Normative Implications of International Territorial Administration

Norms and International Relations Theory

Abstract

In international relations theory after the end of the Cold War, much attention was paid to the internal conflicts and international responses thereto. This has partly been because the United Nations (UN) Security Council has become a forum for East-West cooperation, rather than one of confrontation as during the Cold War period. As a result, the role the UN has been playing was also changed.
This article focuses on the normative implication of the international territorial administration (ITA) by the UN, as one of the new dimensions of the UN's peacekeeping operations, conducted in the places like East Timor and Kosovo. Though ITA is conducted based upon the consent between the parties to the conflicts and the UN, this operation, even as one of tools of post-conflict peacebuilding, often faces criticism that such operation is a continuation of the “imperial past”. This criticism closely relates with how we observe and identify the nature of our world today.
During the past fifteen years, a political jargon using words and phrases such as “failed states”, “humanitarian intervention”, “human security”, ITA and so on. These words and phrases try to legitimize, or even dress up, the particular policy goals pursued by the particular group of States and international organizations. However, for the countries and societies on the recipient side, they tend to revolt against these ideas as interference to internal matters, even if the particular peacekeeping and peace-building mission has the procedural legitimacy.
In cases of ITA, despite of its procedural legitimacy, it is often regarded as a new means for dominant States to rule the society and its people and as a recurrence of “hierarchical” international order which is now legally prohibited by the norm of self-determination. This would also show that, by the expansion of the role which the UN would and could play in the field of the maintenance and restoration of international peace and security, there seems to imply new divisions among States and bring about the fundamental change of norms such as sovereignty, equality among States and non-interference. While the author points out that statements explaining the UN's role in peacekeeping and peace-making are often made, mainly by Western writers, to legitimise certain policies espoused by particular part of international community, he also asserts that what we need now is a normative approach to operations and policies that sees through the camouflaging jargon and we should take the view of the oppositions more seriously.