Human Security Centre Human Rights and International Security Research

One is struck with an unsettling scenario when watching Skyfall: an unseen invader reaches into your infrastructure from afar and manages to cause untold chaos and carnage whilst sat behind his desk sipping Red Bull. Cyber-terrorism is yet to approach its zenith, but that time is not very far away.

Whilst al-Qaeda has never been a particularly centralised organisation, in recent years it appears to have shifted from a model of a centralised franchise, which supports other groups to carry out attacks in their name, to a fractured structure of regional groups, each with its own internal politics and personal missions.

On this, the twelfth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre, the wounds are still fresh and raw in much of the West. Images of men and women diving to their deaths, rather than be crushed and of emergency personnel dying to save those inside the towers still haunt almost aspect of Western politics.

The Assad regime was behind the stomach-churning nerve agent attack on Ghouta. This is not conjecture. This is not a probability. This just simply is.

Humanitarian interventions are not a passing fad, but a genie that is now well and truly out of its bottle for good, to the horror of the remaining dictators in the world. There are many reasons why humanitarian interventions aren’t going away any time soon.

Whenever Afghanistan comes up in conversation, there are nearly always at least one of two myths put forward: firstly, that the only thing being achieved in this war is an increasing death toll of our troops; secondly, that the Afghans do not want us there and they were better off before we invaded.

We were wrong about Saddam Hussein. By ‘we’ I don’t mean the international intelligence community and I don’t mean the governments of the Coalition of the Willing. I mean the public and the media who, to this day, believe and say that what was found in Iraq after the fall of Saddam’s Baathist regime showed Saddam was not a threat to the international society.

Human rights are universal, but they are yet to be universalised. Transparent sovereignty is the answer. Whilst being a legalistic term that tends to evoke groans, apprehensive of impending, inevitable boredom, the word ‘sovereignty’ is central to any debate on whether humanitarian intervention in the internal affairs of a State is appropriate or justifiable.