The Kosovo War and the Emergence of the Responsibility to Protect: The Transformation of International Law in the 1990s and 2000s

The end of the Cold War bipolar order sparked the emergence of new threats to world peace and global security. At the same time, it unleashed a new liberal internationalism and humanitarianism among politicians, intellectuals, international lawyers, and journalists pursuing a transnational agenda. From their perspective, the victory of the liberal model of Western democracies over the communist system of rule indicated the beginning of a process of hierarchical redefinition of the principles of international law. In this context, they questioned the primacy of state sovereignty over human rights protection. The principle of “humanitarian interventionism” found its way into the foreign policy of the USA and its allies in the 1990s. For at least two decades, so-called humanitarian interventions, elevated to a cornerstone of international politics, and the concept of the responsibility to protect found its way into international law. The article focuses on the decisive role that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s intervention in the Kosovo War played in these developments.