International Foreign Policy and Human Rights - Thesis Example

A human rights discourse is frequently used in international relations to justify interventions, state action, and military aggression. Seeking to address the role that human rights play in international affairs, this essay utilizes realist political theory to explore the primary motivations between state and supra-state interest in the international system. Are American military interventions the result of self-interest or can they be explained through an appeal to “soft” issues such as human rights and the need to safeguard the sanctity of the person?

Can UN inaction on a variety of political fronts be explained by geostrategic concerns and state relevance within the international system? Dreams of peace and prosperity ushered in the end of the Cold War; a new world order with the United States and liberal democracy firmly entrenched as the dominant power and ideological system in international affairs. Optimistic dreams of a new world order in which markets were free and peace became the global modus operandi were shattered in the early 1990s with the explosion of ethnic conflict and humanitarian tragedies on a grand scale.

The ethnic conflict threatened the territorial integrity of countries throughout the world including Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Liberia in Africa; Bosnia and Kosovo in Eastern Europe; state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in East Timor in Asia and extreme violence on the North American island nation of Haiti. Although ethnic conflict and humanitarian crises have existed since the dawn of time, for the first time ever images of extreme bloodshed, violence, and even genocide were broadcast into the homes of everyday Americans through international television stations like the Cable News Network (CNN), Fox and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Images of children being slaughtered, women raped, and people brutalized were beamed into the living rooms of the world to see. For the first time, the Western public was confronted, on a near-daily basis, with images of carnage and humanitarian crisis.