Working title of my current project is The Role of the UN in Humanitarian Interventions. The goal of this project is to identify potential for reform within the UN system to enable the UN to handle humanitarian crises more effectively and consistently. To do so I will procede in four steps. In step 1 I will take a look at the normative foundation of the concept of humanitarian intervention (ethical as well as legal). In step 2 the actual workings and outcomes of humanitarian interventions after the end of the cold war will be discussed. In step 3 the institutions of the UN relevant to humanitarian interventions will be analyzed. In the last step I will try to apply the concept of a realistic utopia developed by the late philosopher John Rawls. The realistic utopia is supposed to help us identify feasible reform proposals for the UN regarding more effective and consistent handling of humanitarian crises that call for military intervention.
My research at the PRIO is part of the EU-Network „Applied global justice“ HPRN-CT-2002-00231.