Aisha Hersi

This research examines how NATO member states legally justified the 1999 Kosovo intervention in the absence of explicit UN Security Council authorization, and evaluates whether the subsequent codification of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine at the 2005 World Summit substantively altered that interpretive framework under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Article 2(4) establishes a near-absolute prohibition on the use of force in international relations, admitting only two recognized exceptions: individual and collective self-defense under Article 51, and Security Council authorization under Chapter VII. The Kosovo intervention, bypassing both, exposed a foundational tension between Charter legality and the humanitarian imperative to prevent mass atrocity, a tension NATO states were compelled to articulate and defend before the international community.

Drawing on official state declarations, Security Council and General Assembly transcripts, this project reconstructs the legal arguments advanced by NATO members and assesses the degree to which those arguments constituted a coherent doctrine of humanitarian intervention as an emergent exception to Article 2(4). It then applies a comparative analysis to the 2011 Libya intervention, the first major invocation of R2P to authorize the use of force, to determine whether post-2005 state discourse reflects a genuine legal modification of the Charter framework or a political reframing that ultimately reaffirms Security Council primacy. The research further interrogates whether consistent state practice across these two interventions is sufficient to establish a customary international law exception to the prohibition on force, or whether the Kosovo-to-Libya trajectory instead reveals an enduring, unresolved conflict between the formal legal order and the evolving normative expectations of the international community.