Introduction

The failures of the “international community” in the 1990s are well known. From April to June 1994, Hutu extremists killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and Hutu moderates in Rwanda as the United Nations scaled back its peacekeeping presence there. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica, a UN “safe haven.” Most commentators agree that these were cases where military action should have been used more forcibly to protect civilian life. Yet there have also been cases where military action was used more forcibly for putatively humanitarian ends, resulting in intensified violence and further loss of civilian life – the protection, perhaps, of some others at the expense of other others (Bulley 2010). The 1999 NATO air war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in an attempt to protect Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing, killed around 500 civilians (both Serbs and Kosovar Albanians) (HRW 2000) and escalated the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians at the hands of the Serbian forces (HRW 2001). In Libya, although NATO is widely credited with preventing a massacre in Benghazi, its bombs directly killed at least 72 civilians over the course of the 8-month campaign (HRW 2012). In addition, by supporting the rebels, NATO’s intervention not only arguably gave cover to their atrocities against regime loyalists (Paris 2014) but also perhaps even lengthened a civil war that was about to end, thereby indirectly bringing about, by one calculation, seven times as many casualties as could have been expected if it had not intervened (Kuperman 2013); furthermore, its intervention and the ensuing regime change contributed to the broader proliferation of weapons and instability in the region (Anderson 2015; Strazzari and Tholens 2014), with obvious negative effects on civilian security.