| Summary: | This thesis examines how a state’s domestic legal framework interprets international law to create legal authority when deciding to use force or not for humanitarian reasons. It argues that neoclassical realism, with its emphasis on the domestic level of analysis, can explain the role of legal interpretation during the legal-political process which leads to different interpretations and applications of international law at the domestic level. The value of this undertaking is that by focusing on the importance of legal interpretation and its ability to justify or affect legal change, the research identifies points of interaction between different legal regimes and the interpretive role of law during foreign policy formation. Interaction is essential when there is a need to integrate different legal norms related to the contestation over the protection of human rights during regional conflict. To demonstrate this the research comparatively analyses the United States and France’s legal institutions, in contrast to international law, when deliberating foreign policy, using four civil conflicts as a case study of humanitarian intervention – the Liberian civil war (1989), Operation Restore Hope (1992 Somalia), Opération Turquoise (1994 Rwanda) and the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire (2002-present). The conflicts provide varying examples of interventions to human rights abuses that proliferated following the end of the Cold War to the emergence of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine (“R2P”). Each conflict relates directly to legal-political challenges involved in the formation of foreign policy with state legal strategies and international law during this period. This approach also considers a variation in the traditional meaning of power and rule structures inherent in realist theory, which has traditionally measured power in terms of military capabilities or economic strength. It considers that the allocation of power can also be witnessed in a state’s legal framework, which in turn challenges the constructivist theory of ‘anarchy is what states make of it’ (Wendt 1992).
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