Search Results

After the reality of the Holocaust had become clear, the members of the newly formed United Nations promised to ‘never again’ allow the crime of genocide and other crimes against humanity to occur. The war in Syria demonstrated the shallow nature of this promise. How was it that Syria was allowed to spiral into an inferno in which mass atrocities were committed against civilians and millions were forcibly displaced? We begin by recounting how a popular uprising was brutally suppressed by the al-Assad government’s military forces—the result was a ‘new war’ where many of the protagonists had more to gain from war than peace. The chapter then examines the diplomatic strategies regional and global powers pursued. We note that the enforcement of the Chemical Weapons Convention signalled a rare moment, during the conflict, where there was a consensus among the great powers. No similar collective international action has been evident thus far in response to the massive harms being inflicted upon millions of innocent civilians in a brutal war lasting more than a decade.

This chapter examines the role of humanitarian intervention in world politics. It considers how we should resolve tensions when valued principles such as order, sovereignty, and self-determination come into conflict with human rights; and how international thought and practice has evolved with respect to humanitarian intervention. The chapter discusses the case for and against humanitarian intervention and looks at humanitarian activism during the 1990s. It also analyses the responsibility to protect principle and the use of force to achieve its protection goals in Libya in 2011. Two case studies are presented in this chapter. The first one looks at Myanmar and barriers to intervention. The second one centres on the role of Middle Eastern governments in Operation Unified Protector which took place in 2011 in Libya.

This chapter argues that the the international community’s response to the Syrian civil war was a failure of resolute diplomacy. It first recounts how a popular uprising was brutally supressed by the Bashar al-Assad government’s military forces, sparking a ‘new war’ where many of the protagonists have more to gain from war than peace. It then considers the diplomatic strategies pursued by regional and global powers, as well as the leading players in the intervention and mediation process such as United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, and Swedish-Italian diplomat Staffan de Mistura. It also discusses the use of crisis management and coercive diplomacy to enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention. The case of Syria illustrates how responsibility to protect (R2P) requires a strong consensus among the great powers in order to be effective.

This chapter examines the impact of the Ottawa Process on the use of antipersonnel landmines as well as its significance to foreign policy analysis. The Ottawa Process led to the signing of an international treaty to ban the use and trading of landmines in 1997. It also contributed to the concept of human security and the emerging global principle of responsibility to protect. The chapter first considers the dynamic between governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) leading up to the launch of the Ottawa Process before discussing how middle power countries worked with NGOs and used soft power diplomacy to achieve a ban on landmines. It also explores the utility of the Ottawa Process as a model for recent international efforts, including the Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and the treaties on cluster munitions and the trade in small arms.

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.