ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the moral and political agency of states and international organizations helps to explain why humanitarian military interventions so often fail. The way the United Nations forced the view of the importance of the organization as an institution with a strong moral claim to aid and even govern Somalia actually marginalized the local actors who could have played a role in developing a system of political governance. In The Human Condition, political philosopher, Hannah Arendt uses ancient philosophy to confront contemporary politics. The focus of this work is the via activa, or that aspect of human life concerned with doing rather than thinking. The chapter explains how failure can be explained by the fact that both the United States and the United Nations ground their agency in a discourse that tends to eliminate any space for other agents to develop their own means of protecting their rights.
