Intervention in the Emerging Multipolar System: Why R2P will Miss the Unipolar Moment

Abstract

With the rise of China and Russia, the international system is poised to shift from unipolarity to multipolarity. This article argues that this structural reconfiguration will have—and is having—a profound effect on the future efficacy of the responsibility to protect (R2P). The rise of R2P, we argue, must be situated in the context of the end of the Cold War and the ‘unipolar moment’ this heralded. The efficacy of R2P is predicated on the assumption that moral advocacy can influence liberal democracies to re-orientate their foreign policy priorities towards human rights protection. We argue that the emerging multipolarity will expose the temporal specificity of this strategy and, ultimately, weaken the influence of R2P.     

The Iraq War and the Responsibility to Protect: Uses,Abuses and Consequences for the Future of Humanitarian Intervention

Before the 2003 Iraq war, the political leadership of the United States and United Kingdom had to sell the case for war to their people and the world. This was attempted through a number of speeches that employed rhetorical justifications for the war. Two prominent justifications used during this period involved the employment of security and humanitarian narratives. The security narrative focused on claims regarding Iraq's undermining of international law, possession of weapons of mass destruction and threat to the world. The humanitarian narrative revolved around claims about human suffering in Iraq and the need to liberate its people. While it is widely assumed that security is the dominant casus belli in the post-9/11 world, there is much evidence to suggest that the humanitarian justifications that played a critical role in the military interventions of the 1990s were still important after 9/11. The use of humanitarian justifications for the Iraq war clearly has implications for the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement, which has gained prominence since the December 2001 publication of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report. Based on an extensive content analysis of speeches by the US and UK political leadership before the war, this article will quantify the relative importance of each narrative and analyse what the findings mean for the ongoing debates within the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement.     

JISB Interview: The Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

Dr Aidan Hehir interviewed Dr Francis Deng, UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, in New York on 20 August 2009     

Continuity or Change?: Intervention and Statebuilding after Kosovo

ABSTRACT

The significance of Kosovo can only be understood by first situating the intervention in 1999 and the subsequent statebuilding process in a historical context. While there is a profound difference between 1999 and today, we should not conclude that this means the practice of humanitarian intervention has gone into decline as a result of waning western power. Decisions on intervention at that juncture, as indeed they are today. I conclude by arguing, however, that the theory and practice of statebuilding, has changed markedly since 1999; expectations as to the capacity of international administrations to transform post-conflict societies have declined markedly.     

Responsibility to Peace: A Critique of R2P

Abstract

The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 led to the doctrine of R2P, which envisages the use of force in defence of human rights. But as the Kosovo conflict demonstrates, nothing is more destructive of human rights than war. The protection and promotion of human rights should be done through lawful and non-lethal means. This essay argues that citizens and states have a responsibility to peace as much as to human rights because human rights can only flourish in a condition of peace. This essay seeks to restore peace to its proper place in the discussion of international politics and human rights.     

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan: Impartiality in New UN Peace Operations

Abstract

Set within the complex contemporary context of international interventions, UN peacekeeping operations have now evolved into peace operations. The emergence of the concepts of human security and the responsibility to protect have raised expectations that UN peace operations should deal with both macro and micro level insecurity in conflict and post-conflict situations, especially in the case of failed or collapsed states. Reflecting this development, the question of an appropriate framework in which to conceptualize peace operations has also been debated. This essay considers a conceptualization of UN peace operations from a conflict resolution perspective and analyses the case of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), using a framework of conflict transformation. It argues that the impartiality of UN operations has been reconceived in terms of the values of ‘human security’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’, making it vital to explicitly articulate the meaning and implications of ‘value-based’ impartiality.     

The Responsibility to Protect and the End of the Western Century

Abstract

It is argued here that the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) has to be placed in the context of the failure to develop new international norms around questions of intervention in the 1990s. Far from embodying global consensus, R2P represents the failure of the West to impose new global norms. This lack of consensus was revealed most dramatically by the disagreements among Western states themselves before the 2003 Iraq invasion. It is argued that many of the principles of the War on Terror (such as the commitment to pre-emptive action) are substantively similar to those of R2P. The essay concludes by considering R2P in light of the decline of the West.     

Security Identities and ‘No More,No Less’ Operations: On Making NATO's Involvement in Darfur Possible

This article explores NATO's support mission to the African Union's peacekeeping operation in Darfur, Sudan between 2005 and 2007. NATO policies are commonly presented as functional responses to events, but how did a conflict on the African continent become the Atlantic Alliance's business? In this essay, a poststructuralist practice-oriented approach is used to understand the way in which discursive practices progressively establish a policy option as ‘natural' in a given situation. It is argued that the normalization of NATO's support mission to the African Union in Darfur and the integration of this operation in NATO's security identity were the result of complex and conflict-ridden social interactions between different discursive practices supported by different actors.     

Feminism in the Humanitarian Machine. Introduction to the Special Section on ‘The Politics of Intervention Against (Conflict-Related) Sexual and Gender-based Violence’

ABSTRACT

The prevention and mitigation of sexual and gender-based violence in (post-) conflict societies has become an important humanitarian activity. This introductory article examines the analytical discourses on these interventions, the institutionalization of SGBV expertise in international politics, and the emancipatory potential of anti-SGBV practices. It argues that the confluence of feminist professional activism and militarized humanitarian interventionism produced specific international activities against SGBV. As part of the institutionalization of gender themes in international politics, feminist emancipatory claims have been taken up by humanitarian organizations. The normal operating state of the humanitarian machine, however, undercuts its potential contribution to social transformation towards larger gender equality in (post-) conflict societies.     

Development and security in international aid to North Korea: commonalities and differences among the European Union,the United States and South Korea

In this paper, we contend that the nexus of security and development lies in the crux of challenges confronting human security and aid failure in North Korea. We first review academic and policy discourses concerning the security-development nexus. We then analyse how the nexus works out its logic in North Korea by exploring how insecurity and underdevelopment have fed into each other, producing a vicious cycle that complicates efforts to address human security in North Korea. In the third and main section, we examine the ways in which South Korea, the USA and the EU provided for assistance to North Korea from 1995 to 2012 at national and international policy levels. We analyse their approaches to international aid and identify differences and commonalities in them so as to better understand how aid giving exacerbates or mitigates the insecurity/underdevelopment and then impacts on the development-security nexus. We finally conclude with a consideration of various strategies to help overcome the dual challenges of underdevelopment and insecurity that besiege North Korea.     

The unbearable rightfulness of being human: citizenship,displacement, and the right to not have rights

Claims to human rights protection made by displaced persons are displaced from the universe of humanity and rendered ineffective by the geopolitical character of modern international human rights law, in favour of the protection of citizens' rights claims. In response, there is increasing interest in leveraging respect for and protection of the rights of displaced persons through extension of the rights enjoyed and supposedly borne by emplaced citizens. However, it is a mistake to assume that humans as citizens bear human rights or that the freedoms that they may be able to extend beyond state boundaries are universalisable. The extension of the right to citizenship functions to displace questions of human rights themselves. The question of the human in rights is in fact always displaced, as long as the human subject is acted upon as if it could possess rights. In paying attention to the critical perspectives with which displaced persons confront the citizen, she or he may come to appreciate the fact that the universality of human rights is served where one does not claim to have rights but, rather, actively engages, without limits, with others in the struggle for rights and their respect.     

A feminist challenge to the gendered politics of the public/private divide: on due diligence,domestic violence,and citizenship

This article examines the feminist appropriation of the legal principle of due diligence to politicize acts of violence at the hands of private actors within the private sphere. This move expanded traditional notions of state responsibility for violence against women under international human rights law. Using frame analysis, we focus on the institutionalization of this feminist understanding of due diligence through its discursive incorporation in international human rights policy documents and its mobilization in cases of domestic violence litigated within the UN and the Inter-American and European human rights systems. Through this discursive framing work and its institutionalization, feminists have challenged the gendered politics of the public/private divide to change the terms on which differently positioned women can engage with the state and global governance institutions. We argue that this change can potentially reconfigure women's state-bounded and transnational citizenship. The implications of due diligence as a political and sociological concept require more careful consideration by citizenship and human rights scholars.     

A Positive,Communitarian Right to Security in the Age of Super-Terrorism

Post-9/11, and especially with the dramatic rise of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the author advocates a collective right to security. Plotting a course through state absolutism and liberalism, one finds communitarianism as a philosophy to support this right to security. The communitarian right to security is based on an interpretation of European human rights law, particularly positive duties of the state, to protect the rights to life of individuals from violations by non-state actors such as suspected terrorists. But for reasons of practical enforcement, limitations to the exercise of the right are also articulated.     

人类命运共同体思想构成与新安全观总体性内联初探——基于马克思主义哲学思考为中心的分析

人类命运共同体的思想与总体国家安全观的内在联系,具有马克思主义在方法论与方法上的性质,符合马克思主义"总体论"方法的基本认识,具有对新时代的引领作用。习近平提出并多次强调构建"人类命运共同体"与树立"总体国家安全观",在面对世界百年未有之大变局的情势中,对中国如何处理好国际事务和保证国家安全两大方面有着很强的引领作用。构建人类命运共同体的思想,其基本构成具有科学性并厚重的底蕴,五大构成的总体性使得其内涵精炼且外延宽阔;总体国家安全观,总结和提炼了对国家安全的十一大方面,强调要予以总体把握和统筹,对于进入新时代的中国高瞻远瞩地处理好安全事务,在共同体的构建之中,依照党的十九届四中全会的精神,认清形势,把握大局,夯实自身基础等具有很强的指导意义。     

马克思主义人学思想的初步形成——从博士论文到《1844年经济学哲学手稿》

马克思主义哲学是关于现实的人及其历史发展的科学,从博士论文到《1844年经济学哲学手稿》标志着马克思主义人学思想的初步形成。马克思实现了对黑格尔的思辨的人的超越,通过对劳动和异化劳动的深刻分析,揭示了人的自由、解放和全面发展问题,为科学的人本主义历史观的创立奠定了基础。     

Exploring the failure to protect the rights of the Roma child in Romania

An important test of the progress of development management is its contribution to human rights, especially in transition economies. This article explores the failure to protect the rights of the Roma child in Romania, who are particularly vulnerable to abandonment and institutionalisation. 2008 witnessed the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several other related celebrations. Nevertheless, within EU borders, minority populations can still lead dismal lives. It is argued that although both the EU and the Romanian government made the Roma's social inclusion a top priority, they failed to bring about substantial improvement. The first contribution of the article is to reinforce the trend within development management of linking policy implementation to the specific needs of the local context. Contemporary policy reports and early empirical results from an exploratory study in Galati, mainly in the area of education, suggest several inter‐related causes of poor implementation, including the national political context, specific issues affecting the Roma and local implementation capacity. The second contribution suggests that ideas from business and management, specifically the notion of organisational receptivity to change, could increase the pace of change. Receptivity provides a framework for understanding local issues and how to manage them. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

"行乞权"之争的法理误区--兼评"法无明文禁止之处即可作权利的推定"命题

乞讨行为从来都不是一种被社会道德或国家法律所倡导的行为."行乞权"既不是公民的生存权,也不是一项"穷人的道德权利"或具有普遍意义的道德权利.在"行乞权"之争中,暴露出长期以来法理上,以及近些年来人们在人权理念上的种种误区.逻辑上和实践中,从法无明文禁止之处不能必然地推导出权利.人权不是一种排除义务的绝对权利,或可以凌驾于一切社会规范之上不含界限的一种特权.     

The Use of Drones in Pakistan: an Inquiry into the Ethical and Legal Issues

It is clear the United States and other major powers see drone warfare as the wave of the future. Today more than 70 countries possess drone technology and many others are seeking to acquire it. It is expected that within 20 years, there will be swarms of drones and many autonomous fighters and bombers in use around the globe. If the trends continue as anticipated, these drones will usher in a ‘boundless and borderless war without end’. The development of technological improvements will eventually lead to a militarisation of foreign policy and unnecessary conflicts. While the circumstances in Pakistan are unique, the questions surrounding the US drone programme in non‐combat zones such as Pakistan raise important issues regarding how drone use should be governed in the future. This article is an attempt to analyse legal and ethical issues raised by the US use of drone technology in non‐combat zones such as Pakistan, and it looks into its underpinnings and also its repercussions as tool in prospective warfare.     

Designing institutions to improve well-being: Participation,deliberation and institutionalisation

Social accountability institutions are at the forefront of democratic reformers’ efforts to improve well-being by harnessing the power of citizen participation. This article builds on recent research identifying a positive relationship between participatory budgeting (PB) and well-being. The article is the first large-N study to identify relationships between specific rules of PB programme design and well-being. A unique dataset of 114 Brazilian municipalities with PB programmes from 2009 to 2016 is constructed to evaluate whether internal mechanisms within PB explain variation in local infant mortality rates – an outcome associated with wellbeing. Hypotheses are tested that correspond to citizen participation, the scope of deliberation and embeddedness within local institutions. It is found that PB programmes are associated with lower infant mortality rates when they broaden participation, expand deliberation and embed the new institutions in ongoing policy-making venues. The results offer a framework for designing PB programmes and other social accountability institutions to maximise impact.