Privatizing the Cosmopolitan Responsibility to Protect. : Considering a Normative Argument for Why the Contractor Might Be Better Suited Vis-à-Vis the State Soldier to Serve Common Humanity
type: CreativeWork
description: The idea for this thesis arose from my previous research on liberal state motivations for conducting military humanitarian intervention1. Learning about the reluctance of liberal states to commit wholeheartedly to the protection of strangers overseas, I started asking the question of how to ensure that liberal states commit to their responsibility to protect individuals comprehensibly and resolutely. From this thought stems the core ambition of this research: To explore different ideas that might help the liberal state to provide security as a global good effectively and ethically in humanitarian intervention. This ambition marks the beginning of this exploratory research. In this research I approached the underlying problem of the liberal state’s reluctance to commit its soldier wholeheartedly to humanitarian intervention by trying to conceptualize the relationship between society, state and soldier using liberal Social Contract theory. Through the normative conceptualization of civil-military relations I identified a normative explanation for the empirical observation that soldiers when employed on humanitarian interventions, provide security often ineffectively and unethically. Hence, an exploratory conceptualization of the relationship between society, state and soldier provided me with a theoretical explanation of the link between the particular nature of liberal civil-military relations and the conduct of the soldier in the specific context of humanitarian intervention. It was this conceptualization that inspired the idea of exploring the hypothetical possibility of employing the private armed contractor as an alternative agent of the liberal state to provide security as a global good in humanitarian intervention. Combining two timely topics, namely the future of the responsibility to protect and the commercialization of security, I arrived at an interesting normative question, which was to lie at the heart of this research: Should the contractor become the li…
abstract: The idea for this thesis arose from my previous research on liberal state motivations for conducting military humanitarian intervention1. Learning about the reluctance of liberal states to commit wholeheartedly to the protection of strangers overseas, I started asking the question of how to ensure that liberal states commit to their responsibility to protect individuals comprehensibly and resolutely. From this thought stems the core ambition of this research: To explore different ideas that might help the liberal state to provide security as a global good effectively and ethically in humanitarian intervention. This ambition marks the beginning of this exploratory research. In this research I approached the underlying problem of the liberal state’s reluctance to commit its soldier wholeheartedly to humanitarian intervention by trying to conceptualize the relationship between society, state and soldier using liberal Social Contract theory. Through the normative conceptualization of civil-military relations I identified a normative explanation for the empirical observation that soldiers when employed on humanitarian interventions, provide security often ineffectively and unethically. Hence, an exploratory conceptualization of the relationship between society, state and soldier provided me with a theoretical explanation of the link between the particular nature of liberal civil-military relations and the conduct of the soldier in the specific context of humanitarian intervention. It was this conceptualization that inspired the idea of exploring the hypothetical possibility of employing the private armed contractor as an alternative agent of the liberal state to provide security as a global good in humanitarian intervention. Combining two timely topics, namely the future of the responsibility to protect and the commercialization of security, I arrived at an interesting normative question, which was to lie at the heart of this research: Should the contractor become the li…
author: Krieg, Andreas
language: eng
date published: 2014
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:44:42Z
provider: King's College London
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: King's College London