The Use of Force in Defence of Human Rights, a Conversation with Professor Mats Berdal

In this video, Professor Mats Berdal (King's College London) joins UNU Rector David M. Malone to discuss the normative and geo-political factors behind the increased use of military force for humanitarian purposes. The conversation covers such questions as whether the trend is likely to endure, why the practice of intervention in support of human rights remains so contested, and what factors (normative, power-political, and institutional) are likely to shape its future trajectory.

Since the end of the cold war, the use of military force within the international system has increasingly come to be justified, whether wholly or in part, on humanitarian grounds. The use of force for humanitarian purposes — from Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s to Libya in 2011 — is widely seen as linked to a larger normative shift in international relations in favour of human rights and the justice-related provisions of the UN Charter, over more traditional and narrowly state-centric conceptions of sovereignty.

This view is seemingly confirmed by the UN General Assembly's acceptance, in 2005, of the principle that should individual states fail, the "international community, through the UN" has a "responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity". Even so, the practice of using or threatening to use force to support humanitarian objectives remains highly contested. A number of influential "emerging powers" are challenging what they view as a distinctive Western agenda — one driven by narrow national interests as much as by altruistic motives.

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