Is there a 'responsibility to protect'? Is the UN capable of protecting the victims of internal conflicts?
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international relations
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published 24/07/2006
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Summary
Civil wars are, today, since the end of the Cold War, the dominant form of conflicts all around the world. For instance, as Stephen John Stedman explains, 'all thirty-five of the wars in 1997 were primarily internal' . Massive violence, destruction and killing tend, so, nowadays, to happen within states borders and no more in an inter-state context. Moreover, empirical studies show us, that among the total casualty figures of internal wars since 1945, the so-called 'wars of the third kind', 'approximately 90% of the casualties were civilians' .
As an international organization whose first purpose is to promote global peace and the respect of human rights, the UN can be expected to intervene in order to protect the victims of these civil wars and to establish peace. But this idea is often undermined by the concept of state sovereignty. There is, so, an important dilemma of how to react to such situations as ethnic cleansing, gross violence and explicit violation of human rights within a nation-state, raising the question of the responsibility of the UN in contrast with the sovereign character of states, their exclusive right to exercise supreme political authority . Is there an existing 'responsibility to protect'? Is the UN capable of protecting the victims of these internal conflicts?
Table of Contents
- The UN has not only a right but also a duty to protect the victims of third kind wars
- The various difficulties the organization is facing while trying to fulfil this mission, mostly linked with the concept of sovereignty
- Redefinition of sovereignty in today's world politic context, where the acceptance of humanitarian intervention, rather to go against it, is more a component of it
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