Description
The end of the Cold War fundamentally altered the landscape of international relations and began transforming the method of intervention by Western powers in the developing world. Western nations and international organizations believed that reinforcing democratization and marketization would become self-perpetuating solutions to the social and political strife that resulted from underdevelopment, poverty, famine disease and violent conflict. As the West expanded its role beyond mitigating aggressive war, it declared itself the primary global arbiter of issues such as human rights, security and development in countries it now deemed as failed states, and those issues they believed posed threats to national interests. As the approach of the West towards failed and failing states seems incoherent at best and a general failure at worst, it has inspired a wide spectrum of debates in policy and academia, from supporters of near unlimited intervention to charges of neoimperialism. This paper argues that an approach which conflates the issues of human rights with national and regional security issues has emerged as the primary framework through which the West pursues its vital interests in the post-Cold War era. This 'security/human rights framework' is both a search for a policy agenda in a new era of international relations and strategic manipulation of threats to maintain some form of hegemony. It provides the normative basis for Western military and economic endeavors, one that seeks to distinguish itself from the eras of formal colonialism or imperialism and deal with a Cold War policy agenda that finds itself inadequate in addressing the needs of great powers in a unipolar and globalized world.
