International law makes it explicit that states shall not intervene militarily of otherwise in the affairs of other states; it is a central principle of the charter of the United Nations. But international law also provides an exception; when a conflict within a state poses a threat to international peace, military intervention by the UN may be warranted. (Indeed, the UN Charter provides for an international police force, though nothing has ever come of this provision.) The Charter and other UN documents also assert that human rights are to be protected—but in the past the responsibility for the protection of human rights has for the most part been allowed to rest on the government of the state where the violation of rights occurs. Not surprisingly in this context, the question of what protection (if any) should be provided by the UN or otherwise to individuals when their human rights are violated by their governments or with the complicity of their governments remains a contentious issue. Should the principle of respect for state sovereignty trump the principle of respect for human rights? In this volume contributors grapple with a specific case: was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in Kosovo legally or morally acceptable? The contributors all have doubts on this score, and several argue strongly that the intervention was both legally and morally unjustified. A companion volume, Humanitarian Intervention: Moral and Philosophical Issues focuses on the philosophical principles involved in this sort of question; this volume, on the other hand, focuses as much or more on the political as on the philosophical.

Analyzing the NATO bombing, Chomsky challenges the New Humanism: Is it guided by power interests, or by humanitarian concern? Is the resort to force undertaken in the name of principles and values? Or are we witnessing something more crass and familiar?

An assessment of the Kosovo campaign, setting out the background to the crisis, explaining why the UK and NATO had to intervene, assessing the performance of the UK effort, and giving details of lessons learned with regard to defence capability and equipment capability.

The war in Kosovo was a turning point: NATO deployed its armed forces in war for the first time, and placed the controversial doctrine of 'humanitarian intervention' squarely in the world's eye. It was an armed intervention for the purpose of implementing Security Council resolutions-but without Security Council authorization.This report tries to answer a number of burning questions, such as why the international community was unable to act earlier and prevent the escalation of the conflict, as well as focusing on the capacity of the United Nations to act as global peacekeeper.The Commission recommends a new status for Kosovo, 'conditional independence', with the goal of lasting peace and security for Kosovo-and for the Balkan region in general. But many of the conslusions may be beneficially applied to conflicts the world-over.

Civil-military unity of effort has been an essential yet frustrating elusive requirement for success in post-cold-war peace operations. The need to coordinate, collaborate, and share information between civilian and military entities is on the rise and deemed essential requirements for success. Today’s information and communications technologies serve to facilitate the exchange of information among the disparate players of peace operations but the ability to actually realize open information sharing in real-world coalition operations remains problematic. The integration of relevant information and the timely dissemination of the processed information to interested parties in the field is well within the realities of today’s technology. Increased civil-military involvement in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations around the world is matched in part by the rise in the number and complexity of these situations. There are many more actors on today’s peace operations landscape with competing as well as common interests and expectations. The need to improve cooperation, coordination, and more open information sharing is on the rise. Efforts to improve and facilitate more open working together and information sharing among the disparate participants must overcome a continuing lack of trust among the civil-military actors, obsolete national and international policies, unrealistic legal and funding constraints, and outdated organization cultural traditions and behavior patterns. Additionally, all actors need to better understand each other and the roles they can and should play in an increasingly complex operational environment. In order to obtain closure and improve the future situation, the actors must develop relationships based on mutual trust, and there must be a clear understanding that cooperation, coordination, and information sharing is a two-way street. In reality, inefficiencies are inherent in any multilateral activity, and competing interests and fear of loss of power and prestige make unity of effort a desired objective, but also one that will be difficult to achieve. Furthermore, information is power and can be an effective means to an end, but only if it can be interpreted, shared, and used effectively for military, political, or civil use. Information can also help reduce uncertainty and provide those that possess it a decided advantage in the decisionmaking process. There continues to be a general lack of trust among the players, coupled with the lack of a shared understanding of the added value through more open and improved information sharing. Information sharing among the actors on the peace operations landscape continues to be largely a manual process. These obstacles need to be recognized and, to the extent possible, practical recommendations developed for ameliorating them. Application of new technology must go beyond simply modernizing existing practices and capabilities. The civil-military community needs to look at new ways of doing business and how the rapidly advancing information technology can be used to leverage the power of information to help achieve timely and appropriate success of peace operations. The patterns of conflict for the post-cold-war environment are changing and so are the approaches to military command and control. Advances in information technology have enabled organizations and individuals to more effectively leverage the power of information; yet for coalition operations where information sharing is essential to meet mission needs, it continues to be problematic. The issue is not technology, but largely the will on the part of organizations and individuals to make it happen. There is also a number of policy, doctrine, C4ISR systems, cultural, and environmental challenges that influence the ability to achieve more open sharing of information in coalition operations.

After eleven weeks of bombing in the spring of 1999, the United States and NATO ultimately won the war in Kosovo. Serbian troops were forced to withdraw, enabling an international military and political presence to take charge in the region. But was this war inevitable or was it the product of failed western diplomacy prior to the conflict? And once it became necessary to use force, did NATO adopt a sound strategy to achieve its aims of stabilizing Kosovo? In this first in-depth study of the Kosovo crisis, Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon answer these and other questions about the causes, conduct, and consequences of the war. Based on interviews with many of the key participants, they conclude that notwithstanding important diplomatic mistakes before the conflict, it would have been difficult to avoid the Kosovo war. That being the case, U.S. and NATO conduct of the war left much to be desired. For more than four weeks, the Serbs succeeded where NATO failed, forcefully changing Kosovo's ethnic balance by forcing 1.5 million Albanians from their home and more than 800,000 from the country. Had they chosen to massacre more of their victims, NATO would have been powerless to stop them. In the end, NATO won the war by increasing the scope and intensity of bombing, making serious plans for a ground invasion, and moving diplomacy into full gear in order to convince Belgrade that this was a war Serbia would never win. The Kosovo crisis is a cautionary tale for those who believe force can be used easily and in limited increments to stop genocide, mass killing, and the forceful expulsion of entire populations. Daalder and O'Hanlon conclude that the crisis holds important diplomatic and military lessons that must be learned so that others in the future might avoid the mistakes that were made in this case.