The object of this thesis is to consider the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility and to examine how this relationship has developed over time. There is a conventional story told by many scholars of International Relations which holds that sovereignty has ‘traditionally’ entailed the absence of responsibility and accountability. It has meant that states have a right to govern themselves however they choose, free from outside interference. Only in recent years, the tale goes, have the indefeasible rights that sovereigns have long enjoyed been challenged by notions that sovereigns are responsible and accountable for the protection of their populations. Ideas of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’ which have emerged since the end of the Cold War are framed as radical departures from the way in which sovereignty has been ‘traditionally’ understood. This thesis challenges this conventional account of the history of sovereignty. It argues that the notion that sovereignty entails responsibilities is not new. Rather, responsibilities have been an enduring feature of the social and historical construction of sovereignty. The thesis demonstrates that sovereignty has been understood to involve varied and evolving responsibilities since it was first articulated in early modern Europe and it traces the historical development of the particular tension between the right of sovereign states to be self-governing and free from outside interference and their responsibility to secure the safety of their populations.

This project seeks to expand the dialogue about international humanitarian intervention in a complex emergency or mass atrocity situation by asserting that post-intervention political reconstruction is as essential to the intervention as is the provision of material humanitarian aid and even the ostensive goal of protecting the aid regimes. As a result of this assertion, consideration of humanitarian intervention has, to this point, been too focused on the legal, ethical, and theoretical implications of war and hegemony. The current dialogue centers on its security studies aspects, owing largely to its Cold War precedent. However, a full consideration of the subject of humanitarian intervention must also consider the broader implications of the intervention, including recovery and mitigation of future events. When this is considered at all, the literature to this point largely treats post-intervention establishment of political and social infrastructure as a secondary consideration to the military intervention. The primary approach to address this needed expansion includes drawing a comparison between humanitarian intervention and a similar domestic concept: comprehensive emergency management theory. While there are several dissimilarities between emergency management and its putative international correlate, the theoretical framework it establishes—including not only the response found in the usual literature, but also the well-defined concepts of recovery, mitigation, and preparedness—can expand our understanding of the implications and requirements of humanitarian intervention. It also provides an important lesson in its mirror example for the prescribed evolution of humanitarian intervention scholarship away from its Cold War genesis. This is because domestic emergency management also has a foundation in security studies concerns, but has since evolved into an all-hazards philosophy that embraces prevention and recovery as much as simple response to a human crisis. This parallel will provide a framework for approaching humanitarian intervention that goes significantly beyond the literature to this point and provides a much more encompassing approach to the subject than there has been to this point.

<p>The dissertation takes up the subject of humanitarian intervention in contemporary international law. It identifies a problem, The Dilemma of Humanitarian Intervention, which underlies almost all contemporary theorizing about the subject. In an attempt to find a more palatable means to address the problem of the violation of human rights, the dissertation turns to the work of Hugo Grotius. Through an analysis of international law and its theoretical and philosophical bases, a thorough critique of the state of contemporary international law is made. Using a close-text reading of Grotius, alternative theories are established concerning human rights and humanitarian intervention. The dissertation finds that when the concept of human rights is attached to other normative concepts like moderation or faith, the pressure to resolve all questions of justice in terms of rights can be lessened. Further, if contemporary theorists recognize that the opposition of sovereignty and intervention is a structural and institutional feature of international law, and not a necessary feature of the concept of sovereignty itself, the Dilemma may be overcome by not forcing policymakers to choose either a defense of sovereignty or a defense of human rights.</p> / Dissertation

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to look into the differences between the theoretical frame-works of Realism and Feminism in general as well as their differences with regards to security and referent objects to security. With the differences noted applied upon the Humanitarian Intervention that took place in Kosovo 1999. That is how a shift in the referent objects could change outcome and success or failure in the case studied.</p><p>This is done by a theory testing study based upon literature within the topics of Realism and Feminism, by mainly Morgenthau (1993) with regards to Realism and Tickner (1992) with regards to Feminism. The reason for these authors in particular is due to their importance in the field and the fact that they are found liberally quoted in academic articles and other literature.</p><p>By shifting the referent object of security from e.g. territory (state), that Realism uses, to the individuals in general and the women in particular within the territory (state), like Feminism does, there is bound to be a change in outcome and success. The result of this thesis is that a different referent object offers a new perspective.</p>

Humanitarian intervention is a concept that generates several problems in our time. The idea of humanitarian intervention concerns the modern norms of sovereignty and noninterventional principals. It also concerns the conventional norm, which declares that states are not allowed to interfere in other states’ internal affairs. The use of military force to implement humanitarian intervention is restricted according to international law. This is what this thesis intends to investigate. The purpose was to find out the causes behind the intervention in Libya, which was carried out by NATO. The main questions were (1) to find out if the intervention in Libya was a humanitarian intervention (2) or if there were other motives that were behind the intervention. Two classical international relations theories have been utilized for the analysis. The analysis focused on the five UN Security Council members’ statements and arguments, which have been expressed in the UN Security Council. This issue created a gap between the members of the Security Council, especially between the Western states and the Russian and Chinese authorities

In the decade from 1998 to 2008, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was witness to one of the most brutal violent conflicts in recent history. Crimes against humanity and large-scale violations of human rights occurred on a regular basis, resulting in the death and displacement of millions of people. The international community responded to this crisis with humanitarian efforts such as the donation of billions of dollars in aid and engagement in diplomatic mediations. However, despite the increasing viability of humanitarian intervention as a policy option for international actors, as well as the ‘groundbreaking’ formal adoption of the Responsibility to Protect at the 2005 United Nations World Summit, no intervention was undertaken. This produces a puzzle: why, despite acknowledgement of the severity of the crisis, did the international community respond with humanitarianism, but stop short of intervening? The answer can be found in an examination of the international normative environment at the time of the conflict. Using a three-stage normative life-cycle model developed by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, this thesis posits that the reason the international community engaged in humanitarian actions was because the norm of humanitarianism is at stage 2 of its life cycle, making it well-entrenched enough to compel members of the international community to act. However, the norm of humanitarian intervention is only at stage 1 of its life cycle, meaning that it is weak and underdeveloped. Its weakness is exacerbated by the fact that humanitarian intervention often clashes with the highly entrenched stage 3 norms of realpolitik, and specifically the norm of self-interested engagement, which demands that a state only become engaged with another if it is in the first state’s interests to do so. Thus, despite the brutality of the conflict, the norm of humanitarian intervention was not strong enough to provoke an intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo. / Thesis (Master, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-18 02:05:57.536

This thesis examines the discourse on human security, in particular the 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect. I contend that the human of human security is deeply indebted to an account of the modern subject that is also responsible for producing the model of the citizen/state relationship to which human security is conceived of as a response. Human security reaffirms the appropriateness of the sovereign state while at the same time re-conceiving sovereignty as responsibility and empowering certain international actors to intervene in sovereign states should they fail to act responsibly. Like the citizen, the ostensibly universal category of the human is produced through the exclusion or dehumanization of some ways of being human and some human beings. However, I also consider the ways in which human security works to humanize its subjects, producing the kinds of humans that can be secured.

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 UN Security Council is the preeminent multilateral decision-making body and has the legal authority to initiate military interventions if it first determines a threat to international peace and security, including from civil wars or widespread state repression. While traditional norms of non-intervention and the politics of the Cold War curtailed the body’s ability to fulfil this role, evolving understandings and practices of sovereignty and security in the post-Cold War era have led to the apparent emergence of a new norm permitting ‘humanitarian intervention’ and an in principle acceptance that the body has a ‘responsibility to protect’ vulnerable civilians residing inside the borders of their own state, including through military means. In this context, the thesis argues that the situation in Darfur, western Sudan, has represented a quintessential case for the Council to fulfil its ‘responsibility to protect’. According to a number of authoritative investigations, since 2003 the Sudanese government and government-allied Arab militias have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity on a widespread and systematic basis against Darfur’s non-Arab population. As a result, over 200,000 people died either directly from violence or indirectly from conflict-induced disease and malnutrition, while a further two million fled from their homes and villages in fear. A number of nonmilitary measures were attempted by the Council but failed to create adequate security on the ground. As such, there was a compelling legal-institutional, normative and moral case for the Council to coercively deploy a military intervention in Sudan to protect vulnerable civilians in Darfur. However, during the 2003-06 period of study, no such intervention was deployed. The thesis argues that intervention by the Council was precluded by the national interests of its permanent members, including a lucrative economic relationship between China and Sudan, and because of valuable Sudanese intelligence cooperation in Western counter-terrorism operations in the region. The thesis concludes that the Council’s members chose to preserve these national interests at the expense of protecting civilians in Darfur.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Tufts University, 2003. / Submitted to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Chair: Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 286-299). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;