This study explores the normative dimension of the evolving role of the United Nations in peace and security and, ultimately, in governance. What is dealt with here is both the UN's changing raison d'être and the wider normative context within which the organisation is located. The study looks at the UN through the window of one of its most contentious, yet least understood, practices: active involvement in intra-state conflicts as epitomised by UN peacekeeping. Drawing on the conceptual tools provided by the ‘historical structural’ approach, it seeks to understand how and why the international community continuously reinterprets or redefines the UN's role with regard to such conflicts. The study concentrates on intra-state ‘peacekeeping environments’, and examines what changes, if any, have occurred to the normative basis of UN peacekeeping in intra-state conflicts from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. One of the original aspects of the study is its analytical framework, where the conceptualisation of ‘normative basis’ revolves around objectives, functions and authority, and is closely connected with the institutionalised values in the UN Charter such as state sovereignty, human rights and socio-economic development.
Westphalia was signed by approximately 150 European ‘territorial authorities’, but at that time there were only six or seven modern states. After the Napoleonic Wars, at the beginning of the ‘imperialist age’ (1840–1914), this number increased due to the independence of American states, and at the end of the Second World War the UN Charter was signed by 50 independent states. It was in the second half of the twentieth century that the inter-state system expanded more rapidly. Today there are almost 200 sovereign states with a seat at the UN
concluded with the threat of airstrikes in the background. An especially commonly cited argument was that NATO was acting ‘in the spirit’ of the UN Charter in attempting to compel the Milosevic government to cease and desist its repressive activities in Kosovo. The then NATO Secretary-General, Javier Solana, encapsulated this argument at his first press conference after Operation Allied Force got underway
The Agenda for Democratisation emphasises that although ‘interrupted by the Cold War’, democratisation in accordance with the spirit of the UN Charter is also about ‘the project of democratic international organisations.’ 18 ‘A supportive international environment for democracy’ requires, in the post-Cold War situation and the context of globalisation
Charter, or it becomes, as authorised by the UN Security Council, an execution, sanction, or enforcement of international law. 12 War as a duel between states has been replaced by a discriminatory concept in which the warring state becomes a ‘criminal’ or rogue state. Although the UN Charter constitutes a major modification of the law of war, the Western imagination goes much
This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity.
ones. The first question concerns the legality–legitimacy spectrum. Is legality through UN authorization indispensable? Is non-authorized intervention by definition illegal or is it perhaps legal given an alternative reading of the UN Charter? 37 Can intervention be condoned if it appears legitimate even though it is technically illegal, as the Independent International Commission on Kosovo concluded in its detailed report? 38 Another tack is the
. Half a century later the light (or shadow) of Nuremberg lay on the paths to the two ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and to the International Criminal Court.50 Nuremberg also played a crucial role in the development of international human rights law. Holding individuals responsible for violations of international law ‘duties’ necessarily involved regarding those individuals as subjects of international law. The atrocities committed by the Nazis were partly responsible for the notion of international human ‘rights’ as expressed in the UN Charter (1945), the
humanitarian purposes in certain exceptional cases, thereby bypassing the cardinal norm of non-intervention (see table 4.1 ). According to Wilhelm Grewe’s assessment, in the nineteenth century ‘the principle of humanitarian intervention increasingly absorbed all other grounds of intervention (with the exception of contractual permission and self-help)’. 12 This tendency in law and practice is striking, for, prior to the UN Charter and the international law of
demonstrated by the key role that NATO members have conceded to the UN in overseeing the post-conflict reconstruction of Kosovo. What was confirmed by the Kosovo crisis is that the UN Charter and the security role that derives from it makes the UN an international body that is optimised for dealing with inter-state conflict better than the intra-state kind. The long-term impact of the Kosovo crisis on debates about