ABSTRACT
This chapter broadly explores the wider or global status and fortunes of the humanitarian intervention practice or norm and its successor, the responsibility to protect (R2P) norm before 2011. R2P was specifically designed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001 as a more effective and less controversial replacement for the practice or norm of humanitarian intervention. The chapter provides some of the philosophical arguments for and against humanitarian intervention. Common sense in debates about humanitarian intervention holds it was a distinctive practice of the post-Cold War world. This is substantially true in that it was usually viewed as 'inconsistent with the conventional pattern of international relations' before 1990. Despite the fact the inclusion of R2P in the World Summit Outcome Document was a notable achievement – or perhaps because of it – resistance to the R2P norm reappeared immediately; Gareth Evans memorably characterised this resistance as 'buyer's remorse'.
