ABSTRACT
Despite pronouncements that the age of humanitarian intervention was over (e.g. Cottey 2008), the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya has reignited debate about when, if ever, it is legitimate to use force to protect populations from mass killing, rape, forced displacement and other crimes which, as Michael Walzer (1977) put it, “shock the conscience of humanity”. The practice of “humanitarian intervention” refers to the use of military force by external actors for primarily humanitarian purposes, usually against the wishes of the host government. Indeed, it is often governments themselves that attack sections of their own populations, raising difficult dilemmas about how the world should respond. Should we privilege peace over justice in such cases, or vice versa? Do the rights of peoples trump those of sovereigns? What is more, the use of force always provokes difficult moral questions about whose lives to protect and sacrifice in order to “save strangers” (Wheeler 2000) in grave peril. And, if we accept that there is a right to intervene in some cases, there are questions about what sort of right it is. Do we have a moral duty to intervene to save strangers or a more limited right to do so if we choose? These are urgent moral questions, matters of life and death on a terrible scale. There have
been several humanitarian interventions since the end of the Cold War (see Table 11.1), typically responding to the most massive and grievous of crimes. In the 1990s, genocide in Rwanda (1994) killed at least 800,000, and war in the former Yugoslavia (1992-95) left at least 100,000 dead and forced thousands more to flee their homes. Protracted conflicts in Sierra Leone, Sudan, Haiti, Somalia, Liberia, Ethiopia, East Timor, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and elsewhere killed millions more. The catalogue of misery has continued into the new century: conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan cost the lives of around 250,000 people and forced more than three million people from their homes; protracted conflict and natural disasters in Somalia caused an untold number of civilian deaths, with a single refugee camp in Kenya housing some 400,000 refugees in squalid conditions; during the “Arab Spring” which began in 2011, governments in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria turned their guns on unarmed protestors, killing thousands between them. These deaths were a product of violence aimed directly against unarmed civilians, not an unfortunate by-product of war (see Slim 2008). Recent episodes of mass killing perpetrated by states against sections of their own populations
have typically ended in one of two ways: either the perpetrators succeed in destroying or seriously weakening their target group or they are removed from power (Bellamy 2010a). Facts
like this pose major dilemmas because they pit different moral principles and ways of understanding and practising world politics against one another. They also raise hard questions about how to interpret agreed moral principles. One of the most basic of those principles is the “right to life” – the idea that humans ought not to be killed without good reason. The use of force itself is always morally problematic from a right to life perspective because no matter how carefully it is employed, the innocent will always be caught in the crossfire. Does this mean that
fidelity to the right to life demands a policy of non-intervention in the face of mass atrocities? Or, should external actors be prepared to get “dirty hands” and intervene, gambling that the unintentional endangering of some innocent lives will be compensated for by the saving of a far greater number of innocent lives? Given the importance and complexity of the questions involved and the pronounced differ-
ences between individual cases it is not surprising that there are dozens of perspectives, each of which offers its own account of whether force might or should be used for humanitarian purposes and, if so, in what circumstances. To further confuse the matter, proponents of similar moral theories can, and often do, hold different positions on humanitarian intervention in general as well as on specific cases (Holzgrefe 2003: 51). For example, some communitarians defend intervention in some circumstances, others reject it outright. Likewise, whereas cosmopolitans are more generally inclined towards supporting a duty to intervene, one of the theory’s progenitors, Immanuel Kant, defended the rule of non-intervention. These complexities partly stem from the centrality of consequentialist reasoning in debates about humanitarian intervention, which requires us to make empirical judgements to weigh up the relative value of actions and inactions, and the anticipated utility of different courses of action – all of which is a highly imprecise science. A further complicating factor is that it is impossible to separate out ethics and law without losing an important part of the picture (ibid.). In order to explain and evaluate different ways of thinking ethically about humanitarian
intervention, this chapter suggests a way of thinking about different perspectives on humanitarian intervention in relation to two critical questions, one about the nature of world politics (is it unendingly tragic or potentially progressive?) and the other about which type of actor should be privileged (the state or the individual?) (see Table 11.2). How we answer these two questions shapes the way we think about the ethical possibilities of using military force for humanitarian purposes. The chapter proceeds in five parts. The first clarifies the relevance and scope of these two questions in a little more detail and the remaining sections examine the four basic perspectives made possible by this heuristic framework.
