Arguments Against Humanitarian Intervention

Non-intervention is broadly understood as the norm in international society, but the debate is about the political and moral legitimacy of military intervention when governments blatantly violate the human rights of their citizens, are unable to prevent such violations, or if states have collapsed into civil war and anarchy. For an international society built on principles of sovereignty, non-intervention, and the non-use of force humanitarian intervention poses a tough challenge. Immediately after the holocaust, The international society established laws to prohibit genocide, the mistreatment of civilians, and to recognize basic human rights. These humanitarian principles often conflict with principles of sovereignty and non-intervention.

At the same time, however, groups of liberal democratic states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) tried to build a strong case around the principle of the responsibility to protect. The responsibility to protect insists that states have primary responsibility for protecting their own citizens. However, if they are unwilling or unable to do so, the onus to end atrocities and mass killing shifts to the wider international community. This responsibility to protect was adopted by the UN General Assembly in a formal declaration at the 2005 UN World Summit. Its advocates argue that it will play an important role in building consensus about humanitarian action whilst making it more difficult for states to abuse its citizens. Humanitarian interventions in northern Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo were all justified in humanitarian terms by the intervening states. Justifying the use of force on humanitarian grounds remains a hotly contested debate, with China, Russia and members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) defending a traditional perception of state sovereignty. However, this position became less conventional as the 1990s progressed, and by the end of the decade most states were prepared to accept that the UNSC was entitled to authorize armed

Western nations are increasingly sensitized to the human suffering of others, but this sense of compassion nurture by the media is very selective in its response to human suffering. The media spotlight ensures that governments directed their humanitarian energies to the crises in northern Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia, while at the same time millions perished in the brutal civil wars in Angola, Liberia, and the DRC. The examples of Somalia, and perhaps Kosovo demonstrate that interventions which begin with humanitarian credentials can all too easily degenerate into “a range of policies and activities which go beyond, or even conflict with, the label “humanitarian”‟ (Roberts 1993: 448). So each case has to be judged on its merit. A further fundamental and principal problem with the strategy of forced humanitarian intervention concerns the so-called `body-bag' factor. Is domestic public opinion of the interfering state, especially in the West prepared to see its military personnel die in the cause of humanitarian intervention? A striking feature of all post-cold war humanitarian interventions is that no Western government has yet chosen to risk its military personnel in the defence of human rights where there was a significant risk