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  1. Home
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  3. The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9781139567589
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139567589
Subjects:
Politics and International Relations, International Relations and International Organisations, Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Information

Book description

The question of military intervention for humanitarian purposes is a major focus for international law, the United Nations, regional organizations such as NATO, and the foreign policies of nations. Against this background, the 2011 bombing in Libya by Western nations has occasioned renewed interest and concern about armed humanitarian intervention (AHI) and the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). This volume brings together new essays by leading international, philosophical, and political thinkers on the moral and legal issues involved in AHI, and contains both critical and positive views of AHI. Topics include the problem of abuse and needed limitations, the future viability of RtoP and some of its problematic implications, the possibility of AHI providing space for peaceful political protest, and how AHI might be integrated with post-war justice. It is an important collection for those studying political philosophy, international relations, and humanitarian law.

Reviews

‘… a useful collection of insightful perspectives and important contributions to AHI debates.’

Amanda Cawston Source: The Philosophical Quarterly

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - Introduction to armed humanitarian intervention
    pp 3-25
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The phrase "armed humanitarian intervention" (AHI) denotes a military intervention into the jurisdiction of a state by outside forces for humanitarian purposes. The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) rationale was implemented in 2011 when the UN Security Council approved military intervention in Libya, and this intervention again spurred debates about AHIs. In more recent times, military interventions have been justified as a way of overthrowing a noxious regime, promoting communism, installing an Islamic theocracy, or supporting a democratic form of government. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became apparent that unlimited sovereignty in the international arena was incompatible with any hope of a world free from the devastations of war. International law began to become more prominent in international relations. Establishing a legal right to militarily intervene in another state must require authorization from some legal authority.
  • 2 - Revisiting armed humanitarian intervention
    pp 26-45
  • A 25-year retrospective
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the dramatic transformation of international priorities governing the purpose and principal uses of military force over the past 25 years. It distinguishes the broader historical background of armed humanitarian intervention (AHI) prior to 1989 from two subsequent, distinctive phases: a second wave of humanitarian crises and responses during the 1990s, and a more recent third wave of ethical analysis, dominated by proposals for new political arrangements that would govern collective decision-making by the international community when faced with the question of whether to deploy their military forces for the prevention or cessation of humanitarian crises. The manner in which the history of AHI is narrated is strongly dependent upon the perspectives from which AHI efforts themselves were experienced. All of the military interventions proposed or carried out for humanitarian purposes in the 1990s, however noble their intent violated every single provision of that Weinberger-Powell doctrine.
  • 3 - The responsibility to protect and the war in Libya
    pp 46-58
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Responsibility to protect (RtoP) seemed to be a more prudent expression, and the principle was adopted by a vote of the UN General Assembly in 2005. It is entirely possible that the initial designers of the doctrine, RtoP, were driven by pure and generous intentions. Whether a doctrine of armed humanitarian intervention (AHI) should become a permanent feature of international law is greatly to be doubted so long as its interpretation and application is entrusted to the UN Security Council. The Libyan war represents the only example where the new doctrine of RtoP has been applied, but it seems to embody its spirit well. The intervention in Libya confirms a messianic plan familiar to Western democracies. Because of their technological, economic, and military successes, they are convinced of their moral and political superiority over the other countries of the globe.
  • 4 - The moral basis of armed humanitarian intervention revisited
    pp 61-77
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter makes two claims. First, the rationale for humanitarian intervention, as for any war, is only the defense of persons. Second, whether a particular intervention will be morally justified depends only on how it fares under a full-blown theory of just war. The chapter discusses what constitutes a just cause for war and suggests how to think about humanitarian intervention through those lenses. It then addresses the question of state legitimacy and how it bears on an analysis of humanitarian intervention. A humanitarian intervention is justified only to end or prevent the most seriously wrong acts of coercion perpetrated by governments. The principle of state sovereignty does not protect solely governments: it protects cultures as well. The chapter concludes by proposing a just-war canvass that tackles the notion of proportionality using a modified version of the doctrine of double effect.
  • 5 - All or nothing
    pp 78-94
  • Are there any “merely permissible” armed humanitarian interventions?
  • View abstract

    Summary

    An increasingly common view among political philosophers is that, in fact, all justified humanitarian intervention is obligatory. There is no such thing as merely permissible: either there is a duty to intervene, or there is a duty not to intervene. This chapter considers the possibility those humanitarian interventions, which are permissible but discretionary for citizens, are always either obligatory or prohibited for their government, depending on the circumstances. Severe deprivations and human-rights abuses are a permanent feature of the world in which we live. There is a second feature of positive duties that makes the all-or-nothing view untenable as a description of the moral requirements of citizens. Namely, all positive duties are subject to a high-cost qualification. The all-or-nothing view, if taken as an account of the moral requirements of citizens, looks to be untenable.
  • 6 - Judging armed humanitarian intervention
    pp 95-112
    • By Helen Frowe, Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter argues for what the author calls the justification-based account of humanitarian intervention, according to which the permissibility of humanitarian intervention is determined by two central criteria. The first is that there exists a sound justification for intervention, roughly, that there is a threatened or ongoing process of widespread and serious rights violations that can be averted only by military force and such force is proportionate. This criterion can be satisfied ad bellum. The second criterion is that the actions of interveners are reasonably expected to aid. This criterion applies largely to the in bello behavior of the intervening state. One of the difficulties in making sense of the debate about how to identify humanitarian interventions lies in distinguishing the various components of behavior, motives, intentions, actions, ends, and outcomes.
  • 7 - Bombing the beneficiaries
    pp 113-130
  • The distribution of the costs of the responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In its 1999 intervention in Kosovo, NATO was criticized heavily for its reliance solely on bombing from high altitude. In this chapter, the author defends with what he calls the Restrictive View for the conduct of armed humanitarian intervention. The Restrictive View has been challenged recently by several leading just-war theorists. An alternative view, which the author calls the Permissive View, seems to have become increasingly popular. On the Permissive View, those conducting armed humanitarian intervention are morally required to take on only some or a small amount of the costs of intervention, if any. The chapter presents the prima facie case for the Restrictive View. It argues that beneficiaries are not required to take on greater costs, in comparison with either rescuers or bystanders. More specifically, the author rejects the Rescuers thesis and the Bystanders thesis in turn.
  • 8 - The costs of war
    pp 133-147
  • Justice, liability, and the Pottery Barn rule
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter evaluates Pottery Barn rule and sees if Colin Powell was on to something when he coined it. It argues that the Pottery Barn rule is best understood as a piece of first-person moral guidance, useful for would-be interveners who are subject to the same cognitive errors and biases as the rest of us. If the Pottery Barn rule is to tell us something about the costs of war more generally, it cannot do so on the fault-based conception. Strict liability is imposed in civil law in a variety of areas, including some parts of product liability, and in the allocation of damages that emerge from ultra-hazardous activities. All the costs that emerge from a war, including the costs that are ordinarily justly ascribed to the world community as a whole might be pressed against the one who makes war.
  • 9 - Armed humanitarian intervention and the problem of abuse after Libya
    pp 148-165
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The idea of armed humanitarian intervention has long been attended with warnings that it will be abused by powerful states seeking to justify wars fought not for humanitarian purposes but for self-interest. This problem of abuse has received renewed attention in the wake of NATO's recent intervention in Libya. This chapter represents an attempt to find a way through this problem of abuse. It concludes by briefly contemplating what options, if any, might be available to the society of states for further limiting the problem of abuse without abandoning the idea of armed humanitarian intervention altogether. Arguments about the problem of abuse became particularly prominent from the early 1990s onwards as skeptical states and commentators sought to restrain the emergence of a right of humanitarian intervention in international discourse and interstate relations.
  • 10 - The responsibility to protect and the problem of regime change
    pp 166-186
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the fraught relationship between Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) and regime change and especially the argument that international military action aimed at protecting populations from genocide and mass atrocities must never entail regime change. The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, historical experience clearly demonstrates the necessity of regime change in ending episodes of genocide and mass atrocities perpetrated by states against sections of their own population. Second, accounts of sovereignty as being derived from self-determination that underpin the main arguments in favor of the prohibition do not lend strong support to the idea of an absolute a priori ban. Finally, the chapter proposes a series of checks designed to ensure that regime change may be used in extreme situations as a pathway to protection while guarding against the abuse of protection as a pathway to regime change.
  • 11 - Law, ethics, and the responsibility to protect
    pp 187-208
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the roots of Responsibility to protect (RtoP) in international law and international ethics. It explores how RtoP evolved out of the crisis in Kosovo, and discusses its policy significance today in the controversial case of Libya. Domestically inflicted war crimes and crimes against humanity in non-international, civil-war conflicts are parts of international law outlawed by custom and treaties, including the Rome Statute defining the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Humanitarian intervention is differentially rooted in international ethics, central and fundamental to Liberalism, marginal and instrumental to Realism, and relevant but tangential to Marxism. It is conflicted in international law, required to stop genocide, but rejected by Charter law. The UN-authorized and NATO-led intervention in Libya in March 2011 was the just-war doctrine's most important test case. The intervention in Libya joined legality (Security Council approval) to legitimacy (the cause of protecting civilians).
  • 12 - Responsibility to protect and the language of crimes
    pp 209-223
  • Collective action and individual culpability
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter assesses the impact of the 2005 move to frame Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in criminal terms. The first section argues that while the narrowing of the scope of RtoP to four particular crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes, was designed to forge a greater consensus around the extraordinary situations that might justify the use of force, contestation has lingered over the trigger point for activating international action. The second section demonstrates that the framing of RtoP in the language of crimes has significant implications for the broader approach to conflict prevention. Finally, the chapter posits a tension between the idea of responsibility to protect as a collective responsibility, held and operationalized by the international community as a whole and the need within most criminal frameworks for a centralized authority to both threaten and deliver justice.
  • 13 - Post-intervention
    pp 224-242
  • Permissions and prohibitions
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter sets for itself the goal of constructing general principles to guide decision-makers in the post-intervention moment. It examines different models of post-war justice in general. The chapter then looks at armed humanitarian as a particular kind of war, and sees to what extent one can use the general models of post-war justice to guide our understanding. Many historical cases of armed humanitarian intervention were examined, ranging from World War II to today's Iraq and Afghanistan. The account then looked for inspiration from the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) doctrine, witnessing its development from the ashes of Rwanda to its more recent application in Libya. The chapter concludes by offering 12 substantial principles to guide our sense of post-intervention justice, noting that the RtoP doctrine concurs in general with the author's own endorsement of the post-war paradigm of rehabilitation.
  • 14 - Rethinking responsibility to protect
    pp 243-260
  • The case for human sovereignty
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the last decade the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) has successfully entrenched a conditional understanding of state sovereignty that makes human rights the touchstone of sovereign rights. This chapter explores why one should conceive of military humanitarian intervention as a form of war. It argues that by doing so, one deforms the key aspects of humanitarian intervention, which in turn underlies the significant political controversy that the practice continues to generate. The chapter suggests that we approach it through the paradigm of what is called as human sovereignty. Conceiving of humanitarian intervention as a particular kind of war was a natural step because most commentators have approached the issue of intervention squarely from within the framework of just war theory. Limits on the political character of intervention have shallow roots within the conditionality account of humanitarian intervention.

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