Humanitarian Intervention: Moralism versus Realism?

Abstract

Justice, Intervention, and Force in International Relations: Reassessing Just War Theory in the 21st Century. By Kimberly A. Hudson. New York: Routledge, 2009. 192 pp., $140.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-49025-2). Waging Humanitarian War: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention. By Eric A. Heinze. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009. 207 pp., $65.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-791-47695-6). How Do I Save My Honor? War, Moral Integrity, and Principled Resignation. By William F. Felice. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. 223 pp., $44.95 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-742-56666-8). First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. By David N. Gibbs. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. 346 pp., $27.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-826-51644-2). The unifying theme of these four books is humanitarian intervention—a paradigm that permits a state to intervene into the territory of another state, by employing military force, for humanitarian reasons: to stop large-scale atrocities committed against innocent human beings—the citizens of the target state.1 But this paradigm is not to be confused with the practice of intervention which violates the non-intervention principle foundational to the modern system of sovereign states. Non-intervention is of crucial concern because it constitutes the flipside of the principle of sovereign autonomy and territorial integrity embraced by realists and by legalists favoring international law—both asserting the stability of the international system and its standing territorial arrangements as a baseline. Non-intervention on these premises is the norm while intervention is the exception that calls for justification (Realists justify intervention as a foreign policy tool by claiming that it serves the national interest). Humanitarian intervention is an altogether different concept. Its ground is neither international law nor realpolitik but ethics. Its raison d’etre is protecting the innocent from unjustified violence and its logic is characteristically prescriptive: we ought to intervene in Sudan to alleviate on-going human suffering or we ought to have intervened in Rwanda to prevent the 1994 genocide. Mastering the humanitarian intervention debate is a demanding task because it presupposes familiarity with theories of ethics that transcend the immediate concerns of International Relations (IR). All four books under review contribute to this debate by elucidating how matters of right and wrong bear on the question of what states and governments do, or ought to do, in their mutual relations in the international realm. They are likely to attract the attention of advanced graduate students, IR theorists, and all those interested in the relationship between intervention, ethical constraints on foreign policy, and interstate war. My discussion …