“The colonial or third-world other of the 1960s [was] refigured and transformed from militant and articulate fighter and thinker to ‘victim’ by a defence of human rights strictly identified as the rights of the victim, the rights of those who do not have the means to argue their rights, or create a political solution to their own problems. Solidarity with the subaltern now meant Western aid and rescue, but always with political conditions.
“[I]nvocations of human rights and humanitarian intervention are selective.” It s like the West’s selective reading of history.
“It can be difficult to understand why there was ever so much faith in such an order” – the international liberal order preached in and after Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo.
“[N]o Western government has invoked R2P [the Right to Protect] in response to ethnic cleansing campaigns in Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh or Gaza.”
“[A]s the British political scientist Richard Sakwa has stressed, Russia’s aversion to R2P was not because Vladimir Putin is ‘the crude defender of sovereignty as so often presented’, but rather the West’s selective deployment of it.” (My italics N.M.)
“Recently, ‘Western credibility’ has been diminished by the wildly disparate reactions to war crimes in Ukraine and Gaza. In one notorious example, Russia’s clear violation of article 54 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions against destroying, attacking, or removing ‘objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population’, such as drinking water, was treated as an unambiguous war crime by Western leaders. Yet the same crime, perpetrated by Israel against the people of Gaza, was met with comparative silence.
“[W]ill the death of the liberal order clear the way for a more democratic, accountable and egalitarian world?”
I am not optimistic. One of the reasons is that articles like Lynch’s are so critical and an antidote to amnesia, a help for students, etc. but does not delve into structures of power, which is hinted at here, but not elaborated:
International law and its courts really just a ‘white man’s world’ – a conclusion that would leave those outside of the West with few peaceful tools at its disposal, wholly reliant upon “resistance, struggle and disruption” to advance their calls for justice.
“International law and its courts are really “just a ‘white man’s world’ – a conclusion that would leave those outside of the West with few peaceful tools at its disposal, wholly reliant upon ‘resistance, struggle and disruption’ to advance their calls for justice.”
Furthermore, Lynch’s take on ‘humanitarianism’ in the ‘death of humanitarianism’ is approached from a power vantage-point – regimes and international institutions, but silent on humanitarianism of those who risk their lives to help and the brave who challenge the perpetrators of crimes, i.e. the individuals, the non-NGOs, the ‘ordinary’ people and their resilience.
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