A lack of cooperation between agencies, ignorance in dealing with the methods of fund-gathering and fund-moving measures, and the implementation of contradictory policies have resulted in a system in which the West cannot find a comprehensive strategy to curb the financing of Islamic terrorism.
While the development of R2P as a concept has been the preserve of international relations theoreticians (albeit ones with large amounts of practical experience), its implementation rests on the practitioners of the day. And these practitioners deal in the world of realpolitik with all of its inconsistencies, relativities and competing national interests.
Resources are strategically invaluable economic and political tools. It is the unquestionable human thirst for black gold, and other vital resources such as water and minerals, where global capitalism, post-colonial kleptocracy and the disenfranchised insurgent will meet in an unpredictable and volatile new paradigm.
Motivated both by analytical rigor and political expediency, ICISS sandwiched its discussion of international response to atrocities between what it described as a “responsibility to prevent” and a “responsibility to rebuild.” Once introduced, however, the logic of prevention as core to the global atrocity agenda was difficult to deny. Why wait to halt a massacre if early engagement might avert it entirely?
Traditional approaches to international relation, such as liberalism, realism, and realpolitik, have failed in Somalia. As policymakers determine what to do about Somalia, they should consider employing faith-based diplomacy jointly with traditional military operations and Track I diplomatic efforts.
The moral imperative to intervene in a nation’s internal affairs where acts of genocide are threatened is a powerful one. That the UN is eager to push the doctrine of R2P and to re-define sovereignty to permit intervention in a state’s internal affairs is testimony to the fact that the Charter does not provide that legal authority. It should.
The US experience in Venezuela helped nuance its wider policy towards Latin America by challenging the reliance on free market economics. While the Eisenhower administration chose to re-emphasise democratic values in order to combat rising Communist radicalism, practical support for democracy proved to be limited.
The UN-mandated intervention in Libya is now officially at an end. Perhaps only time will tell whether Libya turns out to have been a great case of international intervention or something rather less.
In the McCarthy era of the 1950s, anti-Communism created an atmosphere of fear which allowed political actors to accrue greater powers over the American population. This unusual situation was permitted as the public were manipulated by people with political interests into believing the USA had entered into a state of emergency in order to safeguard national security.
Without Western responsibility for the outcome of the intervention in Libya and without any transformative promise, Western powers were strengthened morally and politically through their actions, whereas in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, they were humbled and often humiliated.
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