Beyond humanitarian intervention: the new politics of peacekeeping and intervention

This article reviews patterns of peacekeeping and military intervention in the post-9/11 world. It argues that while Western states have become increasingly reluctant to engage in the types of humanitarian interventions they undertook in the 1990s, a new model of peace operations is emerging that lies in the middle ground between traditional United Nations peacekeeping and classical humanitarian intervention and combines elements of both. The emergence of this new generation of peace operations indicates that, despite the post-9/11 reluctance of Western states to intervene militarily for humanitarian purposes, there is continued momentum behind the normative shift away from an absolutist conception of state sovereignty and towards the view that the international community has a right and a duty to intervene in internal conflicts and crises.