Military intervention: protection of human rights versus national interest

Abstract

Intervention, particularly for the purposes of protecting human rights, often involves the use of military force and the disregardfor domestic national sovereignty. However, this raises an interesting question of whether this protection of civilian rights influencesmilitary intervention more than the national interests of the intervening state. This problem encompasses the widely debated, and oftencontroversial, justifications for the use of military force as a mechanism of peacekeeping at the cost of blatant disregard of a nationstate’s sovereignty. The article analyses this debate through the lens of the United Nations (UN) mandate on the Responsibility to Protect(R2P). The arguments presented will establish that such pretence of human rights protection under the R2P mandate can and hasbeen utilised by ‘saviour’ states in order to further their national interests. This is exemplified trough the thorough case study of militaryintervention in Syria and Libya. Such reasoning is presented threefold; based on strategic, economic and norm diffusion interests ofnational states, all of which influence intervention more than the protection of human rights.