The Foreign Service Journal, December 2022

ISTOCK/ GRINVALDS THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2022 55 When Is It ETHICAL to Resign in Protest? Steve Walker, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and no relation to the Stephen Walker discussed here, is a senior diplomatic fellow at the Wilson Center. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of State or the U.S. government. FOCUS Using a case study from the Bosnia War, a Senior FSO discusses the ethics of resignation over policy. BY STEVE WALKER S tate Department employees are profes- sionally obligated to publicly support the policies of the administration they serve. But policy disagreements can become moral quandaries. At what point should an employee who disagrees with U.S. policy resign? This article, drawing on the case of Stephen Walker [no relation to the author!], a Foreign Service officer who resigned his position in 1993 to protest the Clinton administration’s policy on the war in Bosnia, argues that resignation should be an ethical act— that disagreeing with policy may not be adequate justification. The Bosnia War and U.S. Policy Yugoslavia imploded in a violent frenzy of nationalism, ethnic clashes, and historical score-settling when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia declared independence in 1991, followed by Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. Serbia and Montenegro formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia but became separate countries in 2006. Kosovo, previously a part of Serbia, became independent in 2008. In Muslim-majority Bosnia and Herzegovina, the minority Serbs declared an independent “republic” and, with support from neighboring Serbia, launched a brutal war of territorial expansion. Bosnian Serb militias fired on civilians; committed sexual violence; engaged in prolonged, indiscriminate shelling of innocents in Sarajevo and other cities; tortured prisoners in detention camps; and refused to allow humanitarian assistance to sick and starving civilians. Anyone who lived through the period remembers the horrifying photographs. “Ethnic cleans- ing” entered the international lexicon as Bosnian Serb forces destroyed entire Muslim villages and engaged in mass killing. United Nations actions—an arms embargo on all parties, deployment of peacekeepers, sanctions, declaration of a no-fly