Responsibility to Protect: Research, bibliography, background. Supplementary volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
National sovereignty, defined as a nation's right to exercise its own law and practise over its territory, is a cherished norm in the modern era, and yet it raises great legal, political and ethical dilemmas. This study looks at the problems created by international intervention.
Intervention has been a common feature of international politics. This text distinguishes between unilateral and international intervention, examining whether recent political changes have shifted the balance between the sovereign rights of states and the authority of the international community.
The question of when or if a nation should intervene in another country’s affairs is one of the most important concerns in today’s volatile world. Taking John Stuart Mill’s famous 1859 essay “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” as his starting point, international relations scholar Michael W. Doyle addresses the thorny issue of when a state’s sovereignty should be respected and when it should be overridden or disregarded by other states in the name of humanitarian protection, national self-determination, or national security. In this time of complex social and political interplay and increasingly sophisticated and deadly weaponry, Doyle reinvigorates Mill’s principles for a new era while assessing the new United Nations doctrine of responsibility to protect. In the twenty-first century, intervention can take many forms: military and economic, unilateral and multilateral. Doyle’s thought-provoking argument examines essential moral and legal questions underlying significant American foreign policy dilemmas of recent years, including Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The Encyclopedia is an international, interdisciplinary, and collaborative project, spanning all the relevant areas of scholarship related to issues of global justice, and edited and advised by leading scholars from around the world. The wide-ranging entries present the latest ideas on this complex subject by authors who are at the cutting edge of inquiry.
This Handbook offers a comprehensive treatment of transformations of the state, from its origins in different parts of the world and different time periods to its transformations since World War II in the advanced industrial countries, the post-Communist world, and the Global South. Leading experts in their fields, from Europe and North America, discuss conceptualizations and theories of the state and the transformations of the state in its engagement with a changing international environment as well as with changing domestic economic, social, and political challenges. The Handbook covers different types of states in the Global South (from failed to predatory, rentier and developmental), in different kinds of advanced industrial political economies (corporatist, statist, liberal, import substitution industrialization), and in various post-Communist countries (Russia, China, successor states to the USSR, and Eastern Europe). It also addresses crucial challenges in different areas of state intervention, from security to financial regulation, migration, welfare states, democratization and quality of democracy, ethno-nationalism, and human development. The volume makes a compelling case that far from losing its relevance in the face of globalization, the state remains a key actor in all areas of social and economic life, changing its areas of intervention, its modes of operation, and its structures in adaption to new international and domestic challenges.
A series of humanitarian tragedies in the 1990s (Somalia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo) demonstrated the international community's failure to protect civilians in the context of complex emergencies. They were the inspiration for two norms of protection, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Protection of Civilians (POC), both deeply rooted in the empathy that human beings have for the suffering of innocent people. Both norms have achieved high-level endorsement: R2P from the 2005 World Summit and its Outcome document (Art. 138-140) and POC from a series of Security Council resolutions. The two norms of protection were instrumental in adopting the Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973 (Libya) and 1975 (Cote d'Ivoire) in the year 2011. Both norms raise concerns of misinterpretation and misuse. They both are developing--sometimes in parallel, sometimes diverging, and sometimes converging--with varying degrees of institutionalization and acceptance. This process is likely to continue for some time, with successes and failures enhancing or retarding that development. This book engages in a profound comparative analysis of the two norms and aims to serve policymakers at different levels (national, regional, and UN), practitioners with protective roles (force commanders, military trainers, strategists, and humanitarian actors), academics and researchers (in international relations, law, political theory, and ethics), civil society, and R2P and POC advocates.
This new paperback edition of Justifying Interventions in Africa includes a new preface written by Professor Annika Björkdahl from Lund University. Analysing the UN interventions in Liberia, Burundi and the Congo, Wilén poses the question of how one can stabilize a state through external intervention without destabilizing sovereignty. She critically examines the justifications for international and regional interventions through a social constructivist framework.
International intervention on humanitarian grounds has been a contentious issue for decades. First, it pits the principle of state sovereignty against claims of universal human rights. Second, the motivations of intervening states may be open to question when avowals of moral action are arguably the fig leaf covering an assertion of power for political advantage. These questions have been salient in the context of the Balkan and African wars and U.S. policy in the Middle East. This volume undertakes a serious, systematic, and broadly international review of the issues.
The book provides critical perspectives that reach beyond the technical approaches of international financial institutions and proponents of the liberal peace formula. It investigates political economies characterized by the legacies of disruption to production and exchange, by population displacement, poverty, and by 'criminality'.