Intervento umanitario e scienza politica: un'agenda di ricerca e alcune osservazioni preliminari

Political Science and Humanitarian Intervention After the Cold War: A Research Agenda and Some Insights - The article seeks to provide a general framework to interpret humanitarian intervention with the "tools" of political science. It focuses on intervention where military force is directly applied and a phase of stabilization and reconstruction follows military operations. As such, it deals with six major cases: Kurdistan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, East Timor and Kosovo. The central argument of the article is that a thorough understanding of humanitarian interventions is possible only by recurring to approaches and branches of political science that have been traditionally left out from the analysis of such phenomenon. The purpose of the article is to provide a first-cut but comprehensive approach to the analysis of humanitarian interventions, bringing in sometimes overlooked tools provided by literature political science, and to provide the basis for more thorough theoretical and empirical work on the subject. It should also shed light on relevant changes in the global security environment after the Cold War, focusing on the new opportunities, but also on the often overlooked constraints, to foreign intervention.