The revolt against the West: intervention and sovereignty

Abstract

Debates on intervention and sovereignty since 1945 can be summarised as a tale of two cities, San Francisco and Bandung, and of two countries, Rwanda and Libya. All are symbolic of different phases of these debates. The UN was born in San Francisco in 1945 with very little substantive participation by Asian and African governments. The great powers established a system in which they would determine when, where and how military interventions could take place. The 1955 Bandung Conference saw Asian and African countries seek to use new norms of intervention to regain their sovereignty. The 1994 Rwandan genocide, however, forced African countries to dilute notions of absolute sovereignty to allow military interventions for human protection purposes. The 2011 NATO military intervention in Libya did potentially irreparable damage to future UN-mandated interventions and was widely seen in the Global South as an abuse of the responsibility to protect (R2P).