The effect of humanitarian intervention discourse and practice on the process of independence of Kosovo

The humanitarian intervention carried out by NATO in 1999 without UNSC authorization is in a different position from all its predecessors. The aforementioned intervention was carried out only with the aim of restoring human rights, without any legal basis. However, the fact that the intervention is unlawful but legitimate requires addressing concepts such as humanitarian intervention, law and legitimacy as discourse. At this point, if the law is considered as a discourse beyond the norms that constitute it, it becomes clear that law and legal discourse are related to the non-discursive field. Law is closely related to the economic, political and ideological field, not just as a set of rules, but as a form of relationship. In the post-World War II period, the pioneering and original role of the USA in global capitalism had a great impact on the internationalization of capital and the state, and on the global economic and political ideological transformations in this process. Unlike the period before the World War II, in the current form of imperialism in the post-1945 period a state may contain more than one capital group and a capital group or individual capitalist can operate in more than one country. Since the 1980s, as a result of neo-liberal policies, the internationalization process has accelerated, and in 1990s the US hegemony remained the only project in the global conjuncture with the disintegration of the USSR. The new international legal norms of the post-1990 period gain meaning when considered from a political economy perspective. As a matter of fact, the transformation of international law is not an isolated internal transformation. At this point, since the 1990s, the legal principles of the Cold War period have been replaced by a new legal logic that emerged in concepts such as humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect, universal human rights, and rogue state. The economic, political and legal practices of the central capitalist countries during the Yugoslavia wars and the discourses that made them possible place the interests protected within the scope of human rights and humanitarian intervention above the general opinion about humanitarianism. NATO's direct intervention in Kosovo and Kosovo's independence are the products of the new interventionist perspective developed within international law.