NATO’S INTERVENTION IN LIBYA: THE PATHWAY TOWARDS A LEGITIMATE HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION
NATO’S INTERVENTION IN LIBYA: THE PATHWAY TOWARDS A LEGITIMATE HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

Summary/Abstract: As a military organization with regional or even global influence, NATO is one of the few international actors capable of performing large scale humanitarian interventions. Moreover, its new post-Cold War outlook, with an emphasis on peacekeeping and crisis management operations make it one of the most suitable candidates to handle such a task. However, since there are no clear guidelines with regard to the conditions under which humanitarian interventions are to be considered legitimate, there is always room for speculation that political interests are behind this sort of interventions. Consequently, the present paper plans to investigate why NATO’s intervention in Libya was considered legitimate in comparison with other past interventions (mainly Kosovo) which were not. In this way, the study will be able to identify the nature of the changes which determined such a legitimizing effect: was it NATO’s behavior that shifted gears or did the international perception on humanitarian intervention (the conditions which made it legitimate) change as well?

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