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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the development sector has been engaged in debate concerning the failures of the NGO response. NGOs have destructively transplanted a parallel system of governance, often being caught up within an aid worker bubble which has stood between the Haitian state and its citizens and thus undermined the symbiotic nature of their social contract.
Some are calling the coalition intervention that began 19 March 2011, in Libya a success. I call tens of thousands of deaths and injuries a tragedy. When such casualties occur owing to a military intervention never shown to be necessary, the intervention is a failure.
Economics have a profound influence on defence policy regardless of country. One merely needs to observe the debates on expenditure today for a look at how even a superpower like the United State’s armed forces is constrained by defence budgets. While the same holds true for the UK, it has been more noticeable since 1945 with Britain’s declining power and prestige.
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