ABSTRACT

This book explores the case for military intervention across state borders for humanitarian purposes, and the possible tensions between the military action and the humanitarian objectives. This chapter summarizes recent historical events which have brought these issues into sharp focus. These historical cases all raise the same fundamental question for the ethics of international relations. The questions explore whether it is permissible for states, or groups of states, to intervene militarily in the territory of another state with the aim of protecting the human rights of members of that state. These questions are further complicated if a proposed military intervention to protect the human rights of a minority within a state can also be seen as intervention to assist a minority which is attempting to secede from the state and to constitute itself as an independent political community with its own state.