Humanitarian intervention and contemporary security issues

Humanitarian intervention: When is it justified?

One of the most controversial concerns of 20th and 21st century international affairs is the question of when it is justified to embark upon humanitarian interventions. On one hand, there have been clear examples in recent history of genocides (most notably in Rwanda and Bosnia) that clearly defy human decency. On the other hand, the concept of national sovereignty well as the logistics and costs of a coordinated humanitarian intervention can be daunting. Furthermore, calls for humanitarian intervention also often provoke concerns about using such interventions as the pretext for self-interested actions of a more powerful state. This paper will argue that while there are legitimate philosophical objections to humanitarian interventions, on a practical basis such interventions are required to preserve international stability and to prevent future warfare.

A number of theorists of international relations believe that humanitarian interventions of any kind are unjustified. As noted by Benjamin Valentino in his essay, "The true costs of humanitarian interventions," even though the idea of aiding civilians in need may be appealing in the media, it is extremely difficult at times to select who is the aggrieved party. While he acknowledges that the Tutsi victims of Rwanda and the Bosnian Muslims of Serbia were just as innocent as the Jewish victims of World War II, he counters that the military factions purporting to represent these groups were often problematic in character given that they too had committed crimes in the past and the international community did not want to appear to be taking sides in a political conflict (Valentino 2011). But engaging in humanitarian interventions, even when done under the neutral shield of the United Nations almost inevitably means determining who is right and who is wrong. In a state of armed conflict, often no side is pure, one side is merely more powerful than another. Others object to the very notion that the military can be used to enact a humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian interventions may encompass a wide variety of strategies. Some may be genuinely peacekeeping in a pure sense, such as going to a natural disaster area to prevent looting. Others may have a limited, defined military role such as to prevent the encroachment of one foreign power into another's territory or to protect civilians. But mission creep may be inevitable and the military may find itself placed more and more in the protective capacity of one side vs. another.

Furthermore, the question of national sovereignty cannot be ignored (Hoffman 1995: 34). States, according to classical theories of international affairs, have a right to self-determination; the international community cannot set a rigid set of standards by which all nations must live. If so, does the United States' embrace of the death penalty constitute an abuse, given the widespread abandonment of this punishment by most of the major Western democracies? What about Saudi Arabia's oppression of women? Drawing a line in the sand can be challenging. Finally, humanitarian interventions must almost by definition be limited, given the difficulties of securing international support for an action within a sovereign state and the fact that such interventions often do not fully address the real, root causes that generated the problem (Hoffman 1995: 40).

Proponents of humanitarian intervention would counter that such interventions uphold the notion that justice must prevail above sovereignty, and that sovereignty itself is not a universal and absolute good. The conflicts between states can easily spill over into other borders, violating the rights of the citizens of neighboring nations. Humanitarian interventions can save lives and also prevent further and more deeply-entrenched conflicts from taking hold (Hoffman 1995: 35). Beyond this somewhat self-interested defense of international policing is the question of mass suffering which is an affront to human decency, transcending localized and cultural standards. Once again, this definition of crimes against humanity is admittedly difficult to assess (Hoffman 1995: 38). Genocide has typically been the most obvious example of a universal crime against humanity, no doubt because of the lingering shadow of the Holocaust. The most praised international humanitarian interventions in Rwanda and Bosnia were both characterized by actions against attempts at ethnic cleansings; but does this mean that there are also other instances while technically not motivated by the desire to prevent cleansings but which are still warranted?

Hoffman (1995) notes that some generally-accepted criteria of supporters of intervention include when such actions are authorized by the UN or another regional organization as was the case in Rwanda and Haiti. This allows for external monitoring as well as confers legitimacy beyond the action. However, when the UN has proven to be incapable of dealing with the action and other regional bodies are also unable to contain the threat, then unilateral actions may be necessary (Hoffman 1995: 40). There is also often support for defending a democratically-elected government against a hostile minority attempting to secure control as was the case in Bosnia. While the Bosnian mission was initially successful in the sense it stopped the killings of Bosnian ethics by Serb nationals, the Bosnian model still remains subject to criticism given events such as the Srebrenica massacre in which 400 Dutch peacekeeping troops representing UN protection force failed to prevent the killing of over 8,000 Bosnians who were supposed to be in a designated safe zone. The Dutch government blamed poorly prepared troops and an unclearly defined UN mandate but the Dutch government was recently forced to compensate the families of the victims for its negligence ("Dutch state liable," 2014).

Even if humanitarian interventions are not 100% effective, the fact that interventions in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia at least curtailed the bloodshed suggest that they are necessary under some limited circumstances. But these interventions also highlight that even international actions often must be disproportionately backed by certain major powers to be effective; the relatively limited role U.S. interventions played in Somalia, critics alleged substantially hampered efforts there to quickly secure a lasting peace (Howe 1995: 50). As with conventional warfare, half-measures are seen as ineffective, squandering resources, and unnecessarily prolonging the conflict (Howe 1995:60). The U.S. showed itself to be extremely ineffective in terms of nation-building in Somalia and showed a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict. For example, U.S. troops initially allowed Somali warlords to keep their weapons so long as they moved out of Mogadishu (Clarke & Herbst 1996). This reflected the U.S.'s failure to understand the dynamics of the conflict and its overzealousness in not wishing to intervene in Somalia internal politics; the result was an ineffective peace settlement and elongation of the conflict. A similar failure of understanding of the dynamics of the ethnic conflict was manifested in Rwanda. The UN conduced a peacekeeping mission in 1993 which was explicitly limited to monitoring security breaches and offering aid. When the subsequent genocide of 800,000 minority Tutsis ensued in 1994, the UN was nowhere to be found: despite multiple warnings in 1993, the Security Council did nothing (Winter 1993).