Role Of Intervention In International Relations

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Intervention in International Relations If you saw a person being murdered, would you intervene? Would you try and save that person’s life or sit aside and just let things happen? What if it was thousands of people? This is a common problem in international relations on whether to intervene in other sovereign states if human rights are being abused or just let that state deal with it on its own. In international relations, a sovereign state has the right to non-intervention, and to be free from unwanted external states regrading to internal affairs. In this essay, I will explain why it is better to intervene when there are extreme cases of a state abusing human rights despite the premise of non-intervention and we should do so on merit, not …show more content…

This includes international institutions being involved. Without international institutions, especially ones in the general area, it can be costly and not in the best interest for one state to get involved. It shares the weight of the intervention. Ultimately, we have a rule of non-intervention because unilateral intervention threats the harmony and concord of the society of the sovereign states. If, however, and intervention itself expresses the collective will of the society of states, it may be carried out without bring that harmony and concord into jeopardy. (Welsh, Jennifer M) What this means is, if only one state and not the international community as a whole, intervenes then it may upset the harmony and cause unrest. Also, the advantages of a multilateral action is that everyone will be involved and the costs/expense will not be as high, making it more in the interest of states to be involved. Multilateral action does carry some problems if the actors involved do not have open communication and cooperation. Multilateral intervention also increases communication of each state 's actions to others and so reassures states that opportunities for adventurism and expansion will not be used. Unilateral military intervention, is viewed with suspicion; it is too easily subverted to serve less disinterested ends of the intervener. (Katzenstein, Peter …show more content…

In realism, intervention in some cases of human rights abuse, is not rational because it does not have interest in international politics or it does not help with our survival. The U.S and the international community had no self interest in Rwanda, other than to save humans and their rights but that does not promote survival, if anything makes our survival decrease. They were getting basically nothing out of it. Waltz, for example, saw intervention for purposes other than the most vital national interests - ‘defined as developments that could affect the lives of American citizens’ (Daniel Fiott) Also, realism claims that all states are unitary and rational, so intervention would not make since because you would have to except that a state is always acting rational. So if you were a realist then intervention would not be a way for

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