International Intervention in the Post-Cold War World: Moral Responsibility and Power Politics

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War

Interlude

2020 ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Hierarchical Relations ◽  
Bosnian War ◽  
International Authority ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Dayton Peace Agreement ◽  
Working Out

This interlude outlines the contours of international authority created in the response to the Bosnian war of the 1990s. The remaking of international institutions in response to Bosnia's war and its postwar peace heralded the coming-into-being of the “international community” as the dominant protagonist of a post-Cold War order structured around the values of peace, democracy, the rule of law, humanitarian solidarity, and the inviolability of human rights. This order was presented as more or less universally valid. The universal validity of this post-Cold War model bestowed two main roles and sets of hierarchical relations on the agents of intervention: that of mediator above and between conflicting parties, and that of civilizing missionary or educator of not fully modern people(s). Successfully occupying either role required a constant demonstration of neutrality. However, working out what it meant to be “neutral” in the everyday encounters of international intervention across relations of difference was often a vexing and unpredictable endeavor. The interlude then looks at postwar Bosnia's political settlement and explains why refugee return became such an important site of intervention encounters. It also considers the Dayton Peace Agreement.

Japanese National Identity in the Post-Cold War Era

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Takahiko Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Power

The euphoria that followed the end of the Cold War has been gradually replaced in Japan with a sense of uncertainty and, in some quarters, with nostalgia for what seems in retrospect the stable and simple truths of Cold War power politics. Although there is a great need to find new ways of adjusting to the profound transformations that now characterize our age, there is an inclination to base these new methods on old patterns of thought and even to turn to outmoded and obsolete formulations that have been firmly conditioned by old international and domestic circumstances.

scholarly journals A genealogy of mediation in international relations: From ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ forms of global justice or managed war?

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver P Richmond
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
International Mediation ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
New States ◽  
Analogue To Digital ◽  
The Cold War

What does it mean to mediate in the contemporary world? During the Cold War, and since, various forms of international intervention have maintained a fragile strategic and territorially sovereign balance between states and their elite leaders, as in Cyprus or the Middle East, or built new states and inculcated new norms. In the post-Cold War era intervention and mediation shifted beyond the balance of power and towards the liberal peace, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Timor Leste. In the case of Northern Ireland, identity, territorial sovereignty, and the nature of governance also began to be mediated, leading to hints of complex, post-liberal formulations. This article offers and evaluates a genealogy of the evolution of international mediation.

scholarly journals The Limits of Foreign Authority: Publicity and the Political Logic of Ambivalence in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Independent State ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Comparative Study

AbstractThis article explores the ambivalent forms of authority and legitimacy articulated by the Office of the High Representative of the international community in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The High Representative exercised quasi-sovereign powers that placed his position at the center of two contradictions: a democratization paradox of “imposing democracy,” that is, promoting democracy through undemocratic means, and a state-building paradox of building an independent state by violating the principle of popular sovereignty. I analyze the Office's use of mass-mediated publicity to show how the High Representative sought to legitimize his actions in ways that both sustained the norms of democracy and statehood he advocated and suspended the contradictions behind how he promoted them. In doing so, he claimed that Bosnia was caught in a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. This claim obliged him to show that he was working to end the state of exception. By focusing on one failed attempt by the OHR to orchestrate an enactment of “local ownership” that was aimed at demonstrating that Bosnia no longer required foreign supervision, this article identifies important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. It offers a view of international intervention that is more volatile, open-ended, and unpredictable than either the ordered representations of the technocratic vision or the confident assertions that critique international intervention as a form of (neo)imperial domination. It also demonstrates the analytic importance of publicity for the comparative study of international nation-building and democratization in the post-Cold War era.

The U.S.-China Peace: Great Power Politics, Spheres of Influence, and the Peace of East Asia

2003 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
The U.S

East Asia in the post–Cold War era has been the world's most peaceful region. Whereas since 1989 there have been major wars in Europe, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and significant and costly civil instability in Latin America, during this same period in East Asia there have been no wars and minimal domestic turbulence. Moreover, economic growth in East Asia has been faster than in any other region in the world. East Asia seems to be the major beneficiary of pax Americana.

scholarly journals Globalization, Refugee Crisis and the Work of International Non-Government Organisations

Refuge ◽  
1997 ◽  
pp. 13-15
Author(s):  
Robert Holton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Refugee Resettlement ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Positive View ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Moral Influence

The author suggests that increasing economic rationalism in the post-Cold War era has engendered a retreat from public moral responsibility along with the hardening of attitudes to refugees. While deconstructing the international refugee system, he focuses on the roles played by non-government organisations within it, arguing that the existence of NGOs does exert a moral influence on nation-states with respect to treatment of refugees. The author asserts a positive view of the role of NGOs in the changing global refugee resettlement regime and argues that NGOs form an important part of international civil society.

The Mulroney government and humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Misha Boutilier
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
World Order ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Government

Based on primary and secondary sources, this article analyzes the policy of the Mulroney government on humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1993. It finds that the Mulroney government chose to play a leading role in the international intervention in the former Yugoslavia, because doing so both allowed the government to implement its vision of a post-Cold War world order that aligned with its understanding of Canadian interests, and satisfied the demands and preferences of the Canadian public. At the same time, the Mulroney government stumbled into unanticipated situations in Yugoslavia, and failed to respond to them effectively. This led the government to reconsider the assumptions that had motivated its initial enthusiasm for intervention, and to commence a review of peacekeeping and intervention that it would not live to implement.

scholarly journals The international determinants of the Bosnian War

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-619
Author(s):  
Bruno Gomes Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ethnic Conflict ◽  
International System ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
External Support ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Bosnian War ◽  
Great Power Politics

This paper analyzes the international determinants that led to and triggered the Bosnian War in the 1990s. An overview of the Socialist Yugoslavia and its international stance up to its dismemberment is presented at first, focusing on the integration of the country in the international system (and its impact on Yugoslavia) and on its international economic status. Then, the onset of the war and the actions of the Great Powers — United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and Russia — are analyzed, looking at the undermining of the Yugoslav state's sovereignty and the empowerment of domestic actors through external support to belligerent groups. It is seen that after Yugoslavia's economic destabilization, foreign interference propelled the start of the war by making the belligerent groups in Bosnia confident because of their foreign support. Geopolitical interests were a determinant of the Bosnian War, which was characterized as an intractable ethnic conflict to hide political agendas at play.Keywords: Bosnian War; Yugoslavia; Post-Cold War geopolitics; Dismemberment of Yugoslavia;  Great power politics; Ethnic conflict.

17. Security and Insecurity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Security Cooperation ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
Global War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Hans Morgenthau

This chapter examines traditional concepts of security and insecurity in the realm of international politics. It first considers Thomas Hobbes's account of the state of nature and the emergence of the power politics approach to security as worked out by Hans Morgenthau and his successors. It then discusses the evolution of security thinking through to the end of the Cold War, ideas about collective security as embodied in the United Nations and the nature of security cooperation in Europe through NATO. It also explores some pressing security challenges in the post-Cold War period and the broadening of the security agenda to encompass more recent concerns ranging from environmental security to energy security and the notions of ‘human security’ and ‘responsibility to protect’. Finally, it analyses the ‘global war on terror’ and especially how the 9/11 attacks affected the discourse on security and insecurity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document