With a keynote from Sir Lawrence Freedman (Professor emeritus, King’s College London).
Twenty years ago, NATO went to war against Serbia over ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, bringing to a close a decade marked by vigorous debate on the pros and cons of military intervention. By the end of that decade, the consensus seemed to be that ‘something had to be done’ in the face of large scale atrocities. ‘Standing by and letting die’ was not a sound foreign policy option. In response, in 1999, the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair even went so far as to defend a form of ‘liberal interventionism’ in a famous speech in Chicago.
Twenty years later, in 2019, the mood music surrounding intervention has changed considerably. In the 2000s, ethnic cleansing in the Sudanese region of Dafur was not halted by the international community, while the slaughter in Syria has continued unabated since 2011/2. The UN-backed intervention Libya in 2011 was anything but a roaring success. Intervention was barely on the agenda during the ethnic cleansing Myanmar’s Muslim minority in 2018. Powerful states, in particular the USA under the presidency of Donald Trump, have begun to pursue a more isolationist foreign policy where ‘saving strangers’ is not an objective.
Against this background, this year’s high profile conference, co-organised by Surrey’s Centre for International Intervention and BISA IR2P, reflects upon the trajectory of interventionism since Kosovo. What have been its successes? What have been its failures? Does it have a future? How does a changing international environment, as well as the emergence of new actors and combat technologies, affect intervention?
The event will bring a group of top academics, as well as policy makers, to Surrey in order to discuss these and related questions.
This conference is organised by the Centre for International Intervention (cii) at the University of Surrey and BISA International Responsibility to Protect Special Working Group (IR2P).
This event is supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies (University of Surrey), BISA and The Leverhulme Trust.
