Military Intervention in Tuva (1918–1919)

Introduction

Military intervention into interstate and civil wars is both common and important. It lengthens wars, makes them more severe, and shapes how they are fought. Even the mere possibility of intervention can alter the course of a war as belligerent powers alter their strategies to either encourage or dissuade potential interveners. These effects of military intervention are found in both civil and interstate wars. Yet, is state intervention into interstate and civil wars essentially one phenomenon or are they distinct phenomena? By looking at which states are likely to intervene, why and when they intervene, and which wars are most likely to experience intervention, it becomes clear the similarities between state military intervention into civil and interstate wars are more significant than are the differences. In other words, despite some important differences, they are subsets of the same phenomenon. In both types of wars, allies, geographically proximate states, and great powers are more likely to intervene. Also, information revealed by events within both types of wars prompts intervention and explains its timing. Last, wars in which international organizations become involved, both civil and interstate, are more likely to experience intervention. There are, however, important differences notably in the areas of cross-border ethnic ties, the presence of great powers in the war, the use of non-state proxies, and wars caused by commitment problems.

List of Tables - Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - PART 1 BASIC PRINCIPLES 1917-24 - 'Anti-Parliamentarism' and 'Communism' - The Russian Revolution - The Labour Party - Trade Unions and Industrial Organisation - PART 2 CONTINUITY AND CHANGE 1925-35 - The Late Twenties and Early Thirties - The Split in the APCF and Formation of the USM - PART 3 CAPITALIST WAR AND CLASS WAR - The Civil War in Spain - The Second World War - A Balance Sheet - Notes - References/Select Bibliography - Index

PurposeThe purpuse of this study is to answer the following two questions. Do conflict management efforts mitigate the recurrence and severity of civil conflict? If so, how? Do some conflict management strategies fare better than others in these tasks? This study theorizes about the connection between the costliness of a conflict management strategy – with respect to both the disputants and third parties – and civil conflict outcomes. This theory produces two contradictory predictions: that more costly strategies either increase or decrease violence. This study not only adjudicates between these two possibilities but also incorporates the role of timing. The early use of more costly strategies, for example, may encourage disputants to reduce violence in civil conflicts.Design/methodology/approachTo evaluate the predications that the authors derive from their theoretical argument, the authors quantitatively analyze the effect of conflict management strategies’ relative cost on various measures of civil conflict recurrence and severity. The authors first identify the set of international–civil militarized conflicts (I-CMCs) during the period 1946–2010. I-CMCs contain two dimensions – interstate and intrastate – making them the most complex and dangerous form of militarized conflict. To each I-CMC, the authors then link all third-party attempts to manage the I-CMC’s civil conflict dimension. Finally, after developing quantitative indicators, a series of regression equations explore the relationships of primary interest.FindingsTwo main findings emerge. First, when third parties use a relatively more costly conflict management strategy to manage a civil conflict (e.g. a peace operation or military intervention, as opposed to mediation), the severity of the conflict increases, while conflict recurrence rates remain unchanged. Second, this study uncovers a trade-off. The early use of a relatively more costly management strategy lowers a civil conflict’s severity in the short-term. It also, however, increases the likelihood – and speed with which – civil conflict recurs. The timing of certain conflict management strategies matters.Originality/valueScholars typically isolate conflict management strategies in number (i.e. consider efforts as independent of one another, even those within the same conflict) and kind (i.e. examine mediation but not peace operations). This study, in contrast, includes the following: the full menu of conflict management strategies available to third parties – negotiation, mediation, adjudication/arbitration, peace operations, sanctions and military intervention – over a lengthy time period (1946–2010); theorizes about the relative merits of these strategies; and considers the timing of certain conflict management efforts. In so doing, it highlights a policy trade-off and proposes promising areas for future research.

Reviewed by: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It Darko Kwabena Opoku Collier, Paul . 2007. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It. New York: Oxford University Press. 205 pp. $28. (Cloth). This book is part of the growing genre of literature that seeks to deepen our understanding of the causes of poverty and how to address it. The author, Paul Collier, is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford and a former director of development at the World Bank. He notes that while global poverty is declining, several dozen countries—mostly in Africa and home to about a billion people—are engulfed in increased and appalling poverty. He argues that these countries are ensnared by one or more of four traps: the conflict trap, the natural resource trap, the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, and the trap of bad governance in a small country. Consequently, they have diverged from the rest of the world. Writing with force and erudition, Collier proposes four instruments—aid, military intervention, laws and charters, and preferential trade policies—all of which he believes will help lift the bottom billion people out of poverty. Some of his arguments are illuminating, but others are dubious. His discussion that an abundance of natural resource can become a curse or a trap, for [End Page 134] example, is insightful. Similarly, while the challenges of development for landlocked countries are daunting, reliance on poor neighbours for international trade complicates matters. Instability in neighboring countries spawns additional problems. His discussion of the economic devastation wrought by civil wars is illuminating. One might question the precision with which he calculates how economic growth or decline reduces or increases the risk of civil war, but the basic thrust—that civil wars are costly—is apposite. The same cannot be said, however, of his analysis of the causes of civil war. His contention that civil wars bear no relation to colonialism flies in the face of a large body of evidence. In Africa, colonial officials politicized and heightened ethnic differences and created conditions that bred instability. In this regard, James O'Connell's thesis, "The Inevitability of Instability" (1967), remains apt. Decolonization plunged Congo into civil war. Nigeria followed suit. Collier's assertion that civil wars are driven by greed, not grievance, is also dubious. Charles Taylor, Laurent Kabila, and others may have been driven by the lure of wealth, but this hypothesis cannot be generalized. Some groups have bona fide grievances that were created by colonialism and exacerbated by postcolonial leaders. Recent violence in the Rift Valley of Kenya is a prime example. Grievance figured in the civil war in Sierra Leone (Abdullah 2004). To dismiss grievance is therefore hardly helpful. The poverty traps that Collier identifies are not exhaustive. Of course, no single book can discuss all traps, but the omission of some traps is notable. An example is neocolonialism, long recognized as harmful. In Collier's scheme, which reflects a broader theme of his book, the woes of the bottom billion are self-inflicted. Surely some problems are internally derived, but neocolonialism is a vicious trap. Foreign powers have intervened in ex-colonies to secure their own interests, and have often reversed progress. Further, the way in which neoliberalism has been implemented in the bottom billion arguably constitutes a trap. It is hardly coincidental that most Africans, for example, are poorer today than they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Also, the debt overhang arguably amounts to a trap. Collier's instruments for tackling poverty are interesting and thoughtprovoking, but also debatable, too sanguine, and probably impractical—at least not any time soon. I share his view that aid is a palliative, not a cure for poverty. He admits that military intervention is controversial, but necessary to save failing states. He wants to see the enactment of laws and charters against corruption. Last, he asks rich countries to lift tariffs and open their markets. Military intervention is predicated on the flawed notion that benevolent Westerners would dislodge "villains" and...

Ukraine’s social, political, and cultural history has become a controversial issue since the 1990s. Dominant until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the discourse about the Soviet brotherly nations has since been contested by depictions of Ukraine as politically and ideologically divided over the course of its 20th-century history. Russia-Ukraine war that began with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 Feb 2022 has had a dramatic impact on the process of replacing the formerly standard version of Ukraine’s past with new interpretations. At the same time, Russia’s war on Ukraine has also demonstrated that Soviet-era collective memory about the key events in Soviet history has outlived the Soviet state and has been mobilized for political use. When in pain of heart a Ukrainian politician says that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cancelled a shared past of Ukraine and Russia, he refers to a familiar discourse about these nations’ familial ties (Tkach). With this discourse now shattered, the question of particular salience is: How was the idea of brotherhood between Ukraine and other Soviet nations expressed and sustained? How did it evolve? In light of Russia-Ukraine war, the stories that were building blocks of the Soviet foundational narrative about Ukraine and Russia as fraternal nations are worth revisiting. An analysis of such stories reveals the mechanism of making Ukraine’s part an integral part of Soviet culture. In this paper, I discuss the issue of the evolution of the Soviet discourse about ‘eternal friendship of Ukrainian and Russian peoples’ in the example of Igor Savchenko’s film Ballad About Cossack Holota ( Duma pro kozaka Golotu, 1937), released by the Gorkii Film Studio as part of the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Igor Savchenko (Ihor Savchenko in 24 | WEEReview 13 | 2024 Ukraine in Soviet Narratives about the October Revolution Ukrainian) was a Ukrainian Soviet film director who made films both in Russian and Ukrainian film studios; his work played an important role in promoting the idea of familial ties between Ukraine and Russia. Ballad About Cossak Holota is based on Arkadii Gaidar’s novella for children R.V.S. (1925) that is set during the Civil War in Ukraine, following the October Revolution. Savchenko’s film is especially interesting in how he reworks Gaidar’s story; he depicts events of the Civil War in the context of Ukraine’s 17th-18th-century history, drawing on Ukrainian folklore. Cossack Holota, a character from Ukrainian folklore, becomes a symbol of the revolutionary liberation of Ukraine, a promise of a just social and political order. Drawing on memory studies, post-colonial theory, and theory of deconstruction, I discuss the artistic means that Savchenko used in order to integrate Ukraine’s experience of the revolution and the Civil War into the Soviet discourse about the fight for Soviet power. Savchenko constructs Ukraine’s response to the revolution by making use of tropes of a big family, Biblical imagery, elements of folk culture, conventions of the adventure film. The study of Savchenko’s film contributes to our understanding of the debates about Soviet-era and presentday collective memory about the October Revolution and the Civil War in Ukraine and Russia. As the discourse about the biggest Soviet nations’ familial unity is yet another casualty of Russia-Ukraine war, it is important to consider how the idea of brotherhood between Ukraine and other Soviet nations was expressed in Soviet cinema. Such analysis explains why Ukrainian’s common emotional response to the start of the war was that of a feeling of shock and betrayal.

The Russian Revolution has not permitted Western historians the comfort of neutrality. It led to the establishment of a regime, the Soviet Union, that on the basis of Marxist ideology claimed to be building the world’s first nonexploitative and egalitarian society. As such, the Soviet regime further claimed to represent humanity’s future and therefore the right to spread its communist revolution worldwide. These pretentions, however dubiously realized in practice, won the Soviet Union millions of loyalists over the world. At the same time, because these pretentions also threatened any society organized according to different principles, including those of liberal democracy and free enterprise, they made the Soviet regime the object of intense fear and opposition. This reaction was reinforced as the Soviet Union quickly became a brutal dictatorship and, after World War II, emerged as one of the world’s two nuclear superpowers. For these reasons Western scholarship on the Russian Revolution has had an element of contentiousness not often seen in other fields. That, in turn, is why any serious student of the Russian Revolution must be familiar with its historiography, and why this article not only contains a major section on historiography but also includes historiographic commentary in many of the individual entries. The term Russian Revolution itself refers to two upheavals that took place in 1917: the February Revolution and the October, or Bolshevik, Revolution. The former was a spontaneous uprising that began in Russia’s capital in late February 1917 and led to the collapse of the tsarist monarchy and the establishment of the Provisional Government, a regime based on the premise that Russia should have a parliamentary government and free-enterprise economic system. The latter took place in late October and was the seizure of power by a militant Marxist political party determined to rule alone, turn Russia into a communist society, and spark a worldwide revolution. (These dates are according to the outdated Julian calendar in use in Russia at the time, which trailed the Gregorian calendar used in the West by thirteen days. According to the Gregorian calendar, the two revolutions took place in March and November, respectively.) Because the Bolsheviks did not consolidate their power until their victory in a three-year civil war, many histories ostensibly about the “Russian Revolution” include not only the events of 1917 but also their immediate aftermath in early 1918, and then the civil war, which began in mid-1918 and lasted until 1921. That framework has been adopted for this article as well. Matters of evidence and documentation have additionally complicated this subject. In this case the key date is 1991, as that is when the collapse of the Soviet Union finally made many important Russian archives available to scholars for the first time. This significant development is covered in the Published Documentary Collections section of this article.

1 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVI, No.4, Summer 2013 Turkey’s Changing Stance and Paradoxes over the Libyan and Syrian Crises Muhsin Baran* Introduction The current uprising in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, has been sui generis with respect to the exclusive support from the masses and large protests against the regimes in the related countries. The primary reason for such spectacular public backing lies in the demands for change by the peoples of the region. Since these demands were closely related with democracy, the western world, particularly the United States, was expected to devote close attention to this issue and contribute to toppling these regimes. The support from the western world was well below these expectations as the United States and its allies only launched a military intervention in Libya. Other states, namely Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and Syria, were assisted in different forms rather than direct military intervention. Turkey’s attitudes towards a foreign intervention were a bit blurred in the beginning. No sooner was a military operation launched by the western world on Libya, than Turkey insistently stressed the danger of third parties’ military interventions in the region and urged that, first and foremost, the internal dynamics should be backed rather than going ahead with a direct military intervention. However, it was not long before when Turkey shifted from its past opposition to a military intervention in Libya and backed the operation indirectly. This new stance was based on the grounds of the rising number of casualties. Turkey’s stance during the Syrian crisis was similar to that of Libya. As the civil war became more brutal and the death toll seemed likely to reach *Muhsin Baran is a PhD candidate at Uludağ University, Department of International Relations. His research interests are the Middle East, Kurdish issue, discourse analysis and Critical Security theories. He has been writing his dissertation on relations between Turkey and Kurdistan Regional Government. 2 an alarming level, Turkey called for a military intervention led by international organizations to stop the bloodshed. The reluctance of the western world due to the Islamist factions in the Syrian opposition and the vetoes of Russia and China in the United Nations Security Council blocked a military intervention in this country. Turkey’s new stance started to be severely criticized by both the secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Action Party (MHP) as this new policy was different from traditional Turkish foreign policy. The zero problems with neighbor’s policy developed by Ahmet Davutoğlu, the current Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey, was criticized and recast sarcastically by the Turkish opposition as the zero neighbors policy. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) was blamed for turning once friendly regional states into new foes and deviating from traditional Turkish foreign policy. Apart from the internal opposition, there were serious criticism from regional states such as Iran, Iraq and Russia, for they held Turkey partly responsible for the instability and civil war in Syria. Turkey’s new stance demanding a foreign intervention in Syria was paradoxical with respect to the Islamist identity of the ruling AK Party and Turkey’s treatment of Kurdish opposition in Syria. Calling for non-Islamic third party interventions in a Muslim state contradicted the Islamic approach, which has always urged the unity of the Muslim world. The exclusion of the Kurdish opposition whilst patronizing and arming all other factions including those believed to have connections with al-Qaida was another paradox. This study provides an analytical discussion on Turkey’s paradoxes over the Libyan and particularly Syrian crises. It starts with a brief description of Turkey’s traditional foreign policy during the Cold War era. Then the new policy shaped by Davutoğlu, a renowned professor of International Relations, is explained. Following this, Turkey’s new stance and the paradoxes affiliated with this shift during the Libyan and Syrian crises is discussed in the context of the Arab Spring. The study ends with a conclusion that the foreign policy of a state, as in the case of Turkey, is primarily dependent on national interests. (I) A New Paradigm in Turkish Foreign Policy...

Contemporary studies of African Civil-Military Relations have shown that more than 50 % of the African states have undergone one or more successful or abortive military coups. A number of theories have been proposed to explain Civil-Military Relations. The purpose of this paper is to test Huntington's theory of Objective Civilian Control with respect to Civilian-Military Relations in modern Africa. Following a brief overview of African Civil- Military Relations and focus on the question of who controls whom, the paper poses the same question relative to non-African Civil-Military Relations. In a more extensive, in-depth case study of Nigeria, the paper seeks to examine the level and source of military profes sionalism, whether or not Nigeria has ever been free of military intervention in its political process because of its high level of professionalism, and whether Huntington's argument has any validity. In addition, the role of the African military in Nigeria as a paradigm in African Civilian-Military Relations is examined by discussing when and why Nigeria achieved her nationhood, the causes and consequences of military intervention and the level of Nigerian military professionalism, the role of the military and the Civil War, and why professionalism is not a reliable deterrent to military intervention in politics. This discussion illustrates the fallacy of most assumptions in the Civil-Military Relations literature today. The paper concludes that Huntington's assumption that non-military intervention is a function of civilian encouragement of military professionalism and professionalization is spurious. Based on the Nigeran case study and cross-national observations, the data show that a high degree of professionalism and professionalization is not a reliable deterrent against African military activism and intervention in civilian affairs. The data support the findings that professionalization of the military alone would not deter the military from intervening unless it is accompanied by the military's complete satisfaction with civilian control. Without this satisfaction, the military establishment is likely to challenge and possibly remove the civilian control whenever the military is disenchanted with or envious of civilian rule. Drawing from studies on political anthropology, it is sound to say that African military intervention is normal and one of the fundamental aspects of African tradi tional Warriorism. In the final analysis, Objective Military Control is not unique to Africa. It is a universal political phenomenon in Civil-Military Relations today.

Intervention refers to interference in the affairs of a state. Such interference can take many different forms: political or military, direct or indirect. International law is mainly concerned with dictatorial or coercive interference in a state’s affairs, which is in principle prohibited. The scope of the prohibition is, however, affected by the political, legal, or normative changes taking place in the international society at different stages of its development. For this reason, the legality of certain interventions (such as interventions for the protection of human rights, democracy, or self-determination) has given rise to interesting debates. The legal literature on intervention reflects these developments, but it should be noted that intervention is not exclusively a legal concept. Intervention is also a political concept, and international relations scholarship has a long history of dealing with this phenomenon. This article focuses on military intervention only and approaches it in general, as well as in specific, terms. After a general overview, textbooks as well as the sources of law relating to intervention will be presented. Because intervention can take place in a number of different forms, they are covered as follows: By the United Nations in the Domestic Jurisdiction of States, By Invitation, In Civil Wars, Humanitarian Intervention, Pro-Democratic Intervention, and Self-Determination. Because intervention is a multifaceted concept, the resources included here approach the topic from a broad spectrum base, recognizing the various influences involved in the decision on whether to intervene.

Reviewed by: The Bolsheviks and Britain during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–24 by Evgeny Sergeev Murray Frame Sergeev, Evgeny. The Bolsheviks and Britain during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–24. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York and Dublin, 2022. xxi + 270 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Select chronology. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £85.00. This interesting book by Evgeny Sergeev — Chief Research Fellow at the Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of International and British History at the Russian State University for the Humanities — explores a brief but turbulent period in British-Russian relations, 1917–24, charting the transformation from wartime cooperation to open hostility and economic blockade, followed by gradual resumption of trade and diplomatic recognition of the USSR by Britain. Compared to many earlier studies of the topic, the book is notable for the author's extensive use of archives in both Russia and Britain, including previously inaccessible material such as recently declassified intelligence reports. Sergeev therefore adds much detail to a relatively familiar story, and in a manner which carefully balances primary material and perspectives from both sides of the relationship. The questions which Sergeev sets out to answer are clearly stated at the beginning: 'How did the revolutionary events of 1917 affect the military alliance between Petrograd and London? What were the origins of a dramatic transition from friendly cooperation to outright animosity in the later years? Why did the British armed intervention fail, and what are the reasons for the recognition of the Bolshevik dictatorship by the UK government?' (p. 2). Although the main conclusions will not surprise historians of the period — the revolution sundered the military alliance; the outright animosity stemmed from 'competing geopolitical interests' (p. 167); Britain formally recognized the USSR because there was growing appetite for stable relations and resumption of trade — they are grounded in considerable detail, and readers will admire the author's encyclopaedic knowledge of this complex and multi-layered subject. Sergeev succeeds in conveying a tangible sense of the international uncertainties of the period and how they divided officials in both London [End Page 177] and Petrograd/Moscow. On the British side, for example, George Lansbury, Alfred Milner and Lloyd-George — whose assistants, we learn, nicknamed him the 'Kerensky of the West' (p. 12) — favoured early diplomatic recognition of Bolshevik Russia, but most government officials did not, concerned that the Bolsheviks would sign a separate peace with the Central Powers and then seek to undermine the British empire. During 1917–18, this question dominated political deliberations about Russia, especially after the Russian-German armistice in December 1917, and it partly lay behind Robert Bruce Lockhart's well-known mission to Moscow in 1918. On the Russian side, Lenin was anxious about the fate of the revolution as the Germans advanced again in February 1918, and so he remained open to Allied support if necessary, at least until the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed in the face of opposition from many within the Soviet leadership. The 'Lockhart Plot' — or 'complot of ambassadors' — to overthrow the Bolsheviks ended any prospect of collaboration between Britain and Russia for the next two years. Steps towards coexistence were possible only after the cessation of the Allied intervention, the main purpose of which — to protect the eastern front, support the White counter-revolutionaries, or prevent revolutionary contagion — never seemed consistent. A strength of Sergeev's book is that he gives considerable attention to British-Russian relations in the Middle East, often side-lined at the expense of a Eurocentric focus. While Britain sought to contain Bolshevik expansion — and to counter German moves towards Transcaucasia and beyond — the Soviets deployed a variety of diplomatic and political tools aimed at forestalling British encroachments on surrounding territories, such as signing agreements with Persia and Afghanistan in 1921. Sergeev emphasizes that the landmark agreements of the period failed to improve relations quickly. Following the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of 1921, mutual suspicion remained. British officials remained concerned by Soviet efforts to spread revolutionary propaganda across the empire, while the Soviets objected to British funding of White Russians in neighbouring countries. Yet the economic imperative for cooperation was strong: by late 1921...

Sanctions are designed to reduce the amount of resources available to the targeted actor and have the potential to be an effective tool for bringing disputing sides in a civil conflict to the bargaining table by altering incentives for continued fighting. Thus, there is reason to believe that sanctions can shorten the duration of civil conflicts. However, once sides in a conflict have moved to the use of violence to settle their dispute, it is hard for sanctions, in isolation, to impose enough cost to convince warring factions that settling a conflict has greater value than what could be expected from continued fighting. In this article, we argue that sanctions, in isolation, are unlikely to affect the duration of civil conflicts. However, when sanctions are combined with military interventions they can contribute to conflict management strategies resulting in shorter civil conflicts. We test our expectations empirically using data on civil conflicts from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Armed Conflict Database and data on economic sanctions from the Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions Database. Our results suggest that the best hope for sanctions to shorten the duration of civil conflicts is if they are used as part of a comprehensive international response that includes institutional sanctions and military interventions.

The centennials of the Russian revolution and Civil War offer Russian and foreign historians wide possibilities of investigating the revolution and civil war in the European-wide context of the history of revolutions, counter-revolutions, and ideological conflicts. This article examines the author’s methodology for a comparative analysis of the Russian Revolution and Civil War in the context of the classical European revolutions beginning with the French and other revolutions of the late XVIII century. The comparative approach to studying revolutions has a long history. In fact, Russian revolutionaries in 1917 often compared their revolution with the French revolution and drew their own conclusions about the progress of the revolution in Russia. The comparative approach does not diminish the significance of the Russian revolution and Civil War. On the contrary, this approach helps us determine elements of uniqueness in the Russian revolution. One can suggest that, in many ways, the Russian revolution and Civil War were turning points in the European history of revolutions. On the one hand, the revolution and Civil War mark the culmination and completion of the stage of classical European revolutions. On the other hand, the events of 1917 ‑1921 opened a new stage in the history of ideological conflicts in Europe.

As is known, military intervention by the U.S.-led coalition was commenced in September 2014 in Syria. The justification invoked by some participants of the coalition was that the Syrian government was “unwilling or unable” to deal with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an international terrorist group. The “unwilling or unable” test gives rise to various debates among international scholars and practitioners. Some international publicists argue that military intervention on the basis of the “unwilling or unable” test is an emerging rule of customary international law, while others are rather opposed to it. The U.S. announced its intention to withdraw its troops from Syria on 19 December 2018. This, however, does not mean an immediate cessation of operations of the U.S.-led coalition in Syria. It is expressed in the statement made on 6 February 2019 by Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State, in which he articulated that the arms cut in Syria is not a shift in mission but a strategic turn in essence. What can be inferred is that it seems unlikely that the military intervention of the U.S.-led coalition in Syria will be terminated in the near future. In fact, it arouses deep concern of humanity that the military intervention in Syria justified by the “unwilling or unable” test might recur in other regions or states. In this respect, the present article argues the compatibility of military intervention based on the “unwilling or unable” test proposed by some states, including the U.S., and some international publicists under universal principles of customary international law formation and international conventions.

As a new principle in the world, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an obligation on the part of the international community and on the part of the states to protect civilians from mass atrocities by doing several actions like giving international aids, reducing poverty, supporting peacebuilding, educating the population, until military intervention. However, military intervention under R2P norm in Libya produce a counterproductive result which then led the country into civil war. From this background, therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the implementation of R2P in Libya into four types of lessons learned. The first lesson, R2P is corrupted by great powers that make the military intervention far from its mandate. The second lesson is the inconsistency practice from an R2P military intervention which led to the question of credibility of military intervention in Libya. The third lesson is diplomacy must be prioritized rather than military intervention since that there is an R2P success story without military intervention. The last is the recommendation to implement Responsibility while Protecting (RWP) principle in the R2P framework.Keywords: Responsibility to Protect (R2P), Libya, Diplomacy, Military Intervention, Responsibility while Protecting