NATO and human security discourse: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Libya interventions

With the changing security environment in the post-Cold War period, intra-state conflicts have increased significantly while inter-state wars have decreased. Due to this increase in internal conflicts, various discussions have taken place regarding the evolution of the state-centered focus of the traditional security understanding into a people-centered security approach. One of the concepts that emerged in this discussion environment is human security. Human security was officially defined for the first time in the 1994 United Nations Human Development Report and quickly became one of the remarkable concepts in the field of international relations. Human security was the main discourse used by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which entered a transformation process in order to maintain its existence in the post-Cold War period, in its military interventions in this process. NATO used the concepts of humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect in order to legitimize its military interventions with the discourse of human security. In this context, the thesis has researched (i) the consequences of NATO's interventions based on human security discourse in terms of ensuring human security, (ii) the role and impact of NATO, which was established as a defense military organization, in ensuring human security, (iii) whether the human security discourse used by NATO during the post-Cold War transformation process was successful in practice in the places intervened, through the examples of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Libya. In the thesis conducted through literature research, examination of official documents of NATO and other international organizations, and comparative analysis of quantitative data on human security; It has been argued that NATO has failed in practice in terms of ensuring human security in the interventions it carried out with the human security discourse, and it is not a suitable organization to ensure human security in terms of its founding purpose, institutional structure, organizational culture and basic mission.