Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
shades. The limitations of conventional approaches to Security Studies, which hold
that significant threats come only from other states and that the Cold War was a
period of peace, are surely exposed by the unparalleled human suffering resulting
from twentieth-century politicide.
Securing the individual – the global politics
of human rights
The notion of taking politico-legal steps to protect individuals other than one’s own
nationals/citizens is relatively new in international affairs and is still a long way from
being firmly established in international law.
Fighting for the rights of others
– humanitarian intervention
Wars prompted by the abuse of another country’s citizens are a relatively recent
historical development and still shrouded in controversy. Declaring war against a
country for the mistreatment of one’s own nationals resident there is far more solidly
established in international law. Perhaps the most liberal interpretation ever of this
doctrine came in 1850 when the UK threatened Greece with war for a Greek mob’s
attack on the home of Don Pacifico, a part-Gibraltarian and hence British subject.
Table 5.4 presents a chronology of military interventions which have purported
to have been inspired, at least partially, by the motivation of relieving the suffering
of nationals distinct from the interveners. Differentiating between a humanitarian
military action and one motivated by more traditional spurs of gain, self-defence or
ideology is nearly always a difficult judgement. In all the listed cases one or more of
these more familiar reasons to take up arms have been claimed by some observers
to be the real cause of war.
The legal basis for humanitarian intervention is a moot point and it has come
in and out of fashion in international affairs over the last three centuries. Grotius, in
the seventeenth century, considered rescuing imperilled non-nationals to come into
the category of just war but it was not until the Concert of Europe era in the nineteenth
century that the concept was put into practice. Humanitarian intervention, along with
just war in general, fell out of favour amid the amoral realism of twentieth century
state practice but rose to prominence again in the ‘New World Order’ that was
heralded by the demise of the Cold War in 1990. Robertson provides a striking illustration
of this by contrasting the UK government’s enthusiasm for the 1991 ‘Safe
Havens’ action in Iraq and the 1999 Kosovan War with a Foreign Office assertion in
1986 that: ‘contemporary legal opinion comes down against the existence of a right
of humanitarian intervention’ (Robertson 2000: 401). 4
Despite more frequent recourse to it in recent years, humanitarian intervention
remains a highly contentious concept in International Relations since it challenges
that fundamental underpinning of the Westphalian system, state sovereignty.
International law is unclear on the issue. The UN Charter appears both to proscribe
and prescribe the practice. Articles 2.4 and 2.7 uphold the importance of sovereignty
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