Intervention policies of the United Nations to intra-state conflicts in Africa

The role of international organizations, relatively more legitimate in interntional politics, in intervention to intra-state conflicts as main actors is very significant and this role cannot be denied. The intervention of international organizations (and that of the United Nations as the major international organization) to intra-state conflicts, whose numbers increased in many parts of the world after the Cold War period, increased dramatically. During this process, in which changes were observed in humanitarian intervention and UN peacekeeping operations and new norms such as the responsibility to protect emerged, success (and/or effectiveness) and failure in their interventions of international organizaitons and sometimes non-intervention can be observed. In this context, it constitutes a problem why international organizations such as the UN don't intervene in some intra-state conflicts, while prefer to intervene in some others; and why they become successful/effective in some cases and still fail in some others. From this point of view, certain parameters have been developed in determining these different intervention policies (intervention or non-intervention, success/effectiveness or failure) of international organizations with the emphasis on the UN. Besides, this claim was confirmed and exemplified with the utilization of three intra-state conflicts from Africa, a continent in which intra-state conflicts are witnessed quite often. In this context, it was investigated as cases that the UN's non-intervention to Darfur crisis between 2003 and 2007, the failed UN intervention to Somalia between 1992 and 1995, and NATO's effective intervention (with collaboration with the UN) to Libya between March 2011 and October 2011 were analyzed as case studies.