Humanitarian intervention doctrine evolved into a pretext for regime change

Evidence

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1999, Secretary-General Kofi Annan identified a shift in the concept of sovereignty from the national to the individual. As Sungur Sarvan points out, it followed that “where a state violates human rights, the ‘international community’ has the ‘right to intervene,’ militarily if need be, in the internal affairs of that state.” This definition inaugurated the notion of “cross-border rights,” those rights that can be “defended” by an outside force. It was a short step from this notion to the policy of “regime change” pursued by the Bush administration in the first years of the twenty-first century. This sea change in foreign relations was cemented in 2005 by the United Nations’ adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which boldly declares that “sovereignty no longer exclusively protects States from foreign interference” and that states may be seen to forfeit their sovereignty if they fail adequately to protect their populations from human rights violations. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 338

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, where the language of intervention and cross-border ‘sides’ animates Changez’s critique of American foreign policy. — connects to: The 1993 Somalia intervention served geostrategy despite humanitarian framing