Search results

Persistent tensions between the international norm of state sovereignty and emerging human rights norms, including the Responsibility to Protect and the protection of civilians during international peacekeeping, raise the question of when and under what circumstances local and regional actors are more likely to respect global norms. These tensions are particularly stark in Africa. On the one hand, African states and regional organizations were among the first proponents of liberal protection norms in the non-Western world. On the other hand, many African leaders view state sovereignty as indispensable. Building on established empirical justice research in neighboring fields, this article makes an important contribution to the literature by demonstrating that African states are more likely to accept interventionist human rights norms when standards of procedural justice have been observed. The article demonstrates the relevance of procedural justice by examining the puzzle of divergent African reactions to two similar instances of regime change in Libya and the Ivory Coast that were enforced by extra-continental actors in the name of global protection norms.

Persistent tensions between the international norm of state sovereignty and emerging human rights norms, including the Responsibility to Protect and the protection of civilians during international peacekeeping, raise the question of when and under what circumstances local and regional actors are more likely to respect global norms. These tensions are particularly stark in Africa. On the one hand, African states and regional organizations were among the first proponents of liberal protection norms in the non-Western world. On the other hand, many African leaders view state sovereignty as indispensable. Building on established empirical justice research in neighboring fields, this article makes an important contribution to the literature by demonstrating that African states are more likely to accept interventionist human rights norms when standards of procedural justice have been observed. The article demonstrates the relevance of procedural justice by examining the puzzle of divergent African reactions to two similar instances of regime change in Libya and the Ivory Coast that were enforced by extra-continental actors in the name of global protection norms.

Dissociation from international institutions, i.e., states turning away from international cooperation and organizations, is a widespread phenomenon today. It often leads to significant tensions between the states that turn away and those that remain committed to an institution. This introduction to a forum on dissociation from international institutions reviews the state of the art and develops a framework for analyzing the impact of dissociation on relations between departing and remaining states. It centers on the hypothesis that dissociation leads to two types of conflicts between states, ideational and distributive, with ideational conflicts more likely to increase tensions between states. The article then reviews the five cases of dissocia-tion examined in the other contributions to the forum and summarizes their main individual and comparative findings. Taken together, the five cases suggest that dissociation can exacerbate broader structural conflicts between states; that how parties perceive of conflict during the dissociation process matters for its effects on interstate relations and that an emphasis on ideational conflict leads to more confrontational relations; and that domestic politics matter greatly not only for whether dissociation occurs but also for its effects on interstate relations.

Despite abundant debates on humanitarian military interventions, there is yet little empirical knowledge about these operations and their effects due to a lack of systematized data. To stimulate the necessary comparative research, this article introduces a new data set on all humanitarian military interventions between 1946 and 2015. The data set outlines the interveners' proclaimed aims, mandates, and activities. Documentation of events in the target countries prior to, during, and after the interventions facilitates their evaluation. The data set consists of data matrices and structured case descriptions that document all coding decisions. A review of the spatial and temporal distribution of interveners and interventions refutes the prevalent view that the vast majority of humanitarian military interventions are conducted by Western states and that such missions subsided after the interventions in Afghanistan and Libya. The data set enables a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research. Despite its limited number of cases, it can reveal whether humanitarian military interventions generally decrease the duration and intensity of violence. Among other applications, it can help identify the conditions under which such interventions lead to an escalation or de-escalation of deadly violence.