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Abstract
As a military organization with regional or even global influence, NATO is one of the few international actors capable of performing large scale humanitarian interventions. Moreover, its new post-Cold War outlook, with an emphasis on peacekeeping and crisis management operations make it one of the most suitable candidates to handle such a task. However, since there are no clear guidelines with regard to the conditions under which humanitarian interventions are to be considered legitimate, there is always room for speculation that political interests are behind this sort of interventions. Consequently, the present paper plans to investigate why NATO's intervention in Libya was considered legitimate in comparison with other past interventions (mainly Kosovo) which were not. In this way, the study will be able to identify the nature of the changes which determined such a legitimizing effect: was it NATO's behavior that shifted gears or did the international perception on humanitarian intervention (the conditions which made it legitimate) change as well?
Keywords: humanitarian intervention, NATO, Kosovo, Libya
Although quite fashionable within the past few years, the notion of humanitarian intervention is still a highly disputed concept both in theory and in practice. As many scholars rightfully acknowledge (Baer, 2011; Chesterman, 2011; Faer, 2003), "humanitarian intervention is more talked about than done"1. In general, most of these discussions focus on issues such as the legality, morality, practice and, of course, politics of humanitarian intervention, making it one of the hottest topics in Political Science today.
However, another very important aspect of humanitarian interventions, one that is often taken for granted and not given much thought (but the one aspect which makes it possible to have all the above mentioned discussions in the first place), is the military angle of the issue and its effective enactment; in other words, the capability of the international community (through various international actors) to intervene efficiently and coherently in crises situations2. It is this coordinated action and the way in which it is performed that triggers the debates surrounding legality, morality and so on.
It is equally true that humanitarian interventions do not have to be military, but, "its accepted definitions certainly include military interventions, and, for most people, such interventions constitute the hard case, worthy of moral, legal and...