Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Should humanitarian intervention be allowed essay
NATO after the cold war
NATO after the cold war
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The massive, protracted bombing of Serbia was "the first offensive action for NATO, and the first time that Allied armed forces were unleashed against a sovereign nation with which the United States was not formally at war or without express authorization by the United Nations Security Council," observes Stephen Presser, professor of law at Northwestern University. "What we were doing in the Balkans is part of the post-Vietnam creation of a new set of doctrines of international law. These doctrines lack clearly defined limits," he warns. "We may be witnessing the opening moves in the forging of a New Global order that fundamentally impairs national sovereignty and allows possessors of superior military force to dictate the basic terms of domestic life to other nations without even the formalities of conquest."
In the current issue of Orbis, a quarterly publication of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (fpri.org), Presser argues that the real reason for NATO's bombing of a sovereign nation "appears to have been to compel Belgrade to cede autonomy, if not territory, to a minority ethnic group. What is there, then, in the United Nations charter or in international law that would authorize our action in the Balkans," he asks, "and what, if any, are the reach and the limits of our new doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention? The UN Charter seeks to secure both the protection of 'fundamental human rights' and the 'equal rights' of 'nations large and small,'" Presser notes. "The Charter clearly undertakes to protect the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of individual nations, and seems to preclude interference in a nation's domestic affairs unless the Security Council declares a situation a threat to 'international peace and security' and expressly authorizes intervention. While the UN and its agencies expressed official concern about what went on in the Balkans," he affirms, "the Security Council did not authorize intervention in Kosovo by UN or NATO forces."
Presser points out that "a series of international law doctrines wholly outside the UN Charter authorize interference by one state in another's affairs. These have included military actions to protect one's own citizens who are within another's borders, and there have been several armed interventions by individual or groups of nations purportedly to protect the rights of minorities in particular or human rights in general, whether or not the individuals to be protected were citizens of the intervening nations.
In late 1992, as a result of the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Bosnian War started between different ethnic factions of Croatians, Serbians and Bosnians. The United States, as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), provided air power to the United Nations (UN) under Operation Deny Flight.1 This operation intended to preclude the opposing factions from using air assets for mass destruction of their enemies.
In “Definition of Sovereignty”, Schmitt states that “the exception was something incommensurable to John Locke’s doctrine of the constitutional state and the rationalist eighteenth century.” (Schmitt 13, 14). When it comes to the whole “eighteenth century” part of this quote, I agree mostly with Schmitt, because philosophers like Thomas Hobbes believed that anything outside of the sovereign power is the state of nature and the state of nature must always be avoided. On the other hand, if Schmitt was getting the benefit of the doubt, his argument in this statement would simply be an observation that Locke appears to have some internal contradiction. This could make sense because at one moment Locke says “wherever law ends, tyranny begins” (Locke 189) then the next he discusses acting outside the law, also known as prerogative. However, the first time reading this, the argument that Schmitt is saying John Locke does not understand the idea of exception might leave someone wondering if Schmitt even bothered to read Locke, specifically the entire chapter entitled “Of Prerogative”. In the third paragraph of this chapter, Locke clearly says, “This power to act according to the discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it, is that which is
President Clinton addressed the people of the United States on June 10, 1999 over the United States’ mission in Kosovo. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, which makes this war a civil war. Highlights of his speech outline the goals that he wanted to obtain in this Humanitarian intervention, as he called it. The mission had flaws innate to it from the beginning. The three-tiered goal of the President was clearly stated. The first is to allow the Kosovar people back into their homes. The second is to require Serbian forces to leave Kosovo. The last thing was to deploy an international security force, with NATO at its core, to protect all the people that troubled the land, Serbians and Albanians alike. The message was clear, but was not followed in regards to international law, and NATO’s Charter, and even the three clearly stated missions. The involvement in Kosovo’s war is illegal, and the President of the United States has pushed NATO into committing wartime crimes and has used the Powers-of-Office in an unconstitutional manner, which resulted in the illegal intervention of a sovereign state.
International organizations such as NATO and the UN are essential not only for global peace, but also as a place where middle powers can exert their influence. It is understandable that since the inception of such organizations that many crises have been averted, resolved, or dealt with in some way thro...
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were seventeenth century political philosophers whose different beliefs stemmed from the different contexts in which each man lived.
Humanitarian intervention after the post-cold war has been one of the main discussions in the International Relation theories. The term intervention generally brings a negative connotation as it defines as the coercive interference by the outside parties to a sovereign state that belongs in the community. The humanitarian intervention carried out by international institutions and individual sovereign states has often been related to the usage of military force. Therefore, it is often perceived intervention as a means of ways to stop sovereign states committing human rights abuse to its people. This essay will focus on the key concepts of allowing for humanitarian intervention mainly in moral and justice in international society. This essay will also contribute some arguments against humanitarian intervention from different aspects of theories in International Relation Theory.
The idea of intervention is either favoured or in question due to multiple circumstances where intervening in other states has had positive or negative outcomes. The General Assembly was arguing the right of a state to intervene with the knowledge that that state has purpose for intervention and has a plan to put forth when trying to resolve conflicts with the state in question. The GA argues this because intervention is necessary. This resolution focuses solely on the basis of protection of Human Rights. The General Assembly recognizes that countries who are not super powers eventually need intervening. They do not want states to do nothing because the state in question for intervening will continue to fall in the hands of corruption while nothing gets done. The GA opposed foreign intervention, but with our topic it points out that intervention is a necessity when the outcome could potentially solve conflicts and issues. In many cases intervention is necessary to protect Human Rights. For instance; several governments around the world do not privilege their citizens with basic Human Rights. These citizens in turn rely on the inter...
Locke states that the correct form of civil government should be committed to the common good of the people, and defend its citizens’ rights to life, health, liberty, and personal possessions. He expects that a civil government’s legislative branch will create laws which benefit the wellbeing of its citizens, and that the executive branch will enforce laws under a social contract with the citizenry. “The first and fundamental positive law of all common-wealths is the establishing of the legislative power; as the first and fundamental natural law, which is to govern even the legislative itself, is the preservation of the society and (as far as will consist with the public good) of every person in it.”1 Locke believes that humans inherently possess complete and i...
However, he acknowledges that they about abuse the use of force. Consequently, the natural law and legal positivism arguments should be understood as complementary school of thoughts and not “as separate traditions” (p.132). In sum, Bellamy provides that natural law provides justification for the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian terms, whereas legal positivism does not consider the human rights violations and leaves states to abuse the use of force, as in the case of Iraq. I agree with Bellamy when he asserts that the humanitarian exception in Iraq’s case resulted in abuse when he provides “Abuse refers to the case where moral argument are used to justify a war that not primarily motivated by the moral concerns espoused, but by the short-term interests of those instigating violence” (p 132). Moreover, Bellamy outlines the problems with international law. He sets out that international law has no single authoritative lawmaker in international; there is no judge above the sovereign; that customs are difficult to interpret objectively; that positive law is underdeveloped and doesn’t address the necessary aspects of law keeping; and that there is no defined community-based moral framework in place, thereby making it impossible to establish ethics (p.133). The UN Resolution of 687 that is discussed by Bellamy in the case of Iraq illustrates how it is arguable whether the use of
One of most crucial aspects of humanitarian intervention is the lack of proper motives. As noted by Bush, Martiniello, and Mercer, in the case of Libya and Côte d’Ivoire the Western nations were pursuing their own economic imperial interests under the guise of humanitarian intervention (Bush). The lack of pure motives to help decrease crimes against humanity resulted in an increased number of human rights violations in both Libya and Côte d’Ivoire (Bush). In order
Humanitarian intervention involves the coercive action of states intervening in areas for the sole purpose of preventing or halting the killing or suffering of the people there. (1, 9, 5) It is an issue argued fervently amongst restrictionists and counter-restrictionists, who debate over whether humanitarian intervention is a breach of international law or a moral requirement. (10) Restrictionists argue that Articles 2 (7) and 2 (4) of the United Nations (UN) Charter render forcible humanitarian intervention illegal. The only legitimate exception to this, they claim, is the right to self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Although, within the U.N. Charter of 1945, Article 2(4) prohibits the use of force against ‘the territorial integrity or political independence of any state’ (U.N. Charter, art.2 para.4), it has been suggested by counter-restrictionist international lawyers, that humanitarian intervention does not fall under these criteria, making it legally justifiable under the U.N. Charter (e.g. Damrosch 1991:219 in Baylis and Smith 2001: 481). However, this viewpoint lacks credibility, as it is far from the general international consensus, and unlikely the initial intentions of the draftsmen of the charter. In more recent times, one can examine the emerging doctrine of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’(RtoP), which was adopted unanimously by the UN in 2005, as a far more persuasive example of modern legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. While not consolidated within international law, RtoP, which promotes humanitarian intervention where sovereign states fail in their own responsibility to protect their citizens, does use legal language and functions as a comprehensive international framework to prevent human rights
ABSTRACT: This paper defends the claim that the contemporary canon of human rights forms an indivisible and interdependent system of norms against both "Western" and "Asian" critics who have asserted exceptionalist or selectivist counterclaims. After providing a formal definition of human rights, I argue that the set of particular human rights that comprises the contemporary canon represents an ethical-legal paradigm which functions as an implicit theory of human oppression. On this view, human rights originate as normative responses to particular historical experiences of oppression. Since historically known experiences of oppression have resulted from practices that function as parts of systems of domination, normative responses to these practices have sought to disarm and dismantle such systems by depriving potential oppressors of the techniques which enable them to maintain their domination. Therefore, human rights norms form a systematic and interdependent whole because only as parts of a system can they function as effective means for combatting oppression and domination.
In Locke’s book the Second Treatise on Civil Government, he begins by describing the state of nature as a place where men exist in perfect freedom where they are able to pursue their own goals, as long as they do not infringe on the equal liberty of others (II. 4-7). This limitation differentiates Locke from Hobbes. Hobbes argued that freedom and equality and the importance of individual rights, allowed individuals in the state of nature to pursue their survival and interest without limitation (Leviathan, XII, p. 80). They had no duty to respect the rights of others. This is why the state of nature, for Hobbes, was a state of war (Leviathan, XII, p. 79). Whereas Locke believed that individual...
However, the actual definition used is more important than applying the principles that support ecotourism. Boyd and Butler (Wight P, 1995) argue that ecotourism should be treated as dynamic and flexible, and move towards change within the variety of destination sites. Ecotourism is an enlightening natural travel experience that contributes to the preservation of the ecosystem while at the same time showing respect for the integrity of host communities.