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Military intervention for humanitarian reasons

Humanitarian intervention is the use or threat of military force by a state (or states) across borders with the intent of ending severe and widespread human rights violations in a state which has not given permission for the use of force. Humanitarian interventions are aimed at ending human rights violations of individuals other than the citizens of the intervening state. Nonetheless, there is a general consensus on some of its essential characteristics:
Humanitarian intervention involves the threat and use of military forces as a central feature
It is an intervention in the sense that it entails interfering in the internal affairs of a state by sending military forces into the territory or airspace of a sovereign state that has not committed an act of aggression against another state. The intervention is in response to situations that do not necessarily pose direct threats to states' strategic interests, but instead is motivated by humanitarian objectives. The customary international law concept of humanitarian intervention dates back to Hugo Grotius and the European politics in the 17th century. However, that customary law has been superseded by the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force in international relations, subject to two exhaustive exceptions: UN Security Council action taken under Chapter VII, and self defence against an armed attack. The type and frequency of humanitarian interventions have changed drastically since the 19th century, with a massive increase in humanitarian interventions since the end of the Cold War. Historically, humanitarian interventions were limited to rescuing one's own citizens in other states or to rescue ethnically or religiously similar groups (e. g. Christian countries intervening on behalf of Christians in non Christian countries). Moreover, it has sparked normative and empirical debates over its legality, the ethics of using military force to respond to human rights violations, when it should occur, who should intervene, and whether it is effective. To its proponents, it marks imperative action in the face of human rights abuses, over the rights of state sovereignty, while to its detractors it is often viewed as a pretext for military intervention often devoid of legal sanction (as indeed a new customary law norm would require sufficient state practice) selectively deployed and achieving only ambiguous ends. Its frequent use following the end of the Cold War suggested to many that a new norm of military humanitarian intervention was emerging in international politics, although some now argue that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the US "war on terror" have brought the era of humanitarian intervention to an end.

Getting involved in the affairs of another state on humanitarian grounds has been a subject of discussion in public international law since the 19th century. According to Jonathan Friedman and Paul James, explicit assertions about humanitarian motives are not a new phenomenon and military action is instead often rationalized through such moral rather than political arguments. As a pretext for deploying troops in Italian Somaliland and Italian Eritrea for an intended invasion of Ethiopia, Benito Mussolini thus claimed that he was attempting to both secure the Wal Wal border area where some Italian soldiers had been killed and abolish the local slave trade. Similarly, Adolf Hitler justified his own forces' occupation of the Sudetenland by suggesting that they were attempting to quash ethnic tensions in Czechoslovakia. In 1823, after initial ambivalence, the Foreign Secretary George Canning declared that "when a whole nation revolts against its conqueror, the nation cannot be considered as piratical but as a nation in a state of war". In February that same year, he notified the Ottoman Empire that the United Kingdom would maintain friendly relations with the Turks only under the condition that the latter respected the Christian subjects of the Empire. He was also instrumental in the outcome of the St. Petersburg Protocol 1826, in which Russia and Britain agreed to mediate between the Ottomans and the Greeks on the basis of complete autonomy of Greece under Turkish sovereignty. When this did not end the War, Canning negotiated a following treaty that ultimately led to the destruction of the Egyptian Turkish fleet at the Battle of Navarino. The treatment of minorities under the Ottoman aegis proved a rich source of liberal agitation throughout the nineteenth century. A multinational force under French leadership was sent to Lebanon to help restore peace after the 1860 Druze–Maronite conflict, in which thousands of Christian Maronites had been massacred by the Druze population. Following an international outcry, the Ottoman Empire agreed on 3 August 1860 to the dispatch of up to 12,000 European soldiers to reestablish order. This agreement was further formalized in a convention on 5 September 1860 with Austria, Great Britain, France, Prussia and Russia. Despite the unprecedented demonstration of the strength of public opinion and the media, the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli remained an unmoved practitioner of realpolitik, and considered British interests to lie in the preservation of Ottoman sovereignty in Eastern Europe. Lord Derby the Foreign Secretary disagreed and telegraphed the Sublime Porte that "any renewal of the outrages would be more fatal to the Porte than the loss of a battle." Apart from issuing stern advice and proposals for internal Turkish reform and the legal protection of minorities, the Disraeli government did nothing. However, the issue convulsed British politics with former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone coming out of retirement to campaign over the atrocities. In a famous campaigning speech he said:
Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Blmhashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. Rising Great Power tensions in the early 20th century and the interwar period led to a breakdown in the concerted will of the international community to enforce considerations of a humanitarian nature. Attempts were made under the auspices of the League of Nations to arbitrate and settle international disputes. Aggressive actions, such as the Italian Invasion of Abyssinia and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria were condemned, but the League lacked the resolve to enforce its will effectively. The Allied discovery of the Holocaust and the subsequent Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II caused attitudes to change considerably. After the tragedies in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, the international community began to debate how to react to cases in which human rights are grossly and systematically violated. Especially, in his Millennium Report of 2000, then Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, called on Member States: "If humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?". Since the end of the Cold War, interventions have increasingly been used, such as the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the 2011 military intervention in Libya.

Although most writers agree that humanitarian interventions should be undertaken multilaterally, ambiguity remains over which particular agents the UN, regional organizations, or a group of states should act in response to mass violations of human rights. The choice of actor has implications for overcoming collective action challenges through mobilization of political will and material resources. Questions of effectiveness, conduct and motives of the intervener, extent of internal and external support, and legal authorization have also been raised as possible criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of a potential intervener.

The understanding of what constitutes threats to international peace has been radically broadened since the 1990s to include such issues as mass displacement, and the UN Security Council has authorized use of force in situations that many states would have previously viewed as "internal" conflicts.

In “Can Intervention Work?” Rory Stewart, a British diplomat and politician, and Gerald Knaus, a professor and author, argue that in certain circumstances limited, but resourced interventions for a humanitarian mission can succeed. The authors co wrote an introduction at a moment when the international communality was debating whether and how to intervene in Libya, and highlight the West's history of imperfect interventions. They quote Anthony Lake's policy, “to help other nation's build themselves” as a guiding principal in foreign intervention. The authors are critical of the RAND Corporation report Beginner's Guide to Nation Building and argue every intervention situation is different based on the local political economy and there is not one universal approach that always works. The rest of the book is divided into two sections: first, Stewart reviews the international experience in Afghanistan since 9/11 based on his experience and travel in the country, and second, Knaus provides a case study on the international intervention in Bosnia. Overall, the authors warn against “over interventions” such as Iraq that were based on “exaggerated fears" and “irrational confidence” and often ignored “local tradition, identity, and history.” Stewart and Knaus advocate an intervention policy based on ““principled incrementalism” that invest time and resources in understanding local context and defining concrete goals.

The doctrine of humanitarian interventions has not been generally accepted. In April 2000, the 133 states forming the Group of 77 + China explicitly rejected “the so called “right” of humanitarian intervention, which has no legal basis in the United Nations Charter or in the general principles of international law.” This far, only the United Kingdom and Belgium explicitly defended the legality of humanitarian interventions.

Many criticisms have been levied against humanitarian intervention. Inter governmental bodies and commission reports composed by persons associated with governmental and international careers have rarely discussed the distorting selectivity of geopolitics behind humanitarian intervention nor potential hidden motivations of intervening parties. To find less veiled criticism one must usually turn to civil society perspectives, especially those shaped by independent scholars who benefit from academic freedom. Some argue that humanitarian intervention is a modern manifestation of the Western colonialism of the 19th century; the subjects of such intervention are ruled not by one sole party or entity, but by a mix of local institutions, NGOs and the interveners themselves. Anne Orford's work is a major contribution along these lines, demonstrating the extent to which the perils of the present for societies experiencing humanitarian catastrophes are directly attributable to the legacy of colonial rule. In the name of reconstruction, a capitalist set of constraints is imposed on a broken society that impairs its right of self determination and prevents its leadership from adopting an approach to development that benefits the people of the country rather than makes foreign investors happy. The essence of her position is that "legal narratives" justifying humanitarian intervention have had the primary effect of sustaining "an unjust and exploitative status quo". Others argue that dominant countries, especially the United States and its coalition partners, are using humanitarian pretexts to pursue otherwise unacceptable geopolitical goals and to evade the non intervention norm and legal prohibitions on the use of international force. Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali are at the forefront of this camp, viewing professions of humanitarian motivation with deep skepticism. They argue that the United States has continued to act with its own interests in mind, with the only change being that humanitarianism has become a legitimizing ideology for projection of U. S. hegemony in a post–Cold War world. Ali in particular argues that NATO intervention in Kosovo was conducted largely to boost NATO's credibility. Chomsky's expression of "our excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence" is often used to describe Kennedy's intervention in South Vietnam, which spread to all of Indochina. Furthermore, he asserts that the prospective leader of "humanitarian intervention" must uphold several qualifications. A first qualification is that the leader has to work as a moral agent that does not magnify the danger of elite culture, the efficacy of the intervention should be on the targeted population, and the people must be the moral agents that undertake humanitarian efforts. A third type of criticism centers on the event based and inconsistent nature of most policies on humanitarian intervention. These critics argue that there is a tendency for the concept to be invoked in the heat of action, giving the appearance of propriety for Western television viewers, but that it neglects the conflicts that are forgotten by the media or occur based on chronic distresses rather than sudden crises. Henry Kissinger, for example, finds that Bill Clinton's practice of humanitarian intervention was wildly inconsistent. The US launched two military campaigns against Serbia while ignoring more widespread slaughter in Rwanda, justifying the Russian assault on Chechnya, and welcoming to the United States the second ranking military official of a widely recognized severe human rights violator the communist government of North Korea. Further, sceptics have also argued that humanitarian intervention may have perverse consequences. Castan Pinos claims that "humanitarian" interventions generate a multiplicity of collateral effects, including civilian deaths, conflict aggravation, violence spill over into neighbouring regions and mutual distrust between great powers. Jeremy Weinstein, a political scientist at Stanford University, has argued for "autonomous recovery": although the number of civilian deaths rises when violence between rebel groups is left unchecked, the eventual victors can develop institutions and set the terms of their rule in a self enforcing manner. Such self enforcement reduces the risk of a country slipping back into violence. Another criticism argues that humanitarian intervention has historically consisted of primarily actions directed by so called Northern states within the internal affairs of so called Southern states, and has also led to criticism from many non Western states. These critics argue that the norm of non intervention and the primacy of sovereign equality is something still cherished by the vast majority of states, which see humanitarian intervention not as a growing awareness of human rights, but a regression to the selective adherence to sovereignty of the pre–UN Charter world. During the Havana G 77 summit in 2000, the "so called right of humanitarian intervention" as it was described, was condemned as having no basis in international law. Furthermore, in his criticism, Chomsky writes that "Humanitarian interventionism goes only one way from the powerful to the weak", and condemns what he called the targeting of the concept of national sovereignty by humanitarian interventionists, arguing that the primary purpose of national sovereignty is to give weak states partial protection against strong states, and that the protection of national sovereignty under international law stops internal conflicts in weak countries being exploited by strong ones.