The United Nations as a Site of Norm Contestation: Humanitarianism and Sovereignty in Disaster Relief

Since its inception, the United Nations (UN) has served as a central arena for the articulation and contestation of global norms, particularly in the fields of human rights and humanitarianism. Efforts to enhance the protection of individuals have long been shaped by divergent interpretations among member-states, initially along East–West and Third World lines during the Cold War, and more recently along the North-South divide. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), advanced within the UN in the early 2000s in response to atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, has emerged as a significant, though controversial, framework for humanitarian protection in armed conflict. Subsequent initiatives sought to extend elements of R2P to peacetime disaster relief, most notably through the International Law Commission’s (ILC) Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters (DA), now under negotiation for a binding treaty following a 2024 UN General Assembly resolution. Like R2P, the DA’s effort to privilege humanitarianism over national sovereignty proved controversial, generating extensive debates among member states over how to balance these competing principles. Yet the sources of states’ preferences in these debates remain poorly understood. This paper seeks to explain variation in member-states’ positions on humanitarianism and sovereignty in the context of disaster relief. We argue that states’ perspectives are shaped by their experience with disaster response, whether as recipients or providers of assistance, as well as by their broader orientation toward humanitarian norms. Empirically, we employ large language models to analyze transcripts of the ILC’s deliberations on the DA, identifying patterns of agreement and disagreement over key normative trade-offs. Our findings offer insights into the prospects for global rules on disaster relief – an increasingly urgent issue given the growing frequency and costs of disasters.