ABSTRACT
This chapter will engage with the widespread assertion that 9/11 and the 2003 intervention in Iraq have 'cast a shadow over the progression of the human security agenda'. 1 Human security has increasingly been posited as an alternative narrative to state security, in part due to its focus on a more normative discourse, and is now at the heart of the United Nations agenda. However, there is a disjuncture between the United Nations' Security Council's (UNSC) responsibility for international peace and security on the one hand, and the assertion of human security on the other. Nowhere is the difficulty more apparent than in the 'Responsibility to Protect' document published three months after 9/11. It will be argued that the human security agenda can be salvaged to some extent by investing in the third 'pillar' of the concept, the 'responsibility to rebuild'. Here, the interconnected nature of threats can more effectively be addressed. If state failure and state weakness represent some of the causes of terrorism, then it seems logical to concentrate efforts on such endeavours, although such projects have their own dilemmas. Unfortunately peacebuilding has become tainted by its association with unilateral efforts in Iraq and its association with the War on Terror in Afghanistan. As Roland Paris suggests, the partial similarities between these two operations and UN operations elsewhere have led to 'equating the Iraq war and international peacebuilding missions as part of an abhorrent phenomenon of "democratic imperialism" or "imperial nation-building'" . 2 Some have even depicted the US efforts at democracy promotion in Iraq and the Middle East as the logical conclusion of pre-9/ll peacebuilding operations. Before turning to an examination of statebuilding after conflict, the issue of humanitarian intervention and UN interventions in general since the Cold War will be addressed.
