Abstract
The New Zealand film, Once Were Warriors, recounts the private cycle of violence plaguing one family, and the external social circumstances that contribute to its perpetuation.2 In one scene during a party involving several other drunken friends, the couple have an argument that turns into a physical fight in which the husband dominates. The friends respond by fleeing the house en masse, leaving the couple to themselves, while the children are left to witness the violence and deal with the aftermath. No one, individually or collectively, takes it upon themselves to break up the fight, or stop the assault, and no one calls the authorities. Nor do any of the friends return the next day to enquire about the welfare of the family or to offer any kind of support or assistance. The private torments of one family mixed with social indifference and even endorsement lead tragically to the violation and death of an innocent child. Historically, the society of states has often acted like the drunken friends who desert the scene when violence breaks out. In the face of inhumanity confined within sovereign borders, nonintervention was the norm required by an absolutist interpretation of ‘sovereignty as privacy’; not only the use of force, but all kinds of interventionary actions by other states or the United Nations received little endorsement from the society of states because they were seen to challenge the normative foundations of that society.
We will not enjoy development without security; we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.
Kofi Annan, The New York Times1
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Notes
Reuters, ‘Annan Wants Big Reforms on Force, Poverty, Rights,’ The New York Times, 20 March 2005.
L. Tamahori, director. Once Were Warriors, R. Brown, screenplay (Communicado with the New Zealand Film Commission, 1994).
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© 2006 Catherine Lu
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Lu, C. (2006). Cosmopolitanism, Liberalism and Intervention. In: Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics. Global Issues Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299542_6
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