Tag: Humanitarian Intervention

The Violent Logic of Humanitarianism

September 6, 2021

The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan sacrificed politics—the only viable route to peace—for massive corruption and violence, all committed in the name of humanitarian compassion.

“The idea that we’re able to deal with the rights of women around the world by military force is not rational.” This single sentence from President Biden’s ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos on August 18 exposed the paradox of humanitarian intervention. It acknowledged that trying to address violence with violence only serves to perpetuate it. 

https://bostonreview.net/war-security/faisal-devji-violent-logic-humanitarianism

The Responsibility to Protect

August 12, 2021

Meanwhile, the debate about intervention for human protection purposes has not gone away. And it will not go away so long as human nature remains as fallible as it is and internal conflict and state failures stay as prevalent as they are. The debate was certainly a lively one throughout the 1990s. Controversy may have been muted in the case of the interventions, by varying casts of actors, in Liberia in 1990, northern Iraq in 1991, Haiti in 1994, Sierra Leone in 1997, and (not strictly coercively) East Timor in 1999. But in Somalia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994, and Bosnia in 1995, the UN action taken (if taken at all) was widely perceived as too little too late, misconceived, poorly resourced, poorly executed, or all of the above. During NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, Security Council members were sharply divided; the legal justification for action without UN authority was asserted but largely unargued; and great misgivings surrounded the means by which the allies waged the war.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2002-11-01/responsibility-protect

The Moral Logic of Humanitarian Intervention

August 12, 2021

Samantha Power made a career arguing for America’s “responsibility to protect.” During her years in the White House, it became clear that benevolent motives can have calamitous results.

The book inspired a generation of activists, helping to establish the doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” which held that the United States and other wealthy countries had an obligation to defend threatened populations around the world. It also made a star of its author, a charismatic, cracklingly smart presence who urged others to take up the cause. “Know that history is not in a hurry but that you can help speed it up,” she told Yale’s graduating class of 2016. “It is the struggle itself that will define you. Do that, and you will not only find yourself fulfilled but you, too, will live to see many of your lost causes found.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/the-moral-logic-of-humanitarian-intervention

Ten surprising facts about humanitarian intervention

August 11, 2021

As is usually the case in world politics, the actual practice of humanitarian intervention is more complex, than we might think. Sometimes, states traditionally thought to oppose intervention might support it, as with Pakistan over Bosnia and China over Somalia. The reverse is also sometimes true – in 2011 Germany opted not to vote in favour of NATO-led intervention in Libya, whilst decades earlier, Norway – a well known champion of humanitarianism – condemned Vietnam for its intervention which ended a genocide in Cambodia that had accounted for a quarter of that country’s population.

Ten surprising facts about humanitarian intervention

The Responsibility to Protect

December 1, 2019

REVISITING HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

The international community in the last decade repeatedly made a mess of handling the many demands that were made for “humanitarian intervention”: coercive action against a state to protect people within its borders from suffering grave harm. There were no agreed rules for handling cases such as Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo at the start of the 1990s, and there remain none today. Disagreement continues about whether there is a right of intervention, how and when it should be exercised, and under whose authority.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2002-11-01/responsibility-protect