Politics, Military Operations and Humanitarian Action: an Uneasy Alliance [antikvár]

Humanitarian action What is "humanitarian action"? The weakening ofthe natural (State) protector During the Cold War, the key words governing Western thinking were Marxism v. markét economy, popular democracy v. liberal democracy, wars of national liberation v. colonialism, development v. economic imperialism, etc., reflecting a world where geopolitical bipolarity served as the framework for intellectual dialectics. Today it is the word "destructurization" that hovers on all lips, a word that is hardly adequate to disguise the absence of an analytical concept capable of apprehending the reality of international relations; an admission of impotence. There are no longer any poles, or fixed points of reference: national and local economies are disintegrating, State structures are crumbling or simply collapse. The developing countries are obviously the ideál aréna for observing these phenomena: Somalia, Libéria and so many others. The disappearance of the bipolar system of international relations indeed affected developing countries, but its passing alsó brought chaos to the very heart of Europe. The issue of nationality, and therefore of identity, which everyone believed to lie buried beneath the strata of civilization, suddenly reared its head once more. Endowed with obsolete political systems and economies too weak to accommodate this sudden change, the countries of Eastern Europe had to start on the difficult path towards the Western model. Somé, perhaps more fragile than others, such as Yugoslavia, disintegrated into violence. Whether in situations characterized by bipolarity or by chaos, when conflict erupts there is a pressing need for intervention by an external, neutral and independent player. Any armed conflict brings in its wake a degree of structural collapse: the State, concentrating all its resources on the war effort, becomes weaker; it may lose control of parts of its 3