GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 7 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2005—Humanitarian Intervention

Editor's Note

he need to prevent or halt gross breaches of human rights has been cited as justification for external military intervention in the affairs of sovereign nation-states on several occasions in recent years. The 1990s saw interventions in Liberia, Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, Haiti, Somalia, the former Zaire, and East Timor. Humanitarian reasons were given for NATO’s military action during the Bosnia and Kosovo crises, and for Britain’s dispatch of troops to Sierra Leone. They are also the chief remaining justification offered—now that others have gradually fallen away—for the United States–led invasion of Iraq.

Military intervention on the purported grounds of righting humanitarian wrongs raises a multitude of legal, moral and political questions that are among the most acutely pressing of our day. Is military force, which is almost unavoidably destructive of civilian lives, a coherent means of pursuing humanitarian goals? Is the profession of humanitarian ends merely a convenient cloak for aggression by the intervening powers? Intervention violates state sovereignty and frequently occurs without authorisation by the United Nations Security Council—two of the chief pillars of international legality and stability. Does intervention thus not subvert world order and open the door to chaos in relations between states? On the other hand, can respect for state sovereignty be allowed to override concern about the perpetration of atrocities? Faced with ethnic cleansing or genocide, is there not a duty to intervene? These and other quandaries relating to humanitarian intervention are considered in the present issue of Global Dialogue.

Chris Abbott of the UK-based Oxford Research Group opens our discussion with an overview of several recent attempts to provide a principled framework for intervention. He argues that despite the formidable difficulties, a universally acceptable doctrine of humanitarian intervention can and must be developed.

Among the most noteworthy efforts to formulate such a doctrine is The Responsibility to Protect, the 2001 report of a Canadian-sponsored international commission. Ramesh Thakur, a member of the commission, discusses the implications for intervention of the report’s central proposal that sovereignty be reconceptualised as a responsibility to protect. Penelope Simons of Oxford Brookes University, UK, posits that a responsibility to protect crucially entails a responsibility to prevent, not least by addressing the economic factors that can give rise to conflict.

Richard Falk of the University of California, Santa Barbara, distinguishes between two types of response to the issues arising from humanitarian intervention: the “official”, statist response of commissions of eminent persons, and the civil society response of independent critical voices of opinion. He sees the latter as offering the better means of disentangling geopolitical interest from genuine humanitarian concern.

Much discussion of humanitarian intervention is heavily Western in focus. This, says Jeremy Levitt of DePaul University, Chicago, is to overlook the world’s second-largest continent, Africa, which has created innovative regional security mechanisms that he believes constitute the most significant recent developments in the law of intervention.

The growing resort to intervention on putative humanitarian grounds has prompted criticism from several different perspectives, reflected in the contributions that follow. Paul Robinson of the University of Hull, drawing on just war theory, maintains that the ideology of humanitarian intervention has the pernicious effect of weakening jus contra bellum, the presumption against war that came to prevail in twentieth-century thinking about conflict. C. A. J. (Tony) Coady of the University of Melbourne contends that advocates of humanitarian intervention are prone to the vice of “moralism”, whose distorting effects on judgement and action he explicates. Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia blames the burgeoning influence of human rights NGOs for pressuring Western states to undertake foreign mercy missions that do not serve their national interests. Charles V. Peña of the Cato Institute, Washington, D.C., suggests that foreign interventionism by the United States—however well-intentioned—undermines its security by breeding anti-Americanism and, subsequently, terrorism.

The Iraq War figures prominently in several of the preceding contributions—unsurprisingly, given that defenders of the US-led intervention now hail it principally as a humanitarian operation. James Kurth of Swarthmore College argues that the Iraq conflict has had a baleful impact on the prospects for successful humanitarian intervention in the future, increasing the likelihood of undeterred and uninhibited massacres and genocides.

Iraq is currently the prime exemplification of the “Bush Doctrine”—the US strategy to wage pre-emptive war in order to remove threatening regimes and spread market democracy. The doctrine’s supporters assert it will make the world a safer place and thus greatly reduce the need for humanitarian interventions. Jon Western of Mount Holyoke College assesses the validity of this claim.

NATO’s 1999 military action in Kosovo is widely seen as a landmark that set a precedent for the Iraq War by “normalising” the notion and practice of military intervention unauthorised by the Security Council. Examining NATO’s recourse to military force, and the subsequent UN administration of the province, Aidan Hehir of the University of Limerick questions whether Kosovo is as good an advertisement for humanitarian intervention as it is often claimed to be.

The daunting operational challenges of military humanitarian intervention—especially early or pre-emptive intervention to nip a crisis in the bud—are weighed by James F. Miskel of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He holds these are so great as to have persuaded leading nations that humanitarian intervention is not worth the risks and costs involved.

Our discussion concludes on a sombre note with an analysis of the torture and prisoner abuse committed by Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993. Inevitably bringing to mind events in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail, such violence, argues Sherene H. Razack of the University of Toronto, is routine in encounters between Western troops and the non-Western peoples they have supposedly come to help, and is largely motivated by racism.