The Genocide Convention and Cold War Humanitarian Intervention

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Dunne ◽  
Eglantine Staunton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Genocide Convention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Host State ◽  
State Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Consent ◽  
The Cold War

It is conventional in IR literature to observe a sharp break between the Cold War and post-Cold War phases in the evolution of human protection norms. The chapter revisits these arguments in conjunction with the cases of India in Pakistan, Vietnam in Cambodia, and Tanzania in Uganda, where unilateral interventions had humanitarian effects but neither humanitarian justifications nor external legitimation. The predominant view regarding these cases is correct; namely, no evidence can be found for the emergence of a norm of legitimate intervention for protection reasons (in the absence of host state consent). However, this perspective underestimates the extent to which there was a consolidation of norms regarding state responsibilities and how these influenced state practice during the post-1945 period. The end of the Cold War should be seen as less of a stark turning point in the history of responsible sovereignty than has previously been believed.

Truth to Power

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intelligence Support ◽  
The Cold War

This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.

Italy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrizio Coticchia
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
First Century ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Since the end of the bipolar era, Italy has regularly undertaken military interventions around the world, with an average of 8,000 units employed abroad in the twenty-first century. Moreover, Italy is one of the principal contributors to the UN operations. The end of the cold war represented a turning point for Italian defence, allowing for greater military dynamism. Several reforms have been approved, while public opinion changed its view regarding the armed forces. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive perspective of the process of transformation that occurred in post-cold-war Italian defence, looking at the evolution of national strategies, military doctrines, and the structure of forces. After a brief literature review, the study highlights the process of transformation of Italian defeshnce policy since 1989. Through primary and secondary sources, the chapter illustrates the main changes that occurred, the never-ending cold-war legacies, and key challenges.

Part 1 The Cold War Era (1945–89), 21 The Vietnamese Intervention in Cambodia—1978

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fox Gregory H
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Khmer Rouge ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Armed Attack ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Khmer Rouge Regime ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter discusses Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of Cambodia. It begins with a history of the antagonism between the two countries, then reviews the Cambodian border incursions that ultimately prompted the invasion and then describes the invasion itself. Drawing on the extensive debate over the intervention in the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly, the chapter then reviews three legal justifications offered at the time by the two countries and third parties: (i) a self-defense claim that Vietnam properly responded to a Cambodian armed attack, (ii) humanitarian intervention to stop the horrific abuses of the Khmer Rouge regime, and (iii) an invitation by an anti-Khmer Rouge faction of Cambodians. The chapter concludes that while the Vietnamese action is most frequently cited as an example of humanitarian intervention, few states (including Vietnam) made that claim at the time. The self-defense argument is more plausible while the invitation claim does not appear consistent with known facts.

Humanitarian Intervention and International Security

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor B. Seybolt
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
International System ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

Humanitarian intervention is the use of military intervention in a state to achieve socioeconomic objectives, such as keeping people alive and communities functioning by providing basic necessities, without the approval of its authorities. There are three eras of humanitarian intervention: the entire time up to the end of World War II, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War period. These three eras are distinguished by differences in the structure of the international system. Ultimately, the Western intellectual tradition of just war is the foundation for contemporary international law governing armed conflict. It is grounded in natural law, which recognizes the right of sovereigns to use force to uphold the good of the human community, particularly in cases where unjust injury is inflicted on innocents. Eventually, a diverse body of literature on humanitarian intervention has developed. The contemporary debate focuses on the long-standing disagreement between positive law and natural law about coercive intervention. Political scientists use realist and constructivist paradigms to analyze the motives of intervening states and to argue for or against the practice. Proponents favor humanitarian intervention on the basis of legitimacy and the consequences of nonintervention. Opponents argue against intervention on the basis of illegitimacy, practical constraints, and negative consequences. Meanwhile, skeptics sympathize with the humanitarian impulse to help civilians but are troubled about methods and consequences.

scholarly journals From Land-Locked to Land-Linked?

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Ashley Scott Kelly ◽  
Xiaoxuan Lu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Mekong Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Historical Periods

AbstractThis chapter, From land-locked to land-linked? Laos within a continuum of connectivity in the Mekong region, constructs a history of infrastructure-building in Laos understood through economic connectivity. This chapter challenges the dominant narrative of a de-historicized, often linear progression from land-locked to land-linked or from isolation to integration by contextualizing the contemporary imaginations and developments of Laos within the broader social, economic and political transitions across the Mekong region. We examine the malleable identities of “Laos,” “border” and “infrastructure” in the strategic importance of the Mekong region and the struggles to control and reshape its interconnectivity, especially during the period between colonial-era obscuration and more recent revitalization of the Southern Silk Road. Rather than comprehensive or strictly chronological, this chapter focuses on three loosely defined historical periods: the colonial period from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, the Cold War period from the mid-twentieth century to late 1980s, and the post-Cold War period from the late 1980s until the present day. We ground the distinct histories of these periods in discourses specific to their times and places, each with their own geographic conception of the Mekong region and particular combination of socioeconomic and geopolitical imperatives driving investment in large-scale infrastructure projects.

The Turbulent 1990s

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas G. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Current Policy ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Policy Problems ◽  
Current Reality

The responsibility to protect is central to the current policy debate on humanitarian intervention in war zones, and so it is instructive to explore its immediate post-Cold War origins in the decade preceding the December 2001 release of the report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The history of the turbulent decade of the 1990s is essential to understanding the normative and policy problems that the Commission was trying to resolve as well as the remaining contestation that surrounds coming to the rescue of civilians caught in the throes of war. This chapter provides a sense of the practical and political problems that animated the development of R2P along with the distance yet to be covered to make mass atrocities an unpleasant memory instead of an ugly and continuing current reality.

7. Post-Cold War era

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
Global Security ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Terrorism ◽  
Regional Conflict ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

What significant lessons can be learned from the history of nuclear weapons? ‘Post-Cold War era’ considers post-Cold War attempts to curb nuclear proliferation. The clarity of the Cold War world has given way to the ambiguities and uncertainties of a world where global security is threatened by regime collapse, nuclear terrorism, new nuclear weapons states, regional conflict, and pre-existing nuclear arsenals. The nuclear rivalry with Russia, North Korea, and Iran gives the feeling of returning to the Cold War period, with the ever present threat of a deliberate or unintended confrontation. So far, we have avoided mutual destruction, but is this down to policy or luck?

The Future of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Nuclear Physics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

The book is devoted to the intriguing post-war activity called—with different terms—futurism, futurology, future research, or futures studies. It seeks to understand how futurists and futurologists imagined the Cold War and post-Cold War world and how they used the tools and methods of future research to influence and change that world. Forms of future research emerged after 1945 and engaged with the future both as an object of science and as an object of the human imagination. The book carefully explains these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post-war period. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which came from new strands of critical theory in the margins of the social sciences or sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. Different forms of prediction lay very different claims to how, and with what accuracy, futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over coming and not yet existing developments. Not surprisingly, such different claims to predictability coincided with radically different notions of human agency, of morality and responsibility, indeed of politics.

The Development of NATO's Nuclear Strategy

1995 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Heuser
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cold War

With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have come to a turning point, perhaps the most important turning point, in the short but complex history of nuclear strategy. The Cold War is now history, albeit the sort of history that we will be living with for a long time yet. It is therefore time to review the policies and strategies of the Cold War in a historical perspective. In this essay, it is NATO's nuclear strategy during the Cold War that will be the subject of such a review.2

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