PAUL KAN - LIGHT EDIT
Humanitarian Intervention, War, and the State
… In modern civil wars, the legitimacy of the state is further challenged by its inability (or unwillingness) to protect its own citizens: 90 percent of casualties are civilians and not soldiers. It is not surprising that civil wars like those in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, and Kosovo are associated with humanitarian tragedies that have led to the massive outflow of refugees and displaced people internally. For instance, by 1993, 1 out of every 130 people on earth was forced to flee a war. Beyond the mass movement of people, civil wars have culminated in human atrocities, such as genocide, by the belligerents. The violent effects produced by civil wars have made them of greater concern to the international community. Civil wars are also notoriously the most difficult conflicts to resolve; only a quarter to a third of them have found their way to negotiation tables.
The frequency, effects, and nature of civil wars have broadened the discussion of international security by including human rights considerations. Humanitarian intervention—or the multilateral use of outside military force authorized by an international organization to quell massive abuses of human rights—has been the most utilized response to emergency situations where a state is divided by civil war and where such division is causing immense human suffering. Humanitarian intervention also has been the most practiced deployment of force by industrialized nations in the post-Cold War era. The proliferation of this type of intervention, with its mandate to protect populations from harm, may be leading to further development of human-rights standards that supersede the sanctity of state sovereignty.
Changes in patterns of war and intervention do not occur, however, in a vacuum; they often are reflections of prevailing international economic conditions and international power arrangements organized by a dominant state, or hegemony. These changes, in turn, create effects in the global system and raise the question: What have been the effects of military and humanitarian interventions on the guiding norms of international behavior, such as human rights, and on existing institutions in the international arena, like the state? By answering this question in this dissertation, the implications of humanitarian intervention in relation to states and the development of international norms are addressed.
Often overlooked in the current debate over humanitarian intervention has been its relationship to socio-economic trends in the global society. Indeed, it is no coincidence that humanitarian intervention is taking place in a more economically-interdependent world than in previous eras of international history. Even modern leaders seem to acknowledge the growing relationship between globalization, security, and human rights. Explaining the emergence of an “international community” as the reason for NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, Tony Blair remarked to an American television audience:
We are all internationals now, whether we like it or not. . . .We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we still want to be secure.
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