ABSTRACT

This chapter traces the 17th-century origins of both the norm of non-intervention, and of the idea that this norm may sometimes be violated for humanitarian reasons. In the 19th century humanitarian intervention was entwined with imperialism, but the reformation of the international order marked by the United Nations Charter of 1945 removed this association by making intervention presumptively both illegal and illegitimate, a process reinforced by the Cold War, when interventions, though sometimes justified in humanitarian terms, were generally undertaken for political reasons. The end of the Cold War created both the opportunity and the need for a doctrine of humanitarian intervention, which, as the politics of the interventions of the 1990s demonstrated, was hard to achieve. At the end of that decade, frustrated by the problems of humanitarian intervention, an attempt was made to change the question by articulating the doctrine of a ‘responsibility to protect’ as an alternative. However, the subsequent history of the operation of this doctrine suggests that the idea of a norm of non-intervention that can on occasion be violated still has much to commend it.