Ms Josie Hornung1
1University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Biography:
Josie Hornung is a final year PhD candidate at the University of Queensland under the supervision of Chris Reus-Smit and Alex Bellamy, funded by an Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities doctoral scholarship. During her candidature, she completed a visiting DPhil fellowship at the University of Oxford and a research internship at the Australian Civil-Military Centre. In 2019/2020, she was awarded the prestigious AEUIFAI Postgraduate Research Fellowship to attend the European University Institute in Florence. She graduated from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Arts (International Relations) and a Master of International Relations (Advanced) with honours.
Abstract:
This paper, based on my doctoral research, explores the forces and factors that have, historically, affected when states will or won't use force to prevent imminent mass atrocities. Despite the prioritisation of prevention, states continue to respond inconsistently to similar cases and face accusations of selectivity. States navigate contested calls to do something and do nothing, bound by competing normative and institutional commitments. The ‘paucity of thinking’ on controversial coercive prevention measures has resulted in a limited understanding of the associated operational, legal, and ethical challenges that arise from their use. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by linking moral choices, personal ethics, and institutional norms.
My argument unfolds in two parts. First, it is essential to recognise the tragic nature of moral choice in understanding the decision to prevent atrocities, highlighting the complexities and trade-offs inherent in such decisions, which challenges the binary framework that has dominated post-Cold War humanitarian intervention debates. Second, I emphasize the conditions impacting these choices, conceptualizing them as an ‘ecology’ that includes context, contingency, opportunity structures, institutional evolution, and advancements in communication technology. The tragic nature of moral choice shifts as this ecology changes. The transformation of the global organization of political authority and communicative technology is key to understanding the evolution of individual agency and moral choice, as illustrated across my four empirical case studies. This approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the processes behind these critical decisions that incorporates context, agency and moral choice into its theoretical framework.