INTERNATIONAL NORMS:
SOVEREIGNTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
In both the Serbian and Israeli cases, it was not obvious which areas would ultimately wind up in or outside the dominant state. We tend to accept boundaries as given, barely noticing their presence. This may often be justified, since most states have clearly defined boundaries, but others do not, including both Serbia and Israel. In the periods under discussion, these states were still defining their borders and engaging in bitter territorial struggles with national rivals.
When socialist Yugoslavia began to collapse in 1990, it was clear that the question of boundaries would be highly problematic, as different ethnic groups were scattered across the federation's internal boundaries. As the federation broke apart, all areas, in theory, were up for grabs. The legacy of socialist Yugoslavia's internal borders, coupled with international intervention, transformed Sandžak, Vojvodina, and Kosovo into internal provinces of Serbia, but made Bosnia an external frontier. Powerful Western countries decided that only republican boundaries would become sovereign, investing the Bosnia/Serbia border with an importance it had not hitherto enjoyed. At this point, different styles of Serbian state coercion emerged, transforming internal areas into zones of policing, and external areas into arenas of destruction. International forces had hoped to protect Bosnia by recognizing its sovereignty, but had instead helped unleash the most horrendous forms of Serbian nationalist violence.
In the Israel/Palestine case, questions over what was truly internal
International forces played a key role in Palestine's ghettoization. When Serbia objected to Bosnian independence, Western powers threatened it with attack and sanctions, but Israel's disrespect for Palestinian sovereignty was treated with feeble criticism and tacit compliance. Paradoxically, however, the greater support Western powers gave to Bosnia resulted in greater levels of destruction, since nationalist states use more despotic violence at the margins of power. The more Palestine was ensnared within Israel's bureaucratic grip, the more Israel was obliged to treat it as an object of policing, not war.
Part of this is attributable to the increased salience of human rights norms. States are increasingly pressed to demonstrate a modicum of care and responsibility for their populations, risking censure and stigmatization when they kill or forcibly expel their citizens. This has become especially true since the 1970s, when an explosion of human rights organizations, discourse, and networking began. A global regulatory system monitoring state violence has come into being, influencing the ways in which states behave. The clearer the state's responsibilities and the more pervasive its control in a given region, the more it will seek to curb "excesses" by its coercive forces when fighting civilian populations. The greater the state's infrastructural power, the more it will try to curb the most blatantly despotic behavior of its security forces. Not all states care equally about their international legitimacy, however, and not all states exercise infrastructural powers over their de jure territories. Those that do tend to be in the core or semi-peripheral regions of the globe, suggesting a trend in the global organization of state violence: the more states control their own territory and the closer they are to international flows of legitimacy, the more they will resort to police-style behavior in areas over which they exercise empirical and juridical control.