ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two sets of issues, one to do with the nature of humanitarianism itself, the other to do with the justification for violent intervention. It explores humanitarianism and examines the ethics of military intervention. Whilst the chapter offers some arguments for the position that violent humanitarianism or humanitarian violence is either never or very rarely justified, it presents various approaches to the issue, partly in the context of different ethical theories concerning the nature of international relations. The chapter surveys the main normative theories of international relations, with a view to seeing how they tackle the question of humanitarian violence. The three main types of position are (sceptical) realism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The chapter concludes that humanitarian violence is not formally an oxymoron. But, in the modern world, and given the rest of my way of understanding matters, the conception of humanitarian violence largely lacks application.
