ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to conceptualise a fundamental shift in the understanding of humanitarian intervention. The solutionist' cause-and-effect model the archetypal model of intervention in the policy debates of the 1990s and early 2000s operated on the basis of crisis or the exception. Humanitarian intervention is problematic if it is based upon the grand narratives of liberal internationalism, when issues of intervention and non-intervention in Africa and the Balkans were at the centre of international political contestation. Formal Universalist understandings of democracy and human rights shift the understanding of human rights-based approaches to empowerment. Beneath the Universalist humanitarian claims of promoting the interest of human rights, human security or human development, critical theorists suggested new forms of international domination were emerging, institutionalising market inequalities or restoring traditional hierarchies of power reminiscent of the colonial era. The critique of humanitarianism extended to the knowledge assumptions at play in Western discourses.
