Bombs, trials, and rights: norm complexity and the evolution of liberal intervention practices

Abstract

This article analyzes the contested relationship between two practices of intervention on behalf of human rights victims, "humanitarian" military interventions and judicial interventions through international criminal tribunals. While both practices have come to be viewed as complementary instruments in the liberal interventionist "toolbox," their historical evolution was marked by tensions and controversies. To understand both the source of these frictions and how they could be (partly) overcome, the article draws attention to historical and contemporary processes of norm hybridization, that is, to discursive and institutional shifts that have merged different, pre-existing normative ideas into new, complex normative arrangements.