Keyword Archives: security
The Human Rights Dimensions of International Peace and Security: Humanitarian Intervention After 9/11
This paper looks at the impact Human Rights notions have on international peace and security. It discusses how human rights and international peace and security are interrelated and interdependent and that the fostering of one promotes the enhancement of the other and that the needs for universal respects for Human Rights and Peace respectively can be reconciled under international law, if the use of force remains the last resort in the problems of human rights. It also incorporates a step by step procedure for the enforcement of human rights under international law.
Purity or Political Engagement?: Issues in food and health security interventions in complex political emergencies
This paper is concerned with the tension between what it describes as “pure” humanitarianism and the increasing pressures on relief workers to become politically engaged by adopting developmental approaches and by seeking to actively resolve disaster-producing conflicts. Combining theory with case studies concerning the delivery of health and food aid in war zones, it argues that while seductive, attempts to use relief aid as a tool for political engagement are fraught with practical and ethical difficulties. Not only are developmental goals elusive in conflict environments, but abandoning principles of neutrality and impartiality to determine the allocation of scarce resources increases the risk of aid being manipulated by warring parties and by donor governments. While not unproblematic, the paper concludes that neutrality and impartiality remain the best principles currently available to organise humanitarian action.
Mechanisms for Conflict Management in West Africa: Politics of Harmonization
The pattern of co-operation in West Africa has been marked in a most remarkable manner by its colonial past. Among the sub-regions into which the OAU has divided Africa, none has been polarised as West Africa. Indeed the sub-region was described as the most varied in Africa in terms of the size of countries, colonially [...]