History of Humanitarian Intervention Essay

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Humanitarian Intervention

The neoliberal conception of the world that emerged after World War Two incorporated an expanded role for international agencies, led by the United Nations, and an expanded sense of common responsibility among nations. Humanitarian intervention is one of the ways in which this common responsibility has manifested. The process of decolonialization in particular has brought about new conceptions of sovereignty and the nation-state. The UN emphasized one of the key ways in which these ideas have changed. In the past, a nation's sovereignty was absolute, but in the modern world the move has been more towards the concept of human rights, of the individual, and this can at least in some selected cases trump the sovereign nation-state. The UN in particular has instituted the concept of the Right to Protect, meaning humanitarian intervention.

Toward Humanitarian Intervention

The UN's charter did not make mention of peacekeeping, and yet peacekeeping has become one of the UN's highly-visible roles. Conflict in many parts of the world has resulted in humanitarian crises -- populations ravaged by war were in need of help. The ability of international agencies to help has necessitated the peacekeeper -- a military force intended to keep the peace and allow for humanitarian aid to restore civil order in a region otherwise beset by conflict. By the 1990s, peacekeeping became de rigeur for the United Nations, and the peacekeeping budget at the UN grew to $3.6 billion. The UN Security Council spurred this change when it broadened the concept of "threat to peace" to include threats to the economic, social, humanitarian and ecological fields." Thus, where humanitarian intervention was once for situation's like 1980s Cambodia, it was now justified to protect social or economic interests of external nations.

In other words, humanitarian intervention on the part of the UN is not entirely altruistic. There are benefits to UN member states of such actions. Given how much the world's population has boomed since the end of the 19th century, and the intensity with which modern conflict is fought, regional conflict has the potential to create global instability. Refugee flows, famines and terrorism are all issues that can arise out of conflict, and all are better addressed through humanitarian intervention than allowing them to fester unchecked.

Humanitarian intervention has faced numerous challenges as the concept has been developed and implemented around the world. In cases like Somalia, domestic political wrangling undermined the ability of UN peacekeepers to perform their roles effectively. The Security Council, in a shining of example of how it gets in the way of actually solving problems, twiddled its thumbs while the Rwandan genocide was occurring, providing a number of lessons for future peacekeeping missions. Peacekeeping was now challenged at the existential level -- could peacekeepers truly remain neutral and committed to disarming peoples, when not all involved in a conflict are willing to acquiesce? By the time Kosovo happened, NATO was willing to work around the Security Council's petty politicking and do the right thing, using force where the UN lacked the stomach for it, in order to enforce a peace upon a belligerent regime.

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The Responsibility to Protect

At the heart of peacekeeping's existential crisis is the concept of the responsibility to protect. Protection, of course, is not necessariliy only about disarmament, but can also be about engaging in open conflict with a belligerent regime. With this new perspective came a shift in the UN's views regarding the nature of sovereignty. Control over a territory was now deemed less important to the notion of sovereignty than care of "life-sustaining standards" for a nation's inhabitants. Legal recognition of a state is nice, but not everything in the new world order.

The responsibility to protect concept, however, was challenged only a few years later when the U.S. invaded Iraq under false pretenses, one of which was the citation of responsibility to protect as a key determining doctrine. The UN naturally was concerned that responsibility to protect could be used to justify pre-emptive force, as in Iraq, and the UN never agreed to the U.S. action. Instead, it sought to clarify the norms for invoking responsibility to protect. The interesting thing about the doctrine, and the shift towards understanding sovereignty as about providing life-sustaining standards, is that there are many failed states around the world. The UN, and the West, would need to draw a line at where humanitarian intervention can be justified. There are instances of open conflict, but there are also instances where there is no conflict, but no legitimate government. Humanitarian intervention, by definition, would still require abnormal crisis, not just a garden variety abdication of duty on the part of a state. Ban Ki-Moon argued that humanitarian intervention should be reserved for the most extreme and violent situations only -- genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Unspoken was that it would only be applied in situations where the state itself lacks strength -- the UN isn't going to force Saudi Arabia to treat women like humans or North Korea to treat provide for its people's needs. The UN may not be a surrogate government, but the current conception of humanitarian intervention is reserved for situations where there is no functioning government. Libya in 2011 was hailed as the moment when responsibility to protect was hailed as the new norm, but again this was in a country in a state of civil war, the government bombing its own people. Russia and China abstained from voting, on paper out of concern with the reduced definition of sovereignty implied by R2P, given that the old definition is the only thing allowing them to argue against intervention in their military invasions of Crimea and Tibet respectively. R2P as the overriding norm threatens their abilities to invade other states at will.

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