Understanding UN Politics Of Selectivity Through A Comparative Analysis Of International Humanitarian Intervention Practice In Rwanda (1994) And Kosovo (1999).

Humanitarian intervention is an issue which receives a great deal of attention from academics, politicians and the media. Throughout the 1990s, human rights abuses in Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo all raised the question of whether humanitarian intervention could be morally justified. This left Tony Blair to conclude in 1999 that "the most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get involved in other people's conflicts".Among all the situations and cases that the Security Council tries to solve inside its agenda concerning peace keeping, the one related to genocide and mass killing is the most complicated one. How can and will the international community respond to these situations? There is no truly settled consensus concerning essential questions like when and how an intervention could take place, neither is there agreement on the legitimacy or legality of the use of force to save victims of large-scale human rights violations. There is even no consensus on the definition of humanitarian intervention and whether or not it is the appropriate term to be used. And these are the reasons why it is interesting to attempt to find in this research, what are those fundamentals that define the possibility of an intervention or not, on the theoretical and practical level. What are the conditions that rules UN selectivity policy on humanitarian intervention action? Under which conditions will there be humanitarian interventions and what seem to be the most crucial triggering factors that will lead to that intervention? Considering closely the case of the mass killing that occurred in Rwanda in 1994, and the case of Kosovo, what are the key reasons that influence the international response? My hypotheses are that the response by the Security Council is determined by a combined purpose of legal considerations, humanitarian concerns and national interests. "The responsibility to protect" may exist in theory but in practice "political will", and all that underlies this factor, explains the actions of the Security Council.