International humanitarian law (IHL) as it exists today should be regarded as an area of academic scholarship that is currently in the process of development and debate. It is concerned more so with morality and normative discussion rather than legislation, taxation, enforcement and prosecution. IHL scholars, particularly those of the constructivist and post-modern school of thinking, see the conventional enforcement approach, (e.g. a central government presiding over nations to maintain a rule of law) as neither plausible nor desirable for innumerable reasons: ethnocentrism, the replication of systems of oppression, discrimination, and inequality, and the threat of corruption, nepotism, and despotism, being chief among them.

Therefore IHL currently operates in the liberal context of nation states, sovereign rights, and consent to abide by an internationally agreed upon system of order through the ratification of treaties, conventions, trade agreements, and so forth, as a means of preserving and maintaining their own respective self-interests. Nevertheless IHL is often contested and unfortunately negated. The existence of widespread poverty and disease in the global south, the recurrence of sectarian uprisings, civil wars, human rights atrocities (particularly those committed against women, children and minorities), genocide, displacement, and mass murder, terrorism and war in various regions of the world is reason for contemporary IHL scholars to conclude that radical structural change and enlightened social reform must serve as the precondition for an equitable, just, safe and harmonious world order to develop.

IHL operates today as an effective mechanism applied through civil society institutions, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations as well as grass roots community groups and agencies to prevent and respond to crisis, provide relief, and engage in social programming. Commonly international development initiatives and interventions fall within various project areas such as disaster management, emergency preparedness, risk assessment, sanitation, etc., health and medicine (e.g. maternal health, pre-and post natal health, immunizations and preventive treatments, public hygiene and public health education programs); early childhood education, capacity development and volunteer management and violence prevention, etc.

Key actors in the humanitarian sector include the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), also referred to as the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, and Oxfam or the Oxford Project for Famine Relief, and of course, the United Nations. These institutions emerged out of the crisis of the first and second World Wars and they were incorporated out of the need to attend to the vulnerable and innocent victims of war such as wounded soldiers, displaced peoples and political refugees, and prisoners. From these organizations and their local national syndicate societies, IHL took shape through scholarly conferences such as the Geneva Conventions and their Amendments, the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its subsequent International Conventions (e.g. the International Convention on Economic Social and Political Rights, the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, etc.)

Through these conference a common set of universal values or principles were decided to be fundamental, namely the values of humanity, independence, neutrality, impartiality, voluntary service, unity, and universality. The fundamental values and principles given here came out of the Geneva talks and are held today as the core values of the ICRC and IFRC although similar variations will be found in many if not all legitimate humanitarian NGOs. There are thousands if not tens of thousands of local human rights NGOs and social movements, particularly women’s rights movements, operating on a local basis that work in collaboration with larger NGOs and intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and other international allies.

National governments also play a crucial role in the preservation of human rights through foreign aid funding, international development initiatives, humanitarian relief (i.e. responding to disasters), and supporting refugees through medical and food aid, temporary housing and settlement. National governments may also practice political interventions through economic boycotts and sanctions, and in severe cases armed intervention should the offending regime demonstrate itself to be systematically harming its citizenry or minority populations. Ideally this would be done through a legitimate motion through the UN Security Council but historically Western NATO powers (US, UK, France, et al.) have preferred to go the way of unilateral invasions, bombings and covert counter-terrorism operations.

The work of human rights implementation and promotion is also largely carried out by diligent journalists of established and independent media outlets, often times reporting under high risk conditions to expose human rights violations, discrimination and violence against women and children, and corruption. Most notably, news agencies such as Thompson Reuters Trust Foundation, the BBC, Democracy Now, the Nation, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times have on numerous occasions played an instrumental role to aid whistle-blowers and victims of human rights abuses deliver their testimonials to the wider international community.

Similarly, human rights advocacy based non-governmental organizations exist as watchdogs. They tend to be more limited in scope (i.e. the issues they monitor), and tend to be disengaged from the physical aspects of humanitarian relief, development work or charitable funding. Their primary functions are academic, that of monitoring, researching, reporting, advocating, and campaigning and legal interventions. The most prominent international NGOs dedicated to human rights advocacy are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and to a lesser extent Wikileaks. In summary, NGOs, IGOs, the free-press, and the community of academic scholars who generally identify as the international community work in collaboration on an ongoing basis to raise awareness and interest of publics, to influence and persuade governments to implement humanitarian based policy and intervene in human rights violations, as well as engage in the development of more effective legal instruments such as the strengthening of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, and to increase national foreign aid and development funding particularly toward projects related to gender and health equity and wealth redistribution.

References

Sens A., Stoett, P. (2010). Global Politics, Origins, Currents, Directions. Toronto: Nelson

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