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the constitution of current and future global politics.
I will tackle this question via the
notion of state sovereignty, which is still regarded not just as a powerful drive for action
but also as the most important foundation on which the current international order is
seated.
I first look at humanitarian and counterterrorist approaches to state sovereignty.
It will be argued that these two approaches share a very similar logic but that this shared
logic is being subject to creative interpretations in such a way that seems to provide
conflicting prescriptions for action and hence different effects on global politics.
On
this basis, the next section attempts to sketch what these differences mean for future
structures of international relations.
In the Conclusion I will argue for the need to
synthesise the two approaches and suggest how it should take place.
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Humanitarian Intervention, ‘War on Terrorism’ and Sovereignty
Let me start with the issue of IDPs, which has been under serious discussion since the
early 1990s in which an explosion of ethnic conflicts around the world produced an
increasing number of those who are fleeing conflict zones but unable or unwilling to
cross the border.
There are an estimated 25 million IDPs in the world in 2003,
Convention