Abstract
The study examined (a) the extent to which educated people living in two African countries agree with the idea that humanitarian military interventions by United Nations (UN) forces can be legitimate, and (b) the contextual factors that may impact on their level of acceptance of these interventions. Concrete cases depicting an emergency situation were presented to university students from Angola and Mozambique. For a large majority of participants, UN interventions can, at least under certain circumstances, be considered as legitimate. Qualitatively different views were found. The most common one was to consider that, in most cases where a government (or a majority group) threatens the minorities in the country, humanitarian interventions are legitimate, even in relatively benign cases such as forced acculturation. The second most common view was to consider that legitimacy strictly depends on the government's political project: when there was a serious threat of massacre or genocide, support for humanitarian interventions was high, irrespective of the other circumstances.
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