ABSTRACT
Liberal internationalism and realism are two distinct epistemes in which the relationship of human rights and conflict resolution is defined in fundamentally different terms. If there is one international organization tasked with the simultaneous protection of human rights and of "peace and security", it is the UN. The turn to human rights within the UN can also be seen as a symptom of a more general turn away from states and toward individuals—and individualized collectivities—as the primary constituency of international relations and a concomitant shift toward an instrumental conception of sovereignty. The UN's direct conflict resolution engagement has been complemented and surpassed by its work both in conflict prevention and in post-conflict transition through its massive investment in different aspects of rule-of-law promotion—with human rights playing a prominent role. On the conflict prevention side, this has played out through the UN's absorption, again in the 1990s, of a more general paradigm shift in the importance allocated to law in governance.
