The Existing Analyses of Human Rights Enforcement: a Critical Review

Abstract

This chapter examines academic analyses of the practice of humanitarian intervention and of the War on Terror. It seeks to fulfil two tasks:

• 1. To show what is missing from existing analyses; and

• 2. To highlight the nature of the causal relationship between theory and practice, and between academic analyses and the practice of human-rights enforcement.

While the first task represents a traditional way to begin a scientific analysis and consists in demonstrating the deficiencies of available studies in order to justify another analysis or another approach to the problem in question, the second aim of this review of literature is much less conventional. What it implies is that theory is causally related to practice and in order to analyse a substantive phenomenon we need to study not only its empirical manifestations, but also the way it has been constructed in theory, and the implications of the latter for practice. To put it differently, the review of academic literature on post-Cold War policies of human-rights enforcement provided here is part of the research, and not a preliminary to it, as is usually the case in studies underpinned by a positivist epistemology which categorically separates theory from practice. In this respect, the overall aim of this book can be broadly described as an establishment of the content of the concept of human-rights enforcement by ‘exposing the complex set of relations in and through which it is constituted — theoretically and substantively’ (Maclean, 1999b, p. 181, emphasis added).