
Before I went to do my PhD, I did an almost two-year stint with the human rights organization in Washington, DC called the Washington Office on Latin America. I learned a lot doing that work. I deeply believed in the work they were doing, and I worked with amazing people. But I discovered I had a more scholarly temperament. I kept saying, "Do we really know if cutting off economic aid to repressive regimes will improve their practices? Can't we do some more research on this?" And I realized that I was going to be more comfortable in an academic setting doing research than in an activist setting and often lobbying. But I've always done research that I hope and think will be useful to people in activism.
Kathryn Sikkink:
So the research on transitional justice, I designed this whole database saying is the use of transitional justice associated or not with improvements in human rights? And one of the main findings, and this is with better and better data and multiple studies and different methods, that the use of human rights prosecutions is associated with improvements in core human rights. And I think that's quite useful to activists for demanding prosecutions.
Kathryn Sikkink:
We don't actually find the same clear result for truth commissions. I'm not cooking my data to give answers that activists want to hear. I'm often saying things to activists that they don't want to hear, like the fact that reparation, reparations policies, I think may have incredible benefits for victims. So there's reasons to justify reparations policies. We don't see any association between reparations and a decline in human rights violations. I design research of interest to activists, but sometimes my research reveals answers that activists are not necessarily what they want to hear.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Well, is there anything else that you would like to add that I haven't asked you?
Kathryn Sikkink:
One of the things that I've learned from my historical research in Latin America is that there is a wealth of material in Latin American archives, including Latin American diplomatic archives, that Latin American scholars are now starting to mine and need to pay more attention to. The whole trend towards historical research on social actors was amazing. So we know a lot about civil society. We know a lot about labor organizations. But diplomatic history went kind of out of style, and new young scholars were not going to the diplomatic archives. These master's students, the PhD students around the region should also be looking at international relations, should also be going their diplomatic archives because there's a lot of exciting material there that for the most part has not been used.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Are you using it?
Kathryn Sikkink:
I have been. I've been in the diplomatic archives in Uruguay, for example. I've stuff from Mexico. But I was headed for the archives in Argentina when the pandemic hit and I was blocked from doing them. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to get back. It was during my sabbatical. So that's why it's hard for people from abroad to get in those archives. But local scholars can. I hope local Argentine scholars can be watching when the archives finally reopen, they're still not open, after the pandemic and can really use that.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Well, thank you very much for your time. You've been listening to Kathryn Sikkink, is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the author of many books, including Evidence for Hope, Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century.