Medical professionals providing humanitarian aid in times of crisis face complicated ethical and clinical challenges. Today, humanitarian aid is given in accordance with existing guidelines developed by international humanitarian organizations and defined by international law. This paper considers the ethical aspects and frameworks of an atypical humanitarian project, namely one that provides medical support through an Israeli civilian hospital to Syrian Civil War casualties. We explore new ethical questions in this unique situation that pose a serious (...) challenge for the medical community and conventional ethical norms, a challenge Israeli medical staff meet on a daily basis. Before discussing the ethical challenges, we give a description of the project and its unique status. (shrink)

Humanitarian aid workers typically reject the accolade of hero as both untrue and undesirable. Untrue when they claim not to be acting beyond the call of duty, and undesirable so far as celebrating heroism risks elevating “heroic” choices over safer, and perhaps wiser ones. However, this leaves unresolved a tension between the denial of heroism and a sense in which certain humanitarian acts really appear heroic. And, the concern that in rejecting the aspiration to heroism an opportunity is (...) lost to inspire more and better humanitarian action. Having set out this problem in more detail in Part I, the argument in Part II will suggest that a virtue ethics approach to humanitarian moral obligations can make good sense of our intuitions concerning the role of heroism in humanitarian action. In Part III I will argue that at least “professional” humanitarians, instead of rejecting heroism, should aim to be heroes, in the sense of displaying a virtue of humanity in high-stakes contexts, because this is consistent with the aim of humanitarian action. Finally, some lingering problems of demandingness and motivation are considered. (shrink)

We are living in the “era of human rights,” with increasing attention to them following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Humanitarian interventions are mechanisms aimed to protecting human rights and reducing suffering, yet they pose ethical challenges due to the use of lethal force and its resulting harm to civilians. In this paper I am attempting to answer the question: Does humanitarian intervention enhance human rights or violate them in other ways? Could it be a cover for (...) other goals? In an attempt to answer this question, the paper discusses the concept of humanitarian intervention and its relation to human rights, along with some conditions for such intervention and the ethical challenges of using lethal force. Finally, the paper presents a case study: Darfur as an example. (shrink)

The practice of humanitarian intervention, which involves one state intervening militarily into another state in order to prevent abuses of human rights, raises a plethora of ethical and political issues. How is foreign intervention to be reconciled with state sovereignty? Is intervention a threat to international peace and stability? Are alien values being imposed on the target society? Each of these questions has been thoroughly explored by both philosophers and jurists. But the notion that a state infringes the rights (...) of its own citizens by waging war to defend the human rights of foreigners has received relatively little attention. The only thorough philosophical exploration of this problem to date - Allen Buchanan's “The Internal Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention” - is the focus of this paper. My aim here is not to offer a resolution to the “internal” problem, but simply to show that Buchanan misrepresents it in several important respects. First, Buchanan understates the strength of this objection: it is much more resilient than he gives it credit for. Secondly, he overstates its scope, or the range of humanitarian interventions to which it applies. And finally, Buchanan is mistaken to think that whether or not an intervening state fulfils the rights of its own citizens can be determined prior to, and therefore independently of, the question of whether its actions are consistent with the rights of the society targeted by the intervention. (shrink)

In August 2017, a group of activists erected in Ottawa's downtown a tent as a first overdose prevention site as a response to what the public and the activists perceived as an epidemic—a devastating wave of opioid and fentanyl overdoses in Canada. The Ontario premier was urged to declare an emergency that would provide increased funding for harm reduction and also send a message to survivors and families that the lives of their loved ones mattered. Thus, the discourses around the (...) so‐called opioid crisis used a language of moral sentiments to legitimate political action. This “new humanitarianism” is considered a priori as good, but in this article, I ask what is politically at stake if we base our actions on the logic of humanitarian reason. The new universalism of humanitarian organizations is based on the individualism of human rights and thus on a moral imperative that replaces the political. Initiatives like the OPS movement often fill the gaps in social services in the absence of the state and address social problems as emergencies and public health issues, thereby transforming them into medical problems—performing the medicalization of sociopolitical problems. This is what I call the NGOization of the opioid crisis. This form of humanitarianism is a universalism of the temporal present without any universal promise for a better future or the amelioration of human conditions—it is a humanitarianism of emergency. What characterizes new humanitarianism is that it responds to situations of suffering that are the result of increasing inequality and injustices without addressing the root causes of this suffering. Not addressing these causes means to be complicit in perpetuating the inequalities and to restrict visions of possible alternatives. (shrink)

abstract Apparently, there are some important tensions that must be confronted in grappling with the issue of the permissibility of humanitarian intervention. Notably, there is the tension between respecting sovereignty and responding to the plight of the needy, that is, there is tension between respecting governments’ authority and desire for non‐interference, and respecting the individuals who suffer under their leadership. I argue that these and other tensions should be resolved in favour of protecting the individuals who suffer in (...) class='Hi'>humanitarian crises, though the way to do this defensibly requires that we put in place many safeguards against abuse. My main theoretical argument emerges from a model of global justice that I develop. I then examine recent reports on intervention and state sovereignty compiled by an inter‐national commission in order to show that consensus is building about the permissibility of military intervention to protect fundamental human rights for vulnerable populations in certain cases. Some important public policy proposals are evolving in the direction of protecting individuals over states, but there are still some important gaps that remain between what is theoretically desirable and proposals about international law. I show where some of those gaps are and how we can close them. (shrink)

This paper examines four interpretations of the observation that humanitarian intervention might be used ‘selectively’ or ‘inconsistently’ in order to elucidate the normative commitments of the deliberative process in international relations. The paper argues that there are several types of concerns that are implicit in the accusation of inconsistency, and only some of them amount to objections to humanitarian intervention as a whole. The paradox of humanitarian intervention is that intervention is prohibited except where the intervention is (...) humanitarian, yet humanitarian reasons never exist in isolation, and it is nearly impossible to determine the real reason for intervention (or any other collective action) in the international arena. The problems revealed by an examination of inconsistency in the example of humanitarian intervention turn out to be general problems with applying the norms of practical reasoning to moral questions dealing with collective agents. (shrink)

Humanitarian aid’s psycho-therapeutic turn in the 1990s was mirrored by the increasing emotionalization and subjectivation of fund-raising campaigns. In order to grasp the depth of this interconnectedness, this article argues that in both cases what we see is the post-Fordist production paradigm at work; namely, as Hardt and Negri put it, the direct production of subjectivity and social relations. To explore this, the therapeutic and mental health approach in humanitarian aid is juxtaposed with the more general phenomenon of (...) psychologization. This allows us to see that the psychologized production of subjectivity has a problematic waste-product as it reduces the human to Homo sacer, to use Giorgi Agamben’s term. Drawing out a double matrix of a de-psychologizing psychologization connected to a politicizing de-politicization, it will further become possible to understand psycho-therapeutic humanitarianism as a case of how, in these times of globalization, psychology, subjectivity and money are all interrelated. (shrink)

The current mechanisms and agents of humanitarian intervention are inadequate. As the crisis in Darfur has highlighted, the international community lacks both the willingness to undertake humanitarian intervention and the ability to do so legitimately. This article considers a cosmopolitan solution to these problems: the creation of a standing army for the United Nations. There have been a number of proposals for such a force, including many recently. However, they contain two central flaws: the force proposed would be, (...) firstly, too small and, secondly, too dependent on major states. Accordingly, I argue that, to be a substantial improvement on the current situation, such a force would need to be, firstly, much larger and, secondly, in the hands of cosmopolitan democratic institutions. This two-part solution would solve the problems faced by current interveners, but is unlikely to be realised soon. Accordingly, I argue that our immediate efforts should instead be concentrated on improving regional organisations' ability to intervene. (shrink)

In international law, ‘humanitarian intervention’ refers to the use of military force by one nation or group of nations to stop genocide or other gross human rights violations in another sovereign nation. If humanitarian intervention is conceived as military in nature, it makes sense that only the most horrible, massive, and violent violations of human rights can justify intervention. Yet, that leaves many serious evils beyond the scope of legal intervention. In particular, violations of women's rights and freedoms (...) often go unchecked. To address this problem, I begin from two basic questions: When are violations of human rights sufficiently serious to require an international response of some sort? What should that response be? By re-orienting the aim and justification of international law to focus on individual autonomy rather than on peace between nations, I argue that women's rights violations other than genocide and mass rape can warrant intervention. Military intervention is often counter-productive to the aim of achieving autonomy, however. I suggest a range of responses to human rights violations that includes military intervention as one end of the spectrum, and combine this with a greater understanding of the scope of human rights violations that require international response. (shrink)

I argue here that certain species of war, namely humanitarian military interventions (HMIs), can be obligatory within particular contexts. Specifically, I look at the notion of HMIs through the lens of just war theory and argue that when a minimal account of jus ad bellum implies that an intervention is permissible, it also implies that it is obligatory. I begin by clarifying the jus ad bellum conditions (such as just cause, right intentions, etc.) under which an intervention is permissible. (...) I then turn to the claim that permissibility necessitates obligation, by first showing that whenever an intervention is permissible, it is also minimally decent. Second, I show that minimally decent actions are morally obligatory by arguing that the notion of minimal decency is a conceptual bridge between negative and positive duties. Third, I argue that performing minimally decent actions is necessary for a state to be just. Ultimately, my conclusion arises from the following observation: if a humanitarian crisis is bad enough for one to hold that it is permissible to breach sovereignty of a nation, then it is bad enough to hold that there is an obligation to intervene. (shrink)

Much has been written about the ethics of humanitarian intervention in the past fifteen years. In this paper I discuss a variety of justifications that have been proposed (in fact, seven theories of justification), finding difficulties with each of them, and then I offer a theory of justification of my own. My approach to justification will differ from most of the earlier accounts in two ways. First, I begin the discussion of justification at a different point. Second, I seek (...) to expand the traditional discussion of humanitarian intervention to cover an area not usually addressed, namely, the question of the scope of justified humanitarian intervention. If humanitarian intervention is sometimes justified, precisely when is it justified? This is no merely academic question, given the belated appeal to humanitarian intervention on the part of those scrambling to provide a public justification of the war in Iraq. (shrink)

The creation of new technologies that serve humanity holds the potential to help end global poverty. Unfortunately, relatively little is done in engineering education to support engineers’ humanitarian efforts. Here, various strategies are introduced to augment the teaching of engineering ethics with the goal of encouraging engineers to serve as effective volunteers for community service. First, codes of ethics, moral frameworks, and comparative analysis of professional service standards lay the foundation for expectations for voluntary service in the engineering profession. (...) Second, standard coverage of global issues in engineering ethics educates humanitarian engineers about aspects of the community that influence technical design constraints encountered in practice. Sample assignments on volunteerism are provided, including a prototypical design problem that integrates community constraints into a technical design problem in a novel way. Third, it is shown how extracurricular engineering organizations can provide a theory-practice approach to education in volunteerism. Sample completed projects are described for both undergraduates and graduate students. The student organization approach is contrasted with the service-learning approach. Finally, long-term goals for establishing better infrastructure are identified for educating the humanitarian engineer in the university, and supporting life-long activities of humanitarian engineers. (shrink)

Abstract The article addresses three aspects of the humanitarian intervention doctrine. It argues, first, that the value of sovereignty rests on the justified social processes of the target state ? the horizontal contract. Foreign interventions, even when otherwise justified, must respect the horizontal contract. In contrast, morally objectionable social processes (such as the subjection of women) are not protected by sovereignty (intervention, of course, may be banned for other reasons). In addition, tyrants have no moral protection against interventions directed (...) at them. Second, the article addresses the internal legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. It concludes that the liberal state may only use voluntary soldiers (either the voluntary army or mercenaries) to conduct humanitarian intervention. Conscription for that purpose is not permissible. The article shows that the long-standing criticism of mercenaries stems from a romantic prejudice and is thus unfair. Third, the article makes a distinction between intention (the determination to perform an action) and motive (a further goal that the agent seeks with that action) and shows that only intention is relevant for humanitarian intervention. A justified humanitarian intervention requires the intention to liberate the victims, but not necessarily a good further motive. It shows how mainstream doctrine has impermissibly confused the two concepts. (shrink)

International law makes it explicit that states shall not intervene militarily or otherwise in the affairs of other states; it is a central principle of the charter of the United Nations. But international law also provides an exception; when a conflict within a state poses a threat to international peace, military intervention by the UN may be warranted.. The Charter and other UN documents also assert that human rights are to be protected — but in the past the responsibility for (...) the protection of human rights has for the most part been allowed to rest on the government of the state where the violation of rights occurs. Not surprisingly in this context, the question of what protection should be provided by the UN or otherwise to individuals when their human rights are violated by their governments or with the complicity of their governments remains a contentious issue. Should the principle of respect for state sovereignty trump the principle of respect for human rights? Historically it has been allowed to do so, but recently it has been more and more widely argued that when states fail to respect the human rights of their citizens, they may be held accountable for their actions. Is military humanitarian intervention justifiable? And if so, under what circumstances? Those are the questions addressed in this collection of essays. The focus of the volume is on the abstract principles involved; though reference is sometimes made to specific cases, the essays here consist primarily of philosophical reflection on the abstract issues. (shrink)

This work offers an analysis of all the legal and moral issues surrounding humanitarian intervention: the deaths of innocent persons and the Doctrine of Double Effect Governmental legitimacy - The Doctrine of Effective Political Control; UN Charter and evaluation of the Nicaragua ruling; The Morality of not intervening; US-led invasion of Iraq; Humanitarian intervention authorised by the UN Security Council - Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia among others highlight NATO's intervention in Kosovo; The Nicaragua Decision; and The (...) precedents of Panama, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The book's features include: a new framework based on the doctrine of double effect; basic principles of international ethics; outline of the moral argument for humanitarian intervention; explores the morality and legality of military action to end tyranny or anarchy; arguments in a much more detailed and complete fashion than in previous editions; in-depth examination of philosophy of international law; the relationship between custom and moral theory; new discussion of the question of right authority; and a full analysis of recent interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. book addresses a broad interdisciplinary audience of international lawyers, philosophers, and political scientists. In this new edition, the author responds to critics while updating the discussion in the light of the momentous events that took place at the beginning of the new millennium. (shrink)

International law makes it explicit that states shall not intervene militarily or otherwise in the affairs of other states; it is a central principle of the charter of the United Nations. But international law also provides an exception; when a conflict within a state poses a threat to international peace, military intervention by the UN may be warranted. (Indeed, the UN Charter provides for an international police force, though nothing has ever come of this provision). The Charter and other UN (...) documents also assert that human rights are to be protected — but in the past the responsibility for the protection of human rights has for the most part been allowed to rest on the government of the state where the violation of rights occurs. Not surprisingly in this context, the question of what protection (if any) should be provided by the UN or otherwise to individuals when their human rights are violated by their governments or with the complicity of their governments remains a contentious issue. Should the principle of respect for state sovereignty trump the principle of respect for human rights? Historically it has been allowed to do so, but recently it has been more and more widely argued that when states fail to respect the human rights of their citizens (or of others who reside within their boundaries), they may be held accountable for their actions. Is military humanitarian intervention justifiable? And if so, under what circumstances? Those are the questions addressed in this collection of essays. The focus of the volume is on the abstract principles involved; though reference is sometimes made to specific cases, the essays here consist primarily of philosophical reflection on the abstract issues. (A companion volume on the specific issues surrounding a particular case, Lessons of Kosovo, is being published simultaneously.). (shrink)

This book considers who should undertake humanitarian intervention in response to an ongoing or impending humanitarian crisis. It develops a normative account of legitimacy to assess not only current interveners, but also the desirability of potential reforms to the mechanisms and agents of humanitarian intervention.

The article discusses the relationship of the axiological foundations of modern bioethics with casual and even incidental effects of the activity of scholars in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The author examine the ability of humanists to influence the formation of values system as well as the possibility of instrumentalizing these values in social practices. The study determines the entire causal complex that led to the formation of a special tradition of non-religious substantiation of values associated with the (...) teaching and study of ancient languages in the context of the functioning of political and legal institutions and cultural and historical traditions of European states. The author considers the origins and meaning of humanism and the gradual change of its content as well as the transformation of humanistic experience into a tool of constructing ideals and values and an element of social technology. A special place is given to the analysis of attempts to form meta-ethics and bioethics within the framework of the value system of post-Soviet Russian society and the role of humanistic ideas in this process. On the example of the development of modern European philosophical thought, the controversial and problematic nature of various interpretations of humanism is shown, and the thesis of the historical conditionality of the ideals of humanism and its connection with some certain paradigms of metaphysic is confirmed. The central theme of the article is the problem of the relationship between the historical and conceptual, conditional and unconditional, contextual and universal in the heritage of the late medieval humanism. Technologization paths and contexts for the interpretation of humanistic ideas in modern Russia are outlined. The paper determines the ways of harmonization of humanitarian values and the system of their social and legal legitimation. On the example of the educational policy of higher education in recent decades, achievements and failures in the process of forming a new value system are analyzed. This value system could be used as a basis for legislative practice and state policy that would allow determining the basis of modern bioethics, which is of great importance for the development of Russian society and further improvement of the moral and legal foundations of its existence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSome suggest that the duty of humanitarian intervention should be discharged by states that are historically responsible for the occurrence of violence. A fundamental problem with this suggestion is that historically responsible states might be ill-suited to intervene because they are unlikely to enjoy support from the local population. Cécile Fabre has suggested a way around that problem, arguing that responsible states ought to pay for humanitarian interventions even though they ought not to take part in the military (...) operations. We claim that Fabre’s idea is subject to two concerns. First, the duty to perform might not be appropriately transferrable from the historically responsible state to another state because it would allow the primary duty bearer to escape the worst costs of intervention. Second, an intervention might be as unlikely to generate local support when a historically responsible state pays for an intervention as when it performs it. These problems are enough to cast doubt on Fabr... (shrink)

How has the international community responded to humanitarian crises after the end of the Cold War? While optimistic ideational perspectives on global governance stress the importance of humanitarian norms and argue that humanitarian crises have been increasingly addressed, more skeptical realist accounts point to material interests and maintain that these responses have remained highly selective. In empirical terms, however, we know very little about the actual extent of selectivity since, so far, the international community’s reaction to (...) class='Hi'>humanitarian crises has not been systematically examined. This article addresses this gap by empirically examining the extent and the nature of the selectivity of humanitarian crises. To do so, the most severe humanitarian crises in the post-Cold War era are identified and examined for whether and how the international community responded. This study considers different modes of crisis response (ranging from inaction to military intervention) and different actors (including states, international institutions, and nonstate actors), yielding a more precise picture of the alleged “selectivity gap” and a number of theoretical implications for contemporary global security governance. (shrink)

We tend to think that mass atrocities and attempted genocides call for humanitarian intervention by other states. (Nonviolent intervention if possible, military intervention if need be.) In this chapter, I discuss these two related claims in turn. What, if anything, justifies humanitarian intervention in certain states by other states? Ought such interventions, if justified, be pacifist in nature, or is it legitimate in some cases to intervene violently? To discuss these questions, I draw primarily on principles and arguments (...) found in just war theory, pacifism, international relations, and analytic political philosophy more generally. (shrink)

This chapter argues that, because humanitarian intervention typically involves the military of one state attempting to overthrow another state ’s government, it gives rise to different moral questions from simple cases of interpersonal defensive violence. State sovereignty not only protects institutions within a society that contribute to the satisfaction of individuals’ interests and that cannot be easily restored once overthrown; it also plays a role in the constitution of those interests, which cannot be assumed to be invariant across different (...) forms of social life. As a result, humanitarian intervention will frequently give rise to incommensurability between the pre-intervention and post-intervention states of affairs. The reasons against violating sovereignty, together with reasons for conservativism in action that arise in circumstances of incommensurable value, mean that the threshold for the moral permissibility of humanitarian intervention is high. The chapter concludes by outlining how humanitarian intervention might be internationalized, making it easier to justify. (shrink)

As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay describes the humanitarian diplomacy of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) by comparing it conceptually with other forms of advocacy and illustrating it with the ICRC's recent experience in the Yemen crisis. Humanitarian diplomacy is examined as one particular way of balancing legal norms, moral values, and national interests in the pursuit of greater respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) (...) and principled humanitarian action in armed conflicts. The essay looks back to ancient history for archetypal forms of humanitarian advocacy in various cultural traditions. It then describes humanitarian diplomacy's practice of discreet diplomacy and confidential dialogue with all parties to a conflict, and compares its relatively “quiet” approach with the “loud” approach of outrage activism focused on “naming and shaming,” which tends to be the norm today. The essay argues that there is an important and complementary place for the ICRC's style of humanitarian diplomacy alongside other forms of advocacy even in the face of criticism that the ICRC is sometimes publicly silent about what it knows of atrocities and avoids naming and shaming. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the complex humanitarian crises of the 1990s, the concept of the Responsibility to Protect emerged powerfully on the international stage. The report of the International C...

This essay argues that the ethics of humanitarian intervention cannot be readily subsumed by the ethics of just war without due attention to matters of political and moral motivation. In the modern era, a just war draws directly from self-benefitting motives in wars of self-defense, or indirectly in wars that enforce international law or promote the global common good. Humanitarian interventions, in contrast, are intuitively admirable insofar as they are other-regarding. That difference poses a challenge to the casuistry (...) of humanitarian intervention because it makes it difficult to reason by analogy from the case of war to the case of humanitarian intervention. The author develops this point in dialogue with Michael Walzer, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and President Clinton. He concludes by showing how a casuistry of intervention is possible, developing a motivational rationale that draws on the Golden Rule. (shrink)

Humanitarian maps assembled using digital technology are indicative of transformations underway in how the world is made knowable, sensible, and actionable, including for international legal purposes. These transformations are exemplified by the Missing Maps Project (MMP), an initiative of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a U.S.-registered non-profit, and three other non-governmental organisations operating internationally: American Red Cross; British Red Cross; and Médecins Sans Frontières. Projects such as the MMP make it harder for international lawyers to lay claim to, and (...) seek to imaginatively reorient, shared repositories of common sense. Meanwhile, international legal scholars continue to propagate ideas that the world may be reimagined with their help, largely without regard to such transformations. In lieu of imagination’s standard evocation to the end of enhancing critical agency in international legal writing, this article contends that the idiosyncratic notion of imagination advanced in the writings of Walter Benjamin may be better attuned to ongoing shifts in sense-making apparent in international humanitarian mapping. Walter Benjamin’s atypical rendering of imagination as a ‘purely receptive, uncreative’ force in a field of technological reproduction offers international legal scholars another way of thinking about agency and prospects for re-forming their field in the face of its burgeoning digitalisation. (shrink)

When discussing whether or not our elected governments should intervene to end genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity in other countries, the humanitarian intervention debate has largely been assuming that liberal democracies bear no responsibility for the injustice at hand: someone else is committing shameful acts; we are merely considering whether or not we have a positive duty to do something about it. Here I argue that there are important instances in which this dominant third party (...) perspective (TPP) is empirically false and normatively misguided. Much before our positive ?responsibility to protect? potential victims from mass atrocities, we violate our negative duty not to harm these victims. Employing work by Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar, I argue that this harm currently comes about as our elected governments either buy, or allow our corporations to buy, the world's most precious resources from brutal dictators and warlords, who dominate some of the states that are at the heart of intervention discussions. In these cases, democracies' most immediate duty is not intervention but rather humanitarian disintervention: boycotting severely oppressive regimes, and in particular stopping to recognizing these regimes ? whether dictators or civil warriors ? as possessing legitimate authority to sell their peoples' resources. I begin with a brief survey of the intervention literature, followed by the foundations for the disintervention alternative. I then elaborate the conceptual and practical advantages of disintervention, concluding with thoughts on the reasons for TPP's lasting dominance. (shrink)

The current mechanisms and agents of humanitarian intervention are inadequate. As the crisis in Darfur has highlighted, the international community lacks both the willingness to undertake humanitarian intervention and the ability to do so legitimately. This article considers a cosmopolitan solution to these problems: the creation of a standing army for the United Nations. There have been a number of proposals for such a force, including many recently. However, they contain two central flaws: the force proposed would be, (...) firstly, too small and, secondly, too dependent on major states. Accordingly, I argue that, to be a substantial improvement on the current situation, such a force would need to be, firstly, much larger and, secondly, in the hands of cosmopolitan democratic institutions. This two-part solution would solve the problems faced by current interveners, but is unlikely to be realised soon. Accordingly, I argue that our immediate efforts should instead be concentrated on improving regional organisations' ability to intervene. (shrink)

Both radical rebellion and humanitarian intervention aim to defend citizens against tyranny and human rights abuses at the hands of their government. The only difference is that rebellion is waged by the oppressed subjects themselves, while humanitarian intervention is carried out by foreigners on their behalf. In this paper, it is argued that the prudential constraints on war (last resort, probability of success, and proportionality) impose tighter restrictions on, or demand more of, humanitarian interveners than they do (...) of rebels. Specifically, I argue that rebels enjoy exemptions from the success principle that do not apply to humanitarians, and that rebels are not constrained by the foreseen mediated consequences of their actions ? consequences that are interceded by the agency of other parties. The same cannot be said for intervening states. If this is right, then it is possible for a humanitarian intervention to fall short of the prudential conditions of legitimate war despite being expected to accomplish no less, and to cost no more, than a rebellion which is rightly judged to satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

There is an intrinsic connection between genocide and colonialism where both concepts are in close proximity and are based on the logic of elimination. The fact that an active genocide of the Palestinian people continues in 2024 is extremely disturbing. A plethora of human rights laws and principles complement and reinforce the protections afforded under international humanitarian law. These laws were developed in order to prevent historical atrocities from repeating themselves. As history is re-written, it is submitted that these (...) laws, while good on paper, are not being put into practice in the case of Palestine. This article reflects on the application of specific international humanitarian laws, namely protecting healthcare, preserving nutrition and safeguarding children during times of conflict, and analyses how these protections are being flouted in the case of Gaza. (shrink)

After the end of the Cold War, many in the West viewed Africa as a testing ground for the solidarist argument that sovereignty was no longer an absolute principle and that the international community could intervene to protect individual from human rights violations. This argument seems particularly challenging in the African context, given the continental leadership’s historic commitment to territorial integrity and non-intervention. However, as the author shows, African leaders from 1945 to 1990 were largely upholding the pluralist international norms (...) of the time. In other words, the case for humanitarian intervention – and the problems posed by the practice – are not region-specific. The early 1990s, during which the United Nations intervened in Somalia, seemed to confirm the solidarist position. However, the failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, and the more recent experience of interventions in Sierra Leone, present a more mixed picture. Humanitarian intervention remains a controversial practice because of its coercive means, and its tendency to attribute blame or responsibility in what are often very complex civil conflicts. (shrink)

The legitimacy of humanitarian intervention has been contested for more than a century, yet pressure for such intervention persists. Normative evolution and institutional design have been closely linked since the first debates over humanitarian intervention more than a century ago. Three norms have competed in shaping state practice and the normative discourse: human rights, peace preservation, and sovereignty. The rebalancing of these norms over time, most recently as the state’s responsibility to protect, has reflected specific international institutional environments. (...) The contemporary legitimacy of humanitarian intervention is based on UN Security Council authorization of the use of force. Although the Security Council is often viewed as representative of great-power influence, international acceptance of its role is based on the role of non-permanent members and their support for the sovereignty norm. The current rebalanced norms supporting humanitarian intervention, institutional bias that protects state sovereignty, and the changing character of mass violence may undermine the tenuous contemporary legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. Normative adjustments and new institutional designs are required to insure the legitimacy of international action that protects populations against mass violence. (shrink)

Tesón's “humanitarian rationales” for the war in Iraq strain the traditional understanding of humanitarian intervention: The first, that the war was fought to overthrow a tyrant. The second, that it was a defense strategy establishing democratic regimes peacefully, but by force if necessary.

"The book offers contrasting views of humanitarian intervention - a war aimed at ending tyranny. Fernando Tesaon.

Following Alvesson and Kärreman's influential essay on the modes and interpretation of organizational discourse, this article reports on a longitudinal study of naturally occurring interactions that took place before, during, and after a meeting between representatives of Médecins sans Frontières, a well-known humanitarian organization, and representatives of local health centers in a region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This episode is used to exemplify the fruitfulness of adopting a view that incorporates two dimensions of discourse, that is, what (...) Alvesson and Kärreman identify as its transient and muscular nature. The longitudinal aspect of our study allows us to show what interactants accomplish in particular settings, while illustrating a crucial aspect of the trans-local dimension of their talk. As shown in this article, a given Discourse must be embodied, materialized or even incarnated in discourses, that is, tokens of text or talk, in order for it to be reproduced, sustained and transported from one point to another, that is, to become what Latour calls an immutable mobile. A given Discourse can thus maintain its shape across time and space only if a lot of interactive work is done to assure the stability of its associations in the ordinary day-to-day activity of the people who embody it. (shrink)

Humanitarian assistance in conflicts sometimes undermines local coping strategies, reinforces wartime economies, and strengthens the existing power structures. This article argues that some victims of conflicts are made extremely vulnerable and uniquely dependent on humanitarian agencies. In this case, humanitarian agencies have a distinct obligation to assist them. This article considers one novel account that justifies the continued provision of aid to victims of conflicts and rejects the widespread view that aid should be withdrawn to avoid its (...) negative impact. This article presents the “Distinct Dependence Argument” to address the aid dependency predicament in conflicts. It explores the degree of vulnerability and dependence of victims of conflicts and evaluates humanitarian agencies’ causal responsibility in causing such vulnerability and dependency. (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas affect several essential elements of humanitarian aid, such as the adequate selection of crises to which to provide aid and a selection of beneficiaries based on needs and not political or geostrategic criteria. Other challenges encompass maintaining neutrality against aggressors, deciding whether to collaborate with governments that violate human rights, and managing the allocation and prioritization of limited resources. Additionally, issues arise concerning the safety and protection of aid recipients, the need for cultural and political sensitivity, and (...) recognition of the importance of local knowledge, skills, and capacity. The appropriateness, sustainability, and long-term impact of actions; security risks for aid personnel; and the need for transparency and accountability are also crucial. Furthermore, humanitarian workers face the duty to report and engage in civil activism in response to human rights violations and the erosion of respect for international humanitarian law. Lastly, the rights of affected groups and local communities in the decision-making and implementation of humanitarian aid are vital. The traditional foundations and approaches of humanitarian aid appear insufficient in today’s landscape of disasters and crises, which are increasingly complex and divergent, marked by a diminished capacity and shifting roles of various actors in alleviating suffering. This article reviews the historical evolution of the conceptualization of humanitarian aid and addresses some of its ethical challenges and dilemmas. (shrink)

Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. All are examples where humanitarian intervention has been called into action. This timely and important new volume explores the legal and moral issues which emerge when a state uses military force in order to protect innocent people from violence perpetrated or permitted by the government of that state. Humanitarian intervention can be seen as a moral duty to protect but it is also subject to misuse as a front for imperialism without regard to (...) international law. In Humanitarian Intervention, the contributors explore the many questions surrounding the issue. Is humanitarian intervention permitted by international law? If not, is it nevertheless morally permissible or morally required? Realistically, might not the main consequence of the humanitarian intervention principle be that powerful states will coerce weak ones for purposes of their own? The current debate is updated by two innovations in particular, the first being the shift of emphasis from the permissibility of intervening to the responsibility to intervene, and the second an emerging conviction that the response to humanitarian crises needs to be collective, coordinated, and preemptive. The authors shed light on the timely debate of when and how to intervene and when, if ever, not to. Contributors: Carla Bagnoli, Joseph Boyle, Anthony Coates, Thomas Franck, Brian D. Lepard, Catherine Lu, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Terry Nardin, Thomas Pogge, Melissa S. Williams, and Kok-Chor Tan. (shrink)

However much one may wish for nonviolent solutions to the problems of unjust and unrestrained human violence that Glover explores in Humanity, some of those problems at present require violent responses. One cannot read his account of the Clinton administration’s campaign to sabotage efforts to stop the massacre in Rwanda in 1994 – a campaign motivated by fear that American involvement would cost American lives and therefore votes – without concluding that Glover himself believes that military intervention was morally required (...) in that case. Military intervention in another state that is intended to stop one group within that state from brutally persecuting or violating the human rights of members of another group is now known as “humanitarian intervention.” Those against whom the intervention is directed are almost always the government and its supporters, though this is not a necessary feature of humanitarian intervention. It is, however, a conceptual condition of humanitarian intervention that it does not occur at the request or with the consent of the government. The use of force within another state with the consent of the government counts as assistance rather than intervention. The principal reason that humanitarian intervention is contentious is that it seems to violate the target state’s sovereign right to control its own domestic affairs. Because humanitarian intervention is a response to human rights violations within the target state, it is regarded as altogether different from wars of defense against aggression. Indeed, since aggression is normally understood to be war against a state that.. (shrink)

This paper examines what prevents us from legally enforcing the moral imperative of protecting human rights during military operations carried out for distinctly humanitarian purposes. The answer, I argue, lies not in familiar objections to bringing the law into greater congruence with morality, but in international law's indeterminacy regarding the use of force. Preserving stability within the nascent international legal system comes at the cost of a law that eschews the protection of individual rights even in cases in which (...) the protection of human rights is what justifies military action. The tension between state sovereignty and the protection of human rights thus not only generates well-known controversies about the lawfulness of military intervention. It also prevents us from devising laws to protect human rights during wars whose very purpose it is to stop human rights violations. Protecting human rights during humanitarian interventions may thus remain an undertaking as quixotic as it is morally urgent. (shrink)

The article discusses the relations between humanism and humanitarianism through the prism of rationality, which allows to identify the significant contradictions between their essences and methods of implementation as well as to reveal the subtleties and differences in the relationship between them. The author demonstrates the interrelation of the idea of rationality as reasonability with the theory of humanism and its practices; it is shown that the charges of inhumanity against rationality can be addressed mainly to instrumental reasonability, which occupies (...) a dominant position in the society of Modernity. The inconsistency of the development of humanism in recent years is examined. On the one hand, first organizationally formed humanistic movements emerged in the 20th century and humanism gradually became a common social practice. On the other hand, starting from the second half of the 20th century, representatives of the postmodern and religious-conservative traditions more and more clearly pronounce statements about the crisis of humanistic ideology. It is determined that the classical concept of secular humanism has lost its representativeness to social realities because its model of a person becomes outdated and requires rethinking and renewal. It is emphasized that the role of humanitarian technologies is increasing under the new conditions of the science functioning in modern society, in which any knowledge, including natural and technical, acquires a humanitarian dimension. Therefore, the humanitarian component is a necessary part of any science today since the humanitarian component offers a pragmatical and axiological comparison of the scientific achievements with the life-world of men and their needs. The author concludes that rational strategies for overcoming the crisis of humanism are associated with new ontologies and represent attempts to understand the transformations of humanistic values in the technoscientific world. (shrink)

Ten new essays critique the practice of armed humanitarian intervention, whereby one state sends its armed forces into another to protect citizens against major human rights abuses. The contributors examine a range of concerns, for instance about potential adverse effects and about ulterior motives.

This is a review of Patrick Meier’s 2015 book, Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. The book explores the role of technologies such as high-resolution satellite imagery, online social media, drones, and artificial intelligence in humanitarian responses during disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In this analysis, the book is examined using a humanitarian health ethics perspective.

My title is deliberately provocative. What could be less humanitarian than the Melian Dialogue? For most readers of Thucydides it is the paradigm of imperial brutality, ranking with the braggadocio of Sennacherib's Rabshakeh in its insistence upon the coercive force of temporal power. The Melians are assured that the rule of law is not applicable to them. As the weaker party they can only accept the demands of the stronger and be content that they are not more extreme. Appeals (...) to moral or religious norms are quite irrelevant, for in their position the Melians simply cannot afford them—as little as Mr. Doolittle could afford middle-class morality. The message is a hard one, and it has elicited outrage over the centuries from the majority of scholars who tend to prefer the καλὰ ὀνόματα of propaganda to the harsh underlying realities of imperial expansion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing shortly after a war to protect western values had resulted in a new world order, finds it inconceivable that Athenian generals could discount divinely-inspired hope and insist on the imperative of force or that the Melians, that tiny state, would prefer the nobler to the safer course. In this he is echoed by George Grote, writing in the expansionist days of the early nineteenth century: ‘a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification—a good plea, if he can—a false plea or a sham plea if he has not better’. Instead, says Grote, the Athenian envoy ‘disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy’; and the inevitable conclusion for him, as it had been for Dionysius, is that the Dialogue is fundamentally bogus, a composition of Thucydides ‘to bring out the sentiments of a disdainful and confident conqueror in dramatic antithesis’. (shrink)

Humanitarian intervention is a staple of current discussions about relations among states. Should powerful states interfere in the internal affairs of weaker ones, particularly those identified as failed states, in order to bring peace and stability when it is clear that the existing government can not do so? The concept is an old one, not a new one. European nations that engaged in overseas expansion generally justified their conquests on the grounds that they would seek to civilise and Christianise (...) the peoples whom they encountered. The most extensive discussion of the right ? or the responsibility ? of strong states to intervene on a humanitarian basis occurred among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish intellectuals who sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The most famous of these figures was Francisco de Vitoria (1485?1546) whose De Indis outlined all of the arguments that could be raised for and against such intervention. His line of argument suggests that in the long run, intervention even with the best of intentions, may well lead to tragic consequences. It may even be hubris, the sin of those who would play God. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the arguments justifying or opposing the notion of humanitarian intervention from realist and liberal perspectives and considers the difficulties of undertaking such interventions effectively and consistently.

While some suggestions have been made as to how the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention should be assigned to specific states, the question of how to assign the duty to carry the economic a...