From Kosovo to Kabul

This book takes a critical look at the way in which human rights issues have been brought to the fore in international affairs. Over the last decade, the language of international intervention has been transformed. The UN and Nato's new policy of interventionism—as shown in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor—has been hailed as 'humanitarian action', part of a new 'ethical' approach to foreign policy. The establishment of an international criminal court and ad hoc tribunals for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia reflect this shift in perception, which has been welcomed by world leaders, government critics and even NGOs. David Chandler offers a rigorous critique of this apparently benign shift in international relations to reveal the worrying political implications of a new human rights discourse. He asks why the West can now prioritise the human rights of individuals over the traditional rights of state sovereignty and bars to military intervention, and why this shift has happened so quickly. Charting the development of a human rights-based foreign policy, he considers the theoretical problems of defining human rights and sets this within the changing framework of international law. Meticulous and compelling, From Kosovo to Kabul offers a disturbing insight into the political implications of a human rights-led foreign policy, and the covert agenda that it conceals.

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at theUniversity of Westminster. He has written widely on democracy, human rights and international relations and is also the author of Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton (Pluto Press, 1999/2000) and Constructing Global Civil Society (2004), editor of Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (2002) and Peace without Politics: Ten Years of State-Building in Bosnia (2005), and co-editor of Global Civil Society: Contested Futures (2005).