This dissertation examines the history of humanitarianism in international relations by tracing the relationship between moral obligation and sovereignty from the 16th century to the present. Its main argument is that moral obligations and sovereignty are mutually constitutive, in contrast to a widely held assumption in international relations scholarship that they are opposed to each other. The dissertation’s main theoretical contribution is to develop a framework, using a genealogical method of inquiry, for understanding the relationship between sovereignty and the shifting boundaries of moral obligation during the Westphalian period. This approach makes it possible to identify both elements of continuity and change in the history of humanitarianism and practices of sovereignty. The first chapter demonstrates how the extant literature on sovereignty and humanitarianism fails to adequately account for how states have participated in the construction of new moral boundaries even as they have sought to assert their own sovereignty. Chapter two lays out the dissertation’s theoretical framework, first by outlining an identity-based understanding of sovereignty in relationship to moral obligation, and then discussing the genealogical method that is used in three case studies. The following three chapters contain the dissertation’s empirical contributions, which are three historical cases that represent pivotal moments in the history of moral obligation and sovereignty. Chapter three examines the assistance offered by Elizabeth I to Huguenot refugees from 1558-1603, and relates England’s moral obligations towards Huguenots to the emergence of a sovereign English confessional state. Chapter four examines the relationship between British abolitionist arguments against slavery in the 19th century, and justifications for the extension of empire. Chapter five examines the emergence and evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine since 2001, whose advocates posit a modified conception of sovereignty that is explicitly tied to moral obligation. The concluding chapter discusses how the dissertation accounts for both the rise of humanitarianism and the persistence of sovereignty in international relations, as well as provides some reflections on areas for future research.

The thesis focuses on the responsibility to protect as a new concept of the international law designed to help the members of the international community in dealing with humanitarian crisis. Although it is quite new, it has undertaken dynamic evolution and changed its nature to a certain extent. The main aim of responsibility to protect is to ensure that when massive violations of human rights occur, the effective and proportionate response will come and will stop the violations and prevent them from appearing again in the future. First, the debate about state sovereignty and human rights protection was presented and the relevant fields of research were defined. This was followed by the examination of the humanitarian intervention as this concept focuses on issues that are common also to the concept of the responsibility to protect. However, whereas the issues are in common, the perspective is different. While the humanitarian intervention focuses mainly on states, the responsibility to protect focuses on populations striving from human rights violations. While humanitarian intervention deals with the reaction on humanitarian crisis, the responsibility to protect deals mainly with the prevention of the crisis. While the humanitarian intervention places the sovereignty and human rights protection...

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / The 1992 European Union (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP, Maastricht Treaty) marked a turning point in the trans-Atlantic relationship. The Balkan conflicts and broader political changes in the 1990s compelled the EU to assume more responsibility in peace operations. The EU's 60,000 strong Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) is planned to be operational in 2003. Will the EU be able to conduct Petersberg-type peace operations? This thesis analyzes policy and military shortfalls of the Balkan peacekeeping effort. Questions about the legitimacy of armed humanitarian interventions, about difficulties in common policy formulation and translation to sound military objectives are the core problems of civil-military relations in European peace operations. The case studies focus on the EU failure to resolve the Bosnian crises between 1992-95, and on the gaps between NATO policies and military objectives in the operations of 'Implementation Force' in Bosnia and 'Allied Force' in Kosovo. The thesis considers developments in EU CFSP institutions and EU-NATO relationship as well as the EU's response to terrorist attacks on September 11 2001. The thesis argues that the difficulty in EU CFSP formulation limits the effective use of RRF in military operations. / Major, Hungarian Army

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / In response to the 9/11 attacks and continuing threats of mass-casualty terrorism, the United States has adopted a new security strategy that emphasizes anticipatory actions including preventive war. Prevention, undertaken in the absence of an act of aggression or an imminent threat, is prohibited by modern conceptions of just war and international law. Many critics of the strategy fear that any legitimization of preventive war would endanger international stability. But an examination of the relevant ethical issues from the perspective of just war doctrine reveals contradictions within a blanket prohibition of preventive war. Preventive "strategic interventions" against illiberal regimes-states that correlate with the threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction-parallel humanitarian interventions in that they have an ethical basis in the relationship between human rights and the right of state sovereignty. A widely-accepted minimum standard of human rights, incorporated into new international institutions and/or an explicit revision of the definition of just war, could serve as an ethical boundary for both preventive wars and humanitarian interventions. The formal qualification of prevention and its merger with humanitarian goals could bring enhanced international legitimacy and support to preventive actions by the United States and its allies. / Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy

The mounting of relief operations by the -humanitarian organizations during the thirty month Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), for the blockaded Eastern Region became the center of intense political controversy throughout the war. The study analyzes in detail the activities of the humanitarian organizations as well as their influence which they exerted on both parties involved in the crisis. The Federal Government of Nigeria has consistently maintained that the humanitarian organizations involved in the relief efforts in Biafra were guilty of intervention in their internal affairs. The humanitarian organizations insist that their actions were purely humanitarian. This study seeks to ex an ire the merits of the two positions, using international law concepts, empirical data on relief activities and the historical record of the Nigerian civil war as the framework for this examination. The discussion of the nature of humanitarianism and the circumstances under which humanitarian intervention may be justifiable helps to explain the argument by the humanitarian organizations that humanitarian considerations to intervene in order to save civilian lives outweighed Nigeria's charges of their being guilty of intervention. The study concludes that even if the humanitarian organizations, efforts to airlift relief materials to Biafra were purely humanitarian in nature, they cannot be divorced from the political consequences that result from their activities. The study also concludes that the economic support that the humanitarian groups provided the Biafrans was vital toBiafra's legitimacy as a sovereign nation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 395-406). / This dissertation explores the causes of, and possible remedies for, extremely violent ethnic conflict. It starts from a robust yet under-explored finding in the literature: Most groups that fall victim to genocidal violence actually trigger their own demise by launching armed secessions or revolutions against state authorities that only then retaliate with genocide or forced migration ("ethnic cleansing"). Accordingly, the dissertation asks why groups that are vulnerable to genocidal retaliation would provoke that very outcome by launching such "tragic challenges." To explain this phenomenon, the dissertation employs three case studies to test three hypotheses drawn from rational deterrence theory. The cases focus on three subordinate groups whose armed challenges provoked genocidal retaliation: Bosnia's Muslims in 1992-95; Rwanda's Tutsi in 1990-94; and Kosovo's Albanians in 1998-99. To gain further insight by adding variation on the theory's dependent variable, the dissertation also examines an earlier period of the third case during which the subordinate group did not launch a violent challenge, despite having substantial grievances, and thereby avoided genocidal violence (Kosovo's Albanians in 1989-97). he three hypotheses are as follows: (1) the group did not expect its armed challenge to provoke genocidal retaliation; (2) the group expected to suffer genocidal violence regardless of whether or not it launched an armed challenge; (3) the group expected its armed challenge to provoke genocidal retaliation but viewed this as an acceptable cost to achieve its goal of secession or revolution. The dissertation confirms the third hypothesis: subordinate groups launch tragic challenges when they expect to prevail and are willing to civilians as the cost of doing so. / (cont.) Most surprisingly, the dissertation finds that a key cause of the optimism leading to tragic challenges is the expectation by subordinate groups of receiving humanitarian military intervention if they provoke genocidal retaliation against themselves. This reveals that international policies of humanitarian intervention create moral hazard, encouraging vulnerable groups to launch armed challenges and thereby potentially causing the tragic outcomes that these policies are intended to prevent. The dissertation concludes by exploring prescriptions to mitigate this newly discovered "moral hazard of humanitarian intervention." / Alan J. Kuperman. / Ph.D.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the performances of gender that permeated the justifications for Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan, focusing on the representational practices that dominated the Bush administration's narratives of rescue and circumscribed our understanding of the actors involved. In particular, I will argue that the image of Afghan women as the helpless victim of Taliban oppression not only allowed the United States and its coalition allies to cast themselves as heroic masculine warriors but also helped to reinforce the idea that Afghan women were little more than mere symbols of helplessness, placing them in a position of absolute inferiority and dependency. Crucially, I will claim that this image of Afghan women as the passive prisoners of the Taliban was contingent upon the suppression of a series of alternative perspectives that could not be accommodated within the parameters established by the prevailing frames of war. On the one hand, I argue that the dominant representations of Afghan women tended to show them in decidedly monolithic and one-dimensional terms, with the Bush administration and its coalition allies defining them almost entirely by the suffering they experienced. Absent from these accounts, however, was any mention of women's resistance to Taliban rule or their criticisms of the military intervention. On the other hand, I will show how the international community relied upon a particular historical narrative that allowed them to present Afghanistan as a barbaric aberration in the modern world whilst allowing them to dismiss the period of Taliban rule as a terrifying oddity in the country's history, destroying many of the freedoms that were said to exist under previous regimes. As well as ignoring the myriad of interactions between Afghanistan and the outside world and the complex social, economic and political forces that helped to precipitate the rise of the Taliban, I will argue that this historical narrative reinforced the idea that the lives of Afghan women were in a state of suspense during this period, their very existence as human beings held in abeyance until coalition troops could intervene to redeem them. What distinguishes my argument from the work of other feminists is my attention to the way in which these representational practices are contingent upon an uneasy process of repetition and reiteration, leaving them vulnerable to the possibility for subversion and resignification. Drawing on Judith Butler's work on performativity, normative violence and the politics of intelligibility along with Gayatri C. Spivak's work on the subaltern subject, I show how the activities of organisations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and the voices of individuals such as Malalai Joya help to expose the limits of the dominant norms of intelligibility, opening up the possibility for a less violent and less exclusionary re-imagining.

This thesis considers how the international response to egregious crimes can be made more consistent and effective. It focuses in particular on the Security Council as the authorising mechanism for intervention and comprehensively evaluates the proposals for its reform. It shows that contrary to several existing proposals, reform to the Security Council would not improve its authorisation of international action to address atrocity crimes. Similarly, the thesis considers proposals that seek to circumvent the authority of the Security Council but rejects their capacity to bring about a more consistent humanitarian regime. Finally, it robustly considers and argues for the use of regional organisations as alternative authorising mechanisms during mass atrocities.

In Martha Nussbaum’s book Frontiers of Global Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, she presents the capabilities approach, a new theoretical framework that in her view better responds to the urgent problems of social inequality than existing theories of social justice. This thesis evaluates her descriptive claim by applying the capabilities approach to the French burqa ban and assessing whether the ban is unjust, and if so, what forms of intervention are most appropriate. In doing this, I will argue that Nussbaum’s theory is unsatisfactory unless she extends it to include the obligation to criticize in cases where we are certain that an injustice is being committed.

The differences in the international responses to the violent conflicts in East Timor (1998–1999), Maluku (1999–2003) and Aceh (1998–2005) are examined in this research. Given the growing acceptance of the significance of the use of military force for humanitarian purposes, the humanitarian crises in Maluku and Aceh might prima facie have justified humanitarian intervention similar to that in East Timor. By analysing the differences from the Indonesia’s domestic political point of view it is clear that the conscience-shocking situation caused by the violent conflicts was not the compelling factor for the international community to militarily intervene. The deployment of a multinational force in East Timor (INTERFET) was decided only after the UN and foreign major countries believed that such military intervention would not jeopardize the ongoing process of democratization in Indonesia. This suggested that Indonesia’s domestic circumstance was central to whether a similar measure in Maluku and Aceh would take place or not. Due to the reformasi (political reform) in Indonesia within which the independence of East Timor took place, two main changes within Indonesian politics, namely the growing sentiment of anti-international intervention and the continuing democratization process, helped to ensure that humanitarian intervention in the two other regions did not happen. / These two conditions were fortified by the increasingly consolidated democratic politics which brought the communal conflict in Maluku to the Malino Peace Agreement. The emergence of a stronger and democratic government in Indonesia, furthermore, made cooperation with the international community possible in seeking a peaceful resolution to the armed conflict in Aceh. By involving the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) the government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) agreed to the Helsinki peace agreement and accepted the role of the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM) to secure its implementation. Thus, a strong democratic government made an international military intervention for humanitarian purposes unnecessary.