ABSTRACT
The whole array of humanitarian action deserves great attention. This chapter, however, focuses on the use of force by the international community in a sovereign country when the latter fails to protect its citizens, either by tolerating ethnic cleansing on its territory or by embarking on such an operation itself. The chapter further differentiates between a legal and moral entity to authorize and conduct intervention and therefore focuses on the type of operations that do not receive the green light from all the permanent members of the Security Council, but do receive widespread moral support on the righteousness of intervention. One may correctly interpret that the essence of the moral dilemma lies in prioritizing widespread moral norms at the expense of concerns of individual members of the Security Council. The theoretical object of this study has at least one ideal archetype, the NATO intervention in former Yugoslavia in 1999. The chapter is thus based on the case of Kosova primarily because it has crystallized hitherto unsaid principles at the expense of the ones previously taken for granted, more specifically an absolute understanding of sovereignty. ‘Humanitarian intervention’ requires clarification of both components of the term. To start from the latter, there is no broad consensus among scholars on what intervention is. I concur with Hopkins and Donnelly that the defining characteristic of intervention is the presence of coerciveness, defined as the lack of consent by warring parties rather than the employment of forceful means.2 ‘Consent and coercion are mutually exclusive: by definition, one cannot agree to be coerced.’3 Hence, any external action installed with the consent of local warring parties, such as peacekeeping operations, cannot be considered intervention. Regarding the first component of the term, ‘humanitarian’, it is important to recognize the inappropriateness of interpreting a comprehensive multifunctional operation through a single factor. While the operation in Kosova is viewed as humanitarian, it is widely held that no operation has ever originated
out of a single motive, be that humanitarianism. This study follows a broad distinction made by Cooper and Berdal and analyzes operations that are coercive but primarily peace-keeping or humanitarian in nature.4
