To intervene or not to intervene? A contemporary snap‐shot

Abstract

What level of sacrifice are we willing to endure in righting which kinds of humanitarian wrongs? Should we fight and even go to war to protect those in dire need? Ultimately, we ask, “To intervene or not to intervene?” The Responsibility To Protect, and an accompanying volume of supporting research with the same title, provide answers to this question from the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The ICISS report seeks to achieve two objectives. First, it aims to alter the existing normative consensus about humanitarian intervention, or the use of deadly force to help victims in harm's way. Second, it attempts to emphasize that the international responsibility to intervene to halt mass killings and ethnic cleansing is located in the UN Security Council, and that any intervention should be efficient and effective. This essay reviews the overall findings and argues that the ICISS labored hard but emerged more with suggestions for changes in vocabulary than with a politically realistic blueprint for the changes in state practice that would be required to implement and operationalize “the responsibility to protect.”