Humanitarian Intervention

A Brave New World?

The language and practice of humanitarian intervention is far from new. It has been the source of incessant argument by lawyers, theologians, and philosophers for generations, even centuries. But the recent debate has its origins in the Cold War and was motivated by a number of controversial military actions. Three in particular stand out: India's intervention in the Bangladesh War of 1971; Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia in 1978, which resulted in the overthrow of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime; and Tanzania's intervention in Uganda in 1979, which ousted the dictator Idi Amin. These interventions were all condemned throughout the world. This criticism tended to be based on the contention that they undermined the notion of state sovereignty enshrined in Article 51 of the United Nations (UN) Charter. As such, these interventions offered a fundamental challenge to the stability of the post–World War II international system.

In the post–Cold War era, however, this conception of sovereignty as sacrosanct came under sustained attack. It was argued that despotic leaders should not be able to hide behind the shield of state rights and that the international community had an obligation to intervene to stop the widespread abuse of human rights. This contention garnered widespread support. It was an important theme, for example, in the writings of the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The 1990s was a decade of interventions: Iraqi “no-fly zones,” Somalia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Kosovo. The 2003 Iraq war was classified as a humanitarian intervention by some of its advocates, demonstrating how wide the embrace of the term now is.

The doctrine of humanitarian intervention has been widely criticized. For many detractors, it represents a mode of liberal imperialism rather than being an integral element of liberal internationalism. Likewise, humanitarian intervention has been censured for coercively imposing Western ideas about rights onto other cultures. For others, humanitarianism is simply rhetorical cover either for the implementation of traditional geopolitical policies or for powerful economic interests. In particular, it is argued, the failure of the Western powers to intervene during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, where there were no obvious economic or political interests at stake, demonstrated their hypocrisy. Indeed, Rwanda has become a lightning rod for the debate. For critics of interventionism, it proved that interventions were linked to self-interest. For advocates, Rwanda was a catastrophic failure and a spur for future action.

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