1. Humanitarian Intervention and International Order: The Endless Wars Problem
- Author:
- Alex J. Bellamy
- Publication Date:
- 09-2021
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Brown Journal of World Affairs
- Institution:
- Brown Journal of World Affairs
- Abstract:
- Nowadays, few approve of humanitarian intervention, understood as the use of non-consensual force for the principal purpose of alleviating massive human suffering. Realists have always held that armed humanitarian crusades are an irrational, dangerous, and counterproductive extravagance likely to cause more problems than they solve, and at great expense.1 In a world full of autocracies and communities that define their values very differently from one another, re- alists argue, the forceful pursuit of “liberal hegemony” is likely to produce only “a perpetual state of war.”2 Critical thinkers have always suspected that a thinly veiled Western liberal imperialism lay behind what some described as the “new military humanism.”3 Its confidence in Western perfidiousness was briefly shaken by revelations of its misplaced faith in the Khmer Rouge and Slobodan Milošević but restored with gusto by the false pretexts for war with Iraq in 2003. English School pluralists value international order over individual rights;4 legal positivists lament the illegality of humanitarian intervention;5 post-colonial scholars, states, and other critical writers believe humanitarian intervention is the thin end of a neo-imperial wedge to erode hard-won self-determination and sovereignty;6 pacifists complain that humanitarian war is still, after all, war, and highlight the tragic irony of taking lives in order to save lives.7 More recently, Samuel Moyn situated humanitarian intervention within a broader politics by which “endless war” has been normalized as humane at the expense of war prevention.8 So intense is global antipathy that prominent advocates of the “responsibility to protect,” like Gareth Evans, carefully distinguish the principle they champion from humanitarian intervention. Samantha Power, meanwhile, was chastened by a painful experience in Libya into doubting whether humanitarian goals could be achieved by military force.9
- Topic:
- Human Rights, War, Humanitarian Intervention, and International Order
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus