Reinterpretare i conflitti del passato. Il nuovo umanitarismo e la rilettura dell’intervento indiano in Pakistan (1971)

The end of the Cold War accelerated the search for a shared doctrine of humanitarian interventionism. The new humanitarian agenda sought to found its legitimacy on the basis of a path of progressive and irresistible historical evolution and ended up re-reading the past in the light of the normative framework of the present. The chapter analyses the recent historical reinterpretation of one of the cases that is now considered an ante litteram humanitarian intervention, that of India in the 1971 conflict in Eastern Pakistan. The aim is to show how, after the end of the Cold War, various elements of selection and omission, or even negation, recur in the humanitarianist memorisation of past conflicts, which can only be explained in the light of normative requirements in favour of a doctrine of humanitarian intervention for the present.