The international community is fixated on the protection of human rights, and sees only one route to do this: the expansion of liberal democracy. The interest in propagating these models produced the conditions for conflict to break out in Sri Lanka.
Whether international institutions can promote and achieve a more peaceful world is a question that is being examined more and more in the study of international relations. Literature about this issue has further developed over the last 50 years, as the world has seen the rise of new international organizations and the integration of old ones.
As an essay regarding political theory may seem a little out of place on e-International Relations. However, what world leaders, individuals and administrations as a whole, regard ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘justice’ (and the like) to mean, has vast effects to both domestic and international affairs.
The election of Barack Obama as president in 2009 was thought to be the symbolic end of the Bush doctrine and its associated neoconservative underpinnings. This essay however seeks to challenge this notion by examining the parallels between the Bush doctrine and the policies of the Obama administration.
The systematic inclusion of children in the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission process was unprecedented in the history of truth and reconciliation initiatives. Given the country’s history of child involvement in the war as both victims and perpetrators, it was especially important to include children in the post-conflict peacebuilding processes.
It would be a mistake to deny that technological progress has been, and still is, a characteristic of our history. Men have gone from fighting with their gladios in ancient Rome to using gunpowder in cannons and rifles, and from deploying machine guns to applying the threat of nuclear war.
Private security companies and privatizing security can at first seem to offer solutions to maintaining safety and stability when a state is no longer able to do so. However, the interference of PSCs in state functions ultimately can hinder the development and legitimacy of a state and cause further insecurities within.
We may all agree that there is a moral imperative to halt mass atrocities. The problem is the reconciliation of such an obligation and our entrenched system of anarchy at the international level. Those states that are part of the United Nations should have a responsibility to respect the adoption of R2P principles, notably the moral imperative to halt mass atrocities and punish the perpetrators through the ICC.
On May 30th, 2010, former Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Mora Medina declared the drug cartel La Familia Michoacana, known simply as “La Familia,” to be the most dangerous in all of Mexico. The rise of La Familia, its bizarre ideology and indoctrination of members, and the lower-class following it has received have separated it from other DTOs in Mexico.
Although Western publics are not casualty-phobic and presently pay little attention to body counts as the ultimate barometer for success, they are wary of supporting wars with low prospects for ultimate triumph, and casualty rates and patterns can help formulate more nuanced policy opinions.
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