Beyond Humanitarian Imperialism: The Dubious Origins of ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ and Some Rules for its Future

The problem of humanitarian intervention sits at the crossroad of ideas of human rights, theories of sovereignty and Just War theory. Any respectable argument for such collective violence depends on the assertion that international military intervention is necessary where a polity either causes or allows mortal danger to the life and liberty of its citizens such that its sovereignty is suspended. What remains absent from both international law and practice, however, are clear rules on how we decide when such collective violence is justified, whose obligation and right it is to intervene and what limits and sanctions exist to restrain the behaviour of those who intervene, or to punish those who intervene without international agreement. The problem in all humanitarian interventions is that those powers with the capacity to apply force at a distance for humanitarian or other ends are generally also those with economic and strategic interests overseas and are often also states which refuse any cosmopolitan restraint on their own military action. From the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, ‘humanitarian’ interest has repeatedly been used by Britain, France and the US to justify what to critics appeared to be the naked prosecution of selfish national foreign policies. 1 Ryan Goodman may ultimately be right that legalizing unilateral humanitarian intervention would ‘discourage wars with an ulterior interest’ but only if the international community makes rules which specifically protect against the risk of imperialism wearing a humanitarian mask. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.