ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the humanitarian challenges for human rights posed by national and international responses to the great variety of groups that have become household names, such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Boko Haram. The UN Security Council, Human Rights Council, and General Assembly have adopted numerous resolutions in an attempt to balance the real security needs of states with their human rights obligations. The security of individual citizens has strong connections with human rights. State security, however, need not be connected to individual human rights; it depends on the character of the state being protected and the means used to secure it. The implication of the preceding section is that human rights and democracy promotion have lost out less as a result of carefully considered trade-offs of competing interests and more because of a decision to reorient American policy around an ideological crusade.
