When Is Humanitarian Intervention Justified free essay sample

When is Humanitarian Intervention Justified? â€Å"The regime is killing us, many of the opposition fighters are becoming criminals and the world is watching it like a film† (The Economist, 2013). This is a statement by a Syrian student whose sentiment has become common amongst Syrians. According to the UN, since March 18th 2011, the date that marked the beginning of the Syrian uprising, 70,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, have died, but the death toll is likely to be considerably higher (ibid. ). The conflict between followers of the governing Ba’ath Party and the Syrian opposition, which has turned into an utter civil war (Nebehay, 2012), has also resulted into a substantial refugee problem and a deficiency in basic resources and services that has led to â€Å"more than 4 million Syrians now lack[ing] fuel, electricity, a telephone line and food† (The Economist, 2013). These facts reveal that the Syrian situation, which has been going on for more than two years, has turned into a conspicuous humanitarian catastrophe. We will write a custom essay sample on When Is Humanitarian Intervention Justified? or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Yet, â€Å"both NATO and the United States have stated in no uncertain terms that they will not intervene† and â€Å"Russia and China have vetoed efforts in the UN Security Council to condemn Syria† (Landis, 2012). I used Syria as an introductory case study because it forms a contemporary demonstration of the extent to which states can abuse their sovereignty rights, â€Å"treating [them] as a license to kill† (Bellamy amp; Wheeler, 2011, p. 512). Although the international community has gotten militarily involved in other instances, for various reasons it is not willing to do so in Syria, as it was not ready to intervene in Darfur in 2003-4, when the Sudanese government â€Å"embarked on what the UN has described as a reign of terror† (Bellamy amp; Wheeler, 2011, p. 520), despite previous â€Å"declarations that such crimes must ‘never again’ be allowed to happen† (Stark, 2011, p. 4). In this essay it will be argued that within today’s normative context, especially with our conceptions of humanity and the historical struggle behind it, and with an increasing interdependence of states, the international community is provided with a justification to intervene militarily in states that abuse their sovereignty rights, using unjustified force against their own people, committing genocides or mass atrocities, and causing thereby massive human suffering and a potential hreat to international security. It will be stressed that this justification is strongly linked with the time and normative setting we live in, but also that humanitarian justifications can be abused and must therefore be carried out within a certain framework to be viewed favorably by public opinion. For the scope of this essay, humanitarian intervention will be defined as â€Å"the threat or use of force across borders by a state (or group of states) aimed at [†¦] ending widespread and grave violations of the fundamental human rights of individuals other than its own citizens, without permission of the state within whose territory force is applied† (Holzgrefe amp; Koehane, 2003, p. 18). It is crucial to note that social norms are in constant evolution. They are essential to the understanding of international politics because they define â€Å"the rights and duties states believe they have toward one another [†¦], the goals they value, the means they believe are [†¦] legitimate to obtain these goals, and the political costs and benefits attached to different choices† (Finnemore, 2003, p. 53). As a consequence, the meaning, role and motive of humanitarian missions have changed quite significantly over time. In the 19th century, unlike today, â€Å"intervenors found reasons to identify themselves with the victims of humanitarian disasters in some [†¦] exclusive way†, which is strikingly demonstrated by the fact that â€Å"before the twentieth century virtually all instances of military intervention to protect people other than the intervenor’s own nationals involved protection of Christians from the Ottoman Turks† (Finnemore, 2003, pp. 58). The reason is that Christians were the ones considered worthy of humane treatment and hence of humanitarian protection, while non-Christians were viewed as less deserving of such considerations. Hence, mass murdering by colonizers in their colonies did not prompt intervention, and neither did pogroms against Jews, nor massacres of Native Americans in the United States, nor Russian slaughtering of Turks in the 1860s (ibid. ). Today it would not be morally admissible to consider groups of people less human or less worthy of human right protection, because it has been accepted that there are certain rights that â€Å"all persons have by virtue of personhood alone† (Teson, 2001, p. 1). However, because within earlier normative contexts members of entire ethnicities or cultures were openly considered uncivilized, less human and undeserving of rights, it was difficult for states to justify armed intervention in these peoples’ territories as being solely humanitarian. It was with the abolition of slavery and slave trade, an advance that marked â€Å"one of the greatest moral revolutions in human history† (Lauren, 2011, p. 49), that new norms came into practice, expanding the concept of humanity significantly. Human beings previously viewed as beyond the edge of humanity – as being property – came to be viewed as human, and with that status came certain [†¦] privileges and protections† (Finnemore, 2003, p. 68). Decolonization played a further role in the expansion of humanity. â€Å"The colonialism’s humanitarian mission was to ‘civilize’ the non-European world. [†¦] Until these people were civilized they remained [†¦] less than human†. Decolonization, however, took place when humanity ceased being seen as something one could create, or something culturally dependent, becoming instead something â€Å"inherent in individual human beings† (ibid. . Yet, human rights were not granted a permanent place in political discourse and the international agenda until the atrocities of the holocaust and World War II and the subsequent 1948 UN General Assembly’s ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (Donnely, 2011). Since then we have been witnessing the emergence of a global human rights order, which â€Å"is based on strong and widely accepted principles and norms but [†¦] weak mechanisms of international implementation†, leaving the administration of human rights to individual nations (Donnely, 2011, p. 496). This historical perspective serves to demonstrate that it has taken a considerable amount of time and struggle for our contemporary conceptions of humanity and human rights to be formed. It is hence intelligible that once the universality of human rights has been accepted, one of the main purposes of states becomes protecting and securing these rights. â€Å"Governments and others in power who seriously violate [human] rights undermine the one reason that justifies their political power, and thus should not be protected by international law† (Teson, 2001, p. 1). This reasoning suggests that there are limitations to the concept of state sovereignty, which is used as one of the main arguments in the case against humanitarian intervention. â€Å"A sovereign state is deemed to be the protector of the security and property of its subjects [†¦]; or the guardian of their rights [†¦]; or the expression of their collective will† (Hoffman, 1995, p. 34). Hence, state sovereignty â€Å"serves valuable human ends† but â€Å"those who grossly assault them should not be allowed to shield themselves behind sovereignty principles† (Teson, 2001, p. 2). This indicates that sovereignty derives from a state’s responsibility to protect the rights and the welfare of its citizens, and that once they fail to do so they lose their right to non-interference and non-intervention (ibid. ). Thus, government illegitimacy is â€Å"a necessary [†¦] condition for the permissibility of intervention† (Teson, 2001, p. 10). However, it is not enough to ground humanitarian intervention â€Å"solely on the moral illegitimacy of a state, because there are [†¦] cases where the collapse of state legitimacy will not be enough to justify intervention† (ibid. . Given, the complexity and costs of intervention and the unpredictability of outcome, intervening for humanitarian purposes becomes reasonable and justified once there is a clear and substantial human suffering that cannot be stopped peacefully. In other instances non-military alternatives, such as diplomatic pressure and sanctions, might be more proportionate to the probl em and hence better justified (Powers, 2012). Nevertheless, it is essential to recognize that if in the past the normative context shaped no moral duty to intervene to alleviate the suffering of all and any kinds of people, today this moral duty exists and fully justifies armed intervention in the case of atrocities and humanitarian disasters, a duty that should weigh more than sovereignty rights. In other words, â€Å"there are circumstances in which the moral good of sovereignty must yield to superior imperatives, those of global humanity- the protection of human beings from intolerable evils such as the violation of their fundamental rights to life and security† (Hoffman, 1995, p. 5). On the other hand, humanitarian interventions require employing substantial material resources and sacrificing one’s own soldiers (Bellamy amp; Wheeler, 2011). On that account, realists, who are skeptical of the existence of universal moral principles (Dunne amp; Schmidt, 2011), do not accept humanitarian intervention as justified, as â€Å"in their opinion, it requires of [†¦] states that they no longer base their policies on their national interest† (Hoffman, 1995, p. 5. ). Yet, this statement seems to be based on a too limited interpretation of national interest. â€Å"[O]ur preference for an international society in which neither the injustices nor the disorder associated with domestic strife and violations of basic rights will run wild should make it clear that certain interventions even in crises that do not affect our physical or economic security directly [†¦] are in the national interest† (Hoffman, 1995, p. 6). The idea of a preferred international society is especially relevant to today’s globalized world order, which increases social interconnectedness and hence moral obligations, and in which â€Å"massive human rights violations in one part of the world have an effect on every other part† (Bellamy, 2010, p. 155), posing a potential threat to the international peace and security. The realist objection to humanitarian intervention arguably goes against the idea of the universality of human values, since it allocates more importance to the lives of a state’s nationals, penalizing [†¦] victims of atrocious injustices who happened, by brute luck, to be born elsewhere (Kymlicka, 2002). Soldiers and resources employed in humanitarian missions are aimed at saving a considerable number of lives and stop mass suffering, which is why once it is accepted as a norm that all human lives have the same value, the realists’ argument does not effectively undermine the moral justification to intervene militarily in the case of mass atrocities caused by governments. The realist view however demonstrates that the question of when humanitarian intervention is justified is quite controversial, and it leads to the consideration that in certain instances humanitarian rationales might be abused, resulting in unjustified interventions. [N]otoriously, Hitler insisted that the 1939 invasion of Czechoslovakia was inspired by a desire to protect Czechoslovak citizens whose ‘life and liberty’ were threatened by their government† (Bellamy, 2010, p. 157). Therefore, interventions today have to be led in specified ways for states to prove they are not â€Å"espous[in g] humanitarian motives as a pretext to cover the pursuit of national self-interest† (Bellamy amp; Wheeler, 2011, p. 512). It is intelligible that the UN, being the body that promotes diplomacy and that makes sovereign states accountable before the law, should be the entity responsible of providing a functioning framework for humanitarian intervention and guaranteeing that mass human killings and suffering will be actively stopped, which would serve as an assurance that intervention will only be carried out when truly justified. However, the UN dictated international law does not tolerate any kind of military aggression in sovereign states unless mandated by the Security Council (ibid. , and the veto power granted to the P5 members of the UNSC can result into the international community formally disregarding humanitarian disasters because of internal political mechanisms and interests. This reality suggests that the UN is in need of reforms in its structure, especially in terms of the veto (Carlsson, 1995), and that consequently, in order to protect people from atrocities it is not enough to rely on form al international law, which is why countries are justified to intervene even without being backed by the Security Council. For their intervention to be accepted as solely humanitarian, states should however seek to follow certain criteria: the intervention should be aimed at protecting a state’s nationals against genocides or substantial mass cruelties; the use of force should be proportionate to the problem and to the good to be achieved; and military forces should only be employed when peaceful alternatives have been exhausted (Powers, 2012). These are the basic prerequisites for interventions to be â€Å"humanitarian†, yet what truly enhances the consensus about such missions today is multilateralism, either under UN supervision or with explicit multipartite support. This is demonstrated by cases such as the cooperation between the U. S. , Britain and France to protect Kurdish and Shiite people in Iraq following the 1991-92 Gulf War, and the efforts of UN and NATO troops to protect civilian populations from Serbian forces in Bosnia, which might have received criticism about their effectiveness but not about their legitimacy (Finnemore, 2003). Multilateralism is especially important because of the difficulty in determining the amount of deaths and suffering that should be tolerated before forceful intervention becomes legitimate, and to establish when a situation becomes a threat to the international community. Multilateral consent serves as a guarantee that a situation is truly an unacceptable violation of human rights, ensuring the legitimacy of intervention and the unlikelihood of abuse of humanitarian justifications. Moreover, multilateralism means cooperation, which entails sharing material and human costs, creating a mechanism of mutual monitoring, enhancing thereby the transparency of the operation (ibid. ). This operational framework offers a pragmatic defense of humanitarian interventions, which combined with an existing moral duty to protect a universal value of humanity, fully justifies armed interventions to stop crimes against humanity. In conclusion, at this point in history, humanitarian intervention is justified when nationals of a country become targets of violent aggressions led by their leaders. This justification is strengthened by the interconnectedness of states in today’s globalized world, suggesting a need for the reconceptualization of state sovereignty, a political ideal that has been often mistakenly viewed as entailing rights rather than responsibilities. Morally, more importance should be given to saving human lives and halting unjust, man-made suffering than to national self-interest and political agendas, an ideal which, however, is not guaranteed by the current international law and UN system. When atrocities cannot be terminated by peaceful means, states are justified to intervene without a UN mandate if the intervention is coordinated multilaterally and the amount of force applied is appropriate to the situation. It remains nonetheless extremely difficult to determine the amount of killings and suffering to be tolerated before engaging in humanitarian intervention. Multilateralism diminishes the possibility of abuse, helps establish the most opportune moment to intervene and renders the whole mission more transparent and hence truly justified. Finally, it seems shameful that despite the intensity of the historical events that led to today’s acceptance of equal humanity and human rights, states still disregard massive violations of these rights as in Syria’s case, giving borders and self-interest more importance than human dignity, failing thereby to act according to their responsibilities in today’s global community. Bibliography Bellamy, A. 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