ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the collective conception of international rights, incorporating both perceptions of international human rights and the rights of states, had a constitutive effect on the use of force. It also discusses, with reference to three levels, how the current structure of rights affected humanitarian military interventions. And it argues that it was this entire combination of new meanings and interpretations that allowed a new military practice to emerge in the form of a humanitarian military intervention by NATO in Kosovo. The chapter focuses on the humanitarian military interventions of the international community in northern Iraq in 1991, in Somalia in 1992 by the United Nations, and on the combined United Nations, NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1992-95. Finally, it understands how the discourse on humanitarian military intervention and the evolution of this practice helped shape the strategic decision by NATO to intervene militarily in Kosovo and halt the human rights violations there.
