ABSTRACT
The suggestion that international norms concerning such things as human rights and democratization should be held in abeyance in the case of postcolonial states until such time as they have been able to achieve a level of political development at which the kinds of fundamental questions of state formation discussed earlier have been sorted out runs directly counter to the course of events in the period since the end of the Cold War. Instead of allowing ethnic conflicts to proceed uninterrupted on the theory that they constitute an area within the domestic jurisdiction of states protected by Article 2(7) of the UN Charter against outside intervention, the Security Council has assumed a more interventionist posture with regard to conflicts within states. This posture reflects a more expansive reading of the provision in Article 1(1) of the Charter regarding the preservation of international peace and security. The growing recognition that violence within states has the potential to threaten international peace and security as a consequence of massive population displacement into neighboring states has resulted in a changed understanding of Article 1(1). Once thought of as referring to acts of aggression across state boundaries, it now has come to be understood as also encompassesing violence within state boundaries.
