Intervention, Humanitarian

Humanitarian intervention refers to coercive action, involving the use of military force, in the affairs of one state by another state, group of states, or international organization with the express purpose of addressing massive human rights violations or widespread human suffering. Two aspects of this definition are worth noting. First, humanitarian intervention is distinct from the broader category of “humanitarian action,” which might include a range of activities (both military and nonmilitary) designed to address humanitarian emergencies. Second, the explicit and most prominent purpose of the military action must be humanitarian—even if additional objectives are achieved through the use of force.

There are alternative definitions of humanitarian intervention that attempt to narrow the concept still further. Most legal conceptions, for example, insist that the term humanitarian intervention encompasses only those coercive actions that do not involve the consent or invitation of the host country. However, in practice, this definition is difficult to maintain. In many cases where military force has been used for humanitarian purposes, consent from the government of the target state has been either coerced (as it was in the case of Indonesian consent for intervention in East Timor in 1999) or ambiguous (as it was in the case of Bosnia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s). In other instances, such as Somalia in 1992, the breakdown of order within a country makes it difficult to identify authorities who would provide consent for outside action.

Humanitarian intervention has been the subject of controversy, for both scholars and policymakers, because of two tensions that it invokes. The first is between international society's commitment to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and nonintervention and its commitment to upholding and promoting individual human rights. Both of these goals are enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Charter. The second tension is between the objective of protecting individuals from extreme persecution and violence and the use of coercive means (which can involve the death of soldiers and civilians) to achieve that goal. For many nongovernmental organizations involved in the delivery of aid and [Page 1335]humanitarian assistance, the very term humanitarian intervention is a contradiction in terms.