Humanitarian Intervention: Using Force to Build Peace and Democracy

  • NINT 5225 - Humanitarian Intervention: Using Force to Build Peace and Democracy (Fall 2008)

Section A/CRN 3849 (syllabus)
Anna DiLellio
Thursday 6.00pm - 7.50pm

This course addresses the legal, political and ethical questions that arise from humanitarian intervention. Contemporary events and the growing internationalization of human rights legislation can pose a serious challenge to existing legal and political notions of state sovereignty and war, as the debate on the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against the Former Republic Yugoslavia (today Serbia and Montenegro) amply demonstrates. In that case, NATO's intervention and its aftermath tested the post-Cold War world's growing consensus on human rights as a normative framework for both the claims and obligations of individuals and states. We will give particular attention to those issues, among others drawn from recent conflicts, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and Iraq.

The course starts with a survey of the main norm-setting documents, as well as the political and intellectual arguments that lay out the justification and limits of humanitarian intervention. As the concept (and the policy) of intervention develops, both theoretically and in policy terms, the notion of the use of force to build peace takes new turns after September 11. In the theory of preemptive/preventive war the primary goal is to stop rogue states from threatening the lives of democracies, but the ‘realist' perspective of international politics rests also on a normative base that includes a humanitarian component. As the theory of the just war is stretched to accommodate a wider range of particular cases, today, as in the 1990s, the questions remain the same. When and how is it just to intervene? What are the outcomes of intervention or the lack of it? How does intervention deal with democratic governance in post-conflict societies? Answering questions on the concrete consequences of intervention might also help redefine its foundation and purposes.

Concentrations:Conflict and Security, Governance and Rights