There is often tension between counterterrorism and human rights compliance. This particularly applies to international engagement aimed at the protection of fundamental human rights in armed conflicts. This article traces international diplomacy and disputed issues regarding norms of protection in Sri Lanka in 2009. It shows how the Sri Lankan government's three-pronged discourse of counterterrorism, humanitarian protection and non-alignment undercut most international efforts to rein in the government's indiscriminate shelling of densely populated areas. Sri Lanka's strategy benefited from broadbased support among most United Nations member states for the government's framing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a terrorist movement. After signalling approval for a military approach to the war, international actors failed to follow up with clear standards for compliance with international humanitarian law. Subsequently, a few other countries fighting insurgencies expressed their readiness to emulate Sri Lanka's strategy of "defeating terrorism". In this way, international and domestic counterterrorism discourses continue to undermine international protection efforts.
Why does the quest for security lead to insecurity? In its quest for becoming secure, mainstream international relations (IR) has weaved a fictitious web that hardly lives up to its promise of providing security to the international community. It is through the vocabulary of securitisation that the freedom to resist and express dissent is nipped in the bud. Security is premised on a flawed assumption. The insistence on the usefulness of assumptions instead of their truthfulness is not just misleading but a theoretical sleight of hand. Security seems to have flourished owing to a unidimensional view of human nature and a unilinear extrapolation of anarchy, which is considered as the central facet of international political structure. This article contests these assumptions and argues that the construction of security is tantamount to a façade that gives a false impression of security, thereby concealing and camouflaging the hegemonic nature of such an endeavour.
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