ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates what effect the gendering of regime principles has on the implementation of the norms that stem from the regime principles. The moral language of humanitarian intervention draws on the home-front idea whereby state forces actively serve to protect the innocent at home from attack, but expands the community of moral obligation to civilians per se rather than nationals. The targeting of civilian men and boys en masse is more frequent, is more frequently justified as within the bounds of humanitarian law, and is less explicitly condemned within international society. The ethnic majority Kosovar Albanians had always faced discrimination at the hands of the minority Serbs, in what many commentators refer to as an apartheid system. The construction of the Rwandan genocide as a failure of civilian protection demonstrates the correlation of gendered discourse to evocations of the protection norm, and refutes the hypothesis that this gendered language simply reflects empirical realities on the ground.
