ABSTRACT
Military intervention, one of the enduring institutions of international relations, has a notable capacity to mutate. Indeed, the very meaning of the term has changed over a relatively short period of time. In 1984 Hedley Bull opened the introduction to his edited book on intervention with a definition of its subject matter as ‘dictatorial or coercive interference, by an outside party or parties, in the sphere of jurisdiction of a sovereign state’.2 The word ‘dictatorial’ did not imply that the intervening state was a dictatorship: it was to be taken as referring simply to the fact that the intervening state or states forcibly imposed their policies and personnel on the target state. At the time the definition was relatively uncontroversial. Today, however, the word ‘dictatorial’ seldom appears in definitions of intervention. It is hardly the appropriate adjective to describe some of the interventions since 1990, the purposes of which have included: assisting delivery of humanitarian aid, preventing ethnic cleansing and genocide, and introducing democratic changes. ‘Dictatorial’ also seems especially inappropriate given that interventions today are often defended by their protagonists as implementing the principles of the international community as a whole, and as helping to liberate the inhabitants of the territory concerned from dictatorial government. Something fundamental has happened which powerfully affects thinking about the law and ethics of intervention. The decline of the epithet ‘dictatorial’ is emblematic of wider changes in the nature of intervention that are explored in this chapter.
