The development of the post-cold war international law has been a tale of reconciled inconsistencies. On one hand, some states -mostly developing states- have in all azimuths been at the fore-front of churning out international texts of legal relevance against the consolidation of any principle, right, duty, obligation or responsibility of humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, the practice of humanitarian intervention – whether cast in a semantic veneer of ‘right to protect’ or not- has been navigating a torturous path and more often than not has found sanctuary in the grey area between the tricky coitus of legality and legitimacy.
Relying on the Syrian conflict as an analytical template, this paper takes a critical relook at the promises that the end of the cold war begot with regards to the prospects of humanitarian action, discloses the vanity of those promises and proposes a reconstruction of the normative framework of humanitarian action as an instrument of international justice.
Following the Arab Spring of 2011 and the continuation of the war on terror, questions have re-emerged regarding the adequacy of the current legal framework governing armed conflict. Are the rules created in the post-World War II environment relevant in a world in which inter-state conflict is no longer the norm, and those involved in situations of violence are increasingly non-state actors? Will the Additional Protocols be useful in plugging gaps left by 1949 Geneva Conventions? Rather than focus on these broader issues, this paper seeks to address the specific issue of the legal framework governing those conflicts which straddle the indistinct line between non-international armed conflict and sporadic acts of violence or internal disturbances.