Research
Challenges of International Environmental Cooperation
The paper discusses the challenges that confront cooperative relations between and among states on the issue of environment. The environment, has over the years, remained a factor over which states’ relationship in the international system has been carried out, both in cooperative manifestations and conflictive expressions. As with many other issues, the global environment represents a series of problems that are so complex and widespread that unilateral measures are not enough to forestall them. Therefore, relationships among states in the international system have been very active over the past decades in addressing many of the environmental problems. In the concerted bid to rid the globe of environmental danger, there had been international environmental conferences on climate change and other cooperative efforts to save the planet. Notwithstanding the obvious successes that have been recorded by these cooperative efforts, international environmental cooperation is still fraught with myriad of challenges. Employing mainly the secondary method of data collection, this paper analyzes the myriad challenges that confront international cooperative efforts to rid the globe of teething environmental problems.
Post-Cold War Conflicts: Imperative for Armed Humanitarian Intervention
Contrary to the predictions that wars would become obsolete in the post-Cold War world, they rather shifted dramatically from inter-state to increasingly intra-state manifestations. The world since then has become racked by ethnic and nationalist violence. The tragedies and gruesome atrocities concomitant with these eruptions have pushed the imperative for humanitarian intervention to the fore of contemporary international politics and practice, provoking a shift on the international right and necessity of using military force to protect civilians within sovereign states. A novel acceptance has now made its foray into the international scene, which is of emblematic significance for the evolving international humanitarian regime, that a war against a sovereign state can be initiated and justified on humanitarian grounds. The task of situating the imperative for armed humanitarian intervention within the context of the compelling nature and character of the post-Cold War conflicts engages the concern of this study. The paper posits that notwithstanding the fluidity of the concept, chances of misuse and the abounding probabilities of abuse in its practice, humanitarian intervention have in this age, carved a niche for itself, given the bloodbaths and horrendous genocidal incidences that have both wrecked and defined the post-Cold War world.
