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Humanitarian InterventionAnthony F. Lang, Jr

Humanitarian intervention (HI) is the use of military forces to provide aid, ensurethe protection of rights, and/or enforce a peace se lement without the expresspermission of the political authority of the state in which the intervention occurs.As this chapter will demonstrate, HI reveals some important ethical dilemmas ininternational relations. At one level, HIs appear to be morally unproblematic for theyprovide economic and political goods in situations of humanitarian emergency. Atanother level, however, HIs generate a great deal of controversy; by overriding theauthority structure of a state, an HI vitiates self-determination and sovereignty, thefundamental normative structures of the current international order. As a result,

HIs highlight the di culty of doing what is right in an international system wherestate leaders defne their own legal, political and ethical orders.This chapter provides an overview of HI by focusing on three issues. First, HI

constitutes and is constituted by the international political society within which ittakes place. This constitutive nature of HI can be seen by the varying ways in whichnot only HI but any military intervention is defned, defnitions that do not simplyre ect reality but arise from larger international normative structures. Second,debates about whether an intervention is humanitarian or not o en revolves arounda determination of the motives of the interveners. This chapter argues that this

approach con ates motives and intentions, and in so doing, limits the evaluation ofsuch actions. Instead, evaluations of interventions ought to be based on intentions,a concept that di ers from motives in important ways, and also provides a meansto link actions to outcomes. Third, recent international proposals concerning HIre ect a tension between those who see HI as subject to international legal rulesand those who see it as a political and/or ethical judgment made in context specifcsituations. The 2001 Responsibility to Protect doctrine demonstrates the di cultyof negotiating whether or not HI should be governed by strict criteria or le upto the wisdom of a political body like the UN Security Council. The concluding

section examines these issues through a review of one particular intervention, thea empt to resolve ethnic con ict in Sudan.

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Humanitarian Intervention as a Constitutive Practice

To intervene has a meaning outside of international a airs as it relates to interpersonalrelations involvement in the a airs of others without their consent. This basicde nition can have both positive and negative valences; positive if interventionis designed to help and negative if it is undertaken to harm. d ilemmas at theinterpersonal level arise when an intervention designed to help an individual isnot necessarily the kind of help she wants. So, for instance, a family may intervenewith someone who is an alcoholic to change her behaviour, an intervention shemay resist. At the same time, such interventions may result from reasons that arenot purely altruistic, such as embarrassment about that individual. An even morecomplicated situation, and one that relates more directly to debates about de ningHI, is when individuals di er about how to de ne an alcoholic. Appeals to medical

de nitions of alcoholism may well help clarify the situation, but they will notnecessarily resolve it.

In the same way, the policies being undertaken in a particular state that mightprompt a military intervention may well result from di ering interpretationsof what constitutes human rights abuses, civil war, or even genocide. Appealsto international legal de nitions of these practices might help clarify whatdistinguishes a HI from other forms of intervention, but they will not necessarilyresolve those dilemmas. This also suggests that stipulating a de nition of HI at theoutset of this chapter may not capture the normative tensions that surround it. As

a result, this section reviews some de nitions of HI but, in so doing, points to howthose de nitions raise more complex issues of international ethics.Terry Nardin de nes intervention as the exercise of authority by one state

within the jurisdiction of another state, but without its permission. Intervention ishumanitarian when its aim is to protect innocent people who are not nationals ofthe intervening state from violence perpetrated or permi ed by the government ofthe target state (Nardin and Williams 2006, 1). Je Holzgrefe argues that it is thethreat or use of force across state borders by a state (or group of states) aimed atpreventing or ending widespread and grave violations of the fundamental human

rights of individuals other than its own citizens, without the permission of the statewithin whose territory force is applied (Holzgrefe and Keohane 2003, 18). Otherde nitions can be found, but they tend to express roughly the same ideas as Nardinand Holzgrefe.

yet the a empt to clearly de ne HI in these ways occludes the complex interplayof ethics and politics that informs our understandings of this term at di erentpoints in time. Intervention as a distinct practice in international a airs did notexist until there was a state into which military troops could be interjected (Lang2003a, 110). This means that the concept of intervention makes li le sense prior to

the emergence of the sovereign state system, or Westphalian order, that emergedin the late seventeenth century. To say, for instance, that the Romans intervenedin Gaul under Julius Caesar makes li le sense, for a sovereign state system didnot yet exist. A political order did, of course, exist, but it was not constituted byterritorially de ned political structures in which a single authority was consideredC

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sovereign. This political context did begin to develop in the late medieval period.As it did, theorists of war and peace began to write about the contexts in which theuse of force might be used for what we would today consider to be humanitarianpurposes. For instance, the f eenth-century theologian Francisco Vitoria made theargument that kings might use military force in order to punish other kings who hadviolated the rights of their subjects (1991). Within the just war tradition these ideaswere refned and developed, culminating in the work of the seventeenth-centurytheologian and lawyer Hugo Grotius who argued that military force can be usedto defend the helpless and punish those who violate the rights of others (2005). 1 Neither theorist used the word intervention to explain these kinds of actions, muchless humanitarian, but they were analysing situations that have some parallels withmodern debates about HI.

As the sovereign state system developed, however, intervention of any kind

came to be understood as more of a problem than a help to the su ering of others.In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, positivist international law grew inimportance, creating an international normative order that privileged the stateas the vehicle most centrally concerned with the good life. As international lawdeveloped during the nineteenth century, intervention became progressively illegal,for to violate the boundaries of the sovereign state was to violate the internationalorder. As John Vincent pointed out, non-intervention came to be seen as a defningprinciple of international society, one that he argued continued to defne thetwentieth-century international order (1974).

John Stuart Mill, in his short magazine article, A Few Words on Non-Intervention (1859), demonstrates the way this emerging moral and political orderwas sustained by the principle of non-intervention. 2 Mill, the nineteenth-centuryutilitarian philosopher and political theorist, begins his article by critiquing therealist claim that intervention should only be undertaken for national self-interest.One might imagine, then, he would conclude with an argument for intervention incases where a people are su ering from oppression. Instead he argues that suchintervention is only allowed if those oppressing a population come from outsideits territory; that is, are foreigners. Based on Mills claims here, we can assume

that at this stage a clear conception of the state as the means by which foreign anddomestic is to be understood had solidifed in the minds of European intellectualsand political actors. To intervene in this context meant undermining the normativestructure of the European order, and so should be seen as morally wrong.

This account of how intervention was understood re ects the Europeanexperience of the nineteenth century. At the same time, it elides the ways in whichinterventions were undertaken in numerous contexts within imperial structures.Mills article also re ects this tension. Although he concludes that interventionsshould not take place among Christian nations, he is quite clear that intervention

is necessary between imperial powers and their dominions. Allowing intervention

1 See Bellamy (2006) for a useful summary of the tradition, including the role of earlyfgures such as V itoria and Grotius.

2 See Jahn (2006) for an insightful reading of this text by Mill.Copyright



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in this imperial context while forbidding it in the European context results fromthe di erent international societies that were in existence at this time, a di erencedefned in large part by assumptions about moral progress and race:

To suppose that the same international customs, and the same internationalrules of morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another andbetween civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error into which nostatesman can fall into [Barbarians] cannot be depended on for observingany rules. Their minds are not capable of so great an efort (ibid., 4).

Nor was this imperialist understanding of intervention confned to philosophers.The British and French undertook a wide range of military actions throughout thisperiod that were premised on controlling populations a empting to assert their

independence or even limited political control. The British use of military forceto quell the Orabi political movement in Egypt in the late nineteenth century is aclassic example of such action. This action is not called an intervention because thepolitical context in which it takes place is not one defned by two sovereign states inopposition to each other; rather, the British had a position of semi-authority in Egyptat the time, providing them with the legitimacy (from the European perspective) toact militarily when the members of the Egyptian military and political elite soughtto oust what they felt were corrupt rulers (Cole 1999).

The di erence between a European context in which non-intervention defned

the political context and the colonial one in which intervention was necessary tosustaining that context demonstrates the constitutive nature of this practice. In onecontext, the European one, intervention is a form of interference, for those againstwhich it is undertaken consider themselves to be agents who can make decisionsabout their political future. At the same time, the European perception of thosewho do not count as legitimate agents constructs a particular imperial order inwhich hierarchical structures privilege some over others. Intervention plays a keyrole in constituting this nineteenth-century political order, one in which Europeis a place of international legal order and the remainder of the world is a place of

imperial conquest and control.The relationship of HI to larger issues in the international political order can be found in the twentieth century as well. Positivist social scientists believe thatsuch contextual factors have li le role in defning a concept like HI. And yet, if welook at acontextual a empts to defne HI, we see the same issues emerging. Forinstance, James Rosenau claimed that HI should be defned by what he called itsobservable characteristics that would allow the concept to be operationalized forfuture research (1969). Rosenaus defnition, however, was prompted in part by theneed to clarify how the US military action in Vietnam was to be understood. If it

was seen as a war, then certain categories should be applied for understanding it.But if, as US policy-makers argued, it was a military intervention in support of anoppressed population trying to resist a military aggression from a neighbour, thenit could be seen as a HI. One could read into this debate about Vietnam somethingakin to Mills bifurcated understanding of intervention. If all sovereign states areC

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considered equal and inviolable, then US action in Vietnam was unjust. But if notall states are equal and some cannot protect themselves, they can be justly subjectto intervention. Rosenau does not explore all this in his article, but pointing tothis background political and normative context gives us a be er critical purchaseon a empts to defne clearly what constitutes intervention by simply looking toobserved characteristics.

Current international legal scholarship on intervention also re ects some ofthese tensions. The standard legal account privileges state sovereignty, makingany form of intervention a serious wrong. Louis Henkin has pointed out thatalmost any action undertaken by one state in its relations with another could beconsidered a form of intervention. No single rule or defnition has become the normin international legal discourse, perhaps because, as Henkin notes, many states donot want to limit their ability to engage in such actions (1993, 86870). The closest to

a defnition that Henkin provides is a violation of a states sovereignty, suggestingthat intervention should be understood primarily as a violation of a normativestructure. In other words, a legal defnition of intervention is inherently ethical. AsHenkin notes, most international legal defnitions give a negative valence to thisdefnition, allowing it only under specially defned circumstances.

With the emergence of human rights as part of international law, however, andthe corresponding a empts by states to engage in military action to protect thoserights, intervention lost its overtly negative meaning and came to be understood asa positive action, that is, HI. Fernando Tesn wrote one of the frst books on HI in

terms of international legal theory, one that argued the international state systemwith its emphasis on sovereignty prevents legal theorists from seeing the need forintervention in situations of human rights violations (1988). The intervention inSomalia in 199293 seemed to embody this shi as a military action was undertakento protect food supplies and promote reconciliation among warring clans (see Lang2002, 15586, for an overview). The collapse of the intervention in October 1993 as aresult of a acks on US soldiers engaged in a empts to capture one of the warlordssoured some, but the discourse promoting intervention for peacekeeping purposestook on new life as UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali articulated it in

his 1993 Agenda for Peace (1993). Tasked by the Security Council to propose newways of understanding security in the post-Cold War order, Boutros-Ghali pushedthe traditional UN conception of peacekeeping toward the much more assertiveidea of peace enforcement, proposing the use of military forces to protect humanrights or stop con ict, which might mean taking sides in a particular con ict.

As this new doctrine of HI became more widely accepted in the internationalsystem, it soon became clear that it re ected the same tensions found in Millsdual understanding of the term. Anne Orford has recently examined HI in thecontext of the Australian-led intervention in East Timor. In her critical account of

this and surrounding discourses, Orford concludes that HI has helped to constructan international order in which some states control the system by drawing ondiscourses of failed states (2003). This new political order allows for peacebuildingand/or statebuilding exercises in which elites from the UN and other internationalorganizations step in to govern a political community. Interventions in CambodiaC

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in 1993 and Afghanistan in 2002 provide examples of this more assertive UN role.Some have pointed to the parallels of these new UN-led interventions as evidence ofa neo-trusteeship emerging in the international order (Bain 2003). As these military-led statebuilding interventions have increased in frequency, some have begun toquestion their positive moral valence. david Chandler has been a leading proponentof this critical inquiry into the value of these HIs, arguing that they are preventingpolitical actors in local contexts from resolving their own problems (2002). In 2007,Chandler launched a new journal, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding , designedto provide more space for critical inquiry into this kind of work.

This section has demonstrated, however, that while we can move toward someclarity about what HI means, it is important to keep in mind how its meaning arisesfrom and is shaped by a wider set of political and moral dynamics that shape theinternational system as a whole. Martha Finnemore has also made this point in her

review of di erent meanings of intervention from the nineteenth to the twentiethcenturies (2003). The point to emphasize is that while we can move toward clearermeanings about intervention and HI more particularly, we should not forget thatthese de nitions are constituted by the international order from which they arise.

Motives and Intentions

d ebates about whether or an intervention is truly humanitarian o en revolvearound the claim that the intervening powers usually great powers are actuallyintervening for the wrong reasons. When it is discovered that an intervention mayhave been undertaken because the leading state has certain interests in the placewhere the intervention occurs, these interests somehow sully the intervention suchthat it cannot be considered truly humanitarian. This debate about motives is notcon ned to the popular press. Both realists (Gray 2001) and critical theorists (Booth2001) argue that intervention is motivated by a desire for power, land, money, andso on, rather than doing anything that might be considered morally justi ed. The

di erence between the two critiques is that the realist will argue that HI should be avoided as a result of this hypocrisy, while the critical theorist will argue thatnew security structures and institutions need to be created that will mitigate thein uence of the hypocritical great pow ers.

This particular form of criticism results, in part, from a confusion about thedi erence between motives and intentions. This confusion, furthermore, resultsnot from a simple misunderstanding of meaning but from the very structuresof modern social scienti c inquiry. That is to say, those who write and thinkabout international relations in the academic world tend to adopt the positivist

methodological assumption that distinguishes explanatory claims from evaluativeclaims. In so doing, such theorists look to those factors that will explain an event orseries of events, factors that can be observed in some way. As well, the tendencyin political science and international a airs more broadly has been to dismiss anyreasons that actors might give for their actions and instead look for the causes.C

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As Peter Winch so famously argued, however, to avoid reasons for actions is toavoid understanding the practices of politics and society as they are understood bythose engaged in such actions themselves (1958).

A review of foreign policy analysis literature as it relates to HI demonstrates thispoint. As with any foreign or defence policy, explanations of HI fall into three levelsof analysis: the individual, the state and the system (Waltz 1959). Some explain HIsas resulting from the emotional response that individual leaders have to scenesof devastation, civil con ict or su ering. Evidence suggests George H.W. Bushinitiated the intervention in Somalia in 1992 as a result of reports from the New YorkTimes and diplomatic cables in the summer of 1992 that focused on the starvationof children and the ways in which warlords were using food aid as a politicalweapon (Lang 2002, 1645). To describe such interventions as HI then assumes thatthe motives of the leaders are central to our evaluations of those actions. In other

words, if it was discovered that the Bush administration undertook the Somaliintervention not because the president believed it was morally obligatory to do so, but because he believed it was in the national interests of the US to retain a militaryfoothold on the horn of Africa (considering its proximity to Saudi Arabia), then ourevaluation of that intervention might no longer be described as humanitarian butmight be be er categorized as strategic.

The second level of explanation focuses on the state rather than the individualleader. This might mean focusing on how a states culture, political system or even bureaucracy determined its decision to undertake a HI. Most o en, the explanations

of HI at the second level focus on ideology, arguing that states undertaking HIare really in the business of trying to dominate the international system in orderto advance a particular political agenda. Critics of HI and its surrounding moraldiscourse, such as Noam Chomsky and david Chandler, focus on this kindof explanatory account. Chandler has argued that the growth in internationalintervention to support human rights claims has resulted from a combinationof the UKs ethical foreign policy agenda coupled with US a empts to controlthe international political order (2002). Chomsky claims that any interventionundertaken for humanitarian purposes is simply a lie, one that is in fact being

undertaken to support and sustain international structures that favour wealthycorporations. In fact, he entitles one chapter of his book on Kosovo AssessingHumanitarian Intent (1999, 3880); the bulk of that chapter is devoted to critiquingthe motives of the US and UK concerning HI. Chomskys argument is that themotives of the interveners cannot truly be humanitarian for they do not intervenein other contexts where similar humanitarian emergencies exist.

The fnal level of analysis is the systemic one. This type of explanation focuseson the interactions of agents at the international level, interactions which aredetermined by the structure of the system, geographic location of the di erent

states, or structural economic forces. These kinds of explanations of interventionand HI are more rare, although some do exist (Feste 2003). Of the three kinds ofexplanations for intervention and HI, this one does not focus on the motives ofthe leaders, for the assumption is that their actions are largely determined by thestructures within which they are forced to operate. Nor are these structures theC

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leaders can really change, such as their internal political structures, but largerinternational structural forces such as the sovereign state system or global economicprocesses.

Stephen Krasners argument that sovereignty is a form of organized hypocrisydemonstrates how a systemic level explanation produces theoretical explanationsthat seem to avoid ethics but actually assume them (1999). According to Krasner, theassumption that sovereignty is a defning feature of the international is undermined

by the frequent practice of intervention. Krasner argues that normative structuresas such do not really exist, and that international politics can be determined by thepursuit of material interests in situations of anarchy. Following from this point, nostate would ever engage in a HI, for to do so would undermine its security in ananarchic order. yet, this fails to account for the fact that HIs do indeed take place.Krasner and other neorealist theorists respond to interventions in Somalia, Bosnia

and Kosovo by claiming that the states undertaking them do not really care aboutthe humanitarian issues but instead focus on what is in the interests of their state;in other words, that the intentions of the actors are really not humanitarian. Inan interesting way, Krasner turns the interests of the state into a single motive,the concern with protecting individual leaders positions and the positions of theirstates in the international order.

The three levels of analysis assume that motives are central to evaluatinginternational relations more generally and HI in particular. Even in the case of thesystemic level where individual agency disappears, assumptions are made about

what agents in the system will pursue, in this case security above all else. But anexcessive focus on motives blinds us to di erent ways of evaluating HI. Nardinhelps here by pointing out that there is an important distinction between motivesand intentions, and that too much of the discourse surrounding HI focuses onmotiv es, o en con ating it with motiv es:

The intention of an act is the state of a airs it seeks to bring about. A motive,in contrast, is the frame of mind in which the agent acts the desires andother passions that propel him. Motives are a necessary element in judgments

of responsibility, or praise and blame, culpability and excuse, but are o enincidental to judgments of the justifcation, the objective rightness orwrongness, or an act (Nardin and Williams 2006, 10).

Nardin uses this distinction to emphasize that, while motives should play a rolein the moral evaluation of international a airs, intentions are just as, if not more,important in determining the moral justifcation of interventions, a determinationthat would play a role in whether or not an intervention should be calledhumanitarian.

Although he tends to con ate the terms intention and motive, Nicholas Wheelermakes a similar point. Wheeler argues: Making the primacy of motives the defningtest of a legitimate humanitarian intervention excludes cases where states act fornon-humanitarian reasons but produce a positive humanitarian outcome (2000,195). In his book, Saving Strangers , Wheeler demonstrates that some of the mostC

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important humanitarian interventions were undertaken by states that had verymixed motives in their decision to act. As Michael Walzer has suggested whenconsidering the value of unilateral versus multilateral interventions:

Political motivations are always mixed, whether the actors are one or many. A pure moral will doesnt exist in political life, and it shouldnt be necessaryto pretend that kind of purity. The leaders of states have a right, indeed, theyhave an obligation, to consider the interests of their own people, even whenthey are acting to help other people (ibid., 26).

Clearly, an understanding of an agents motives is important to defning anintervention as humanitarian. But it should not be the sole criteria. Chris Brownhas made a similar point in his analysis of the inconsistency argument of those

who critique HI. d rawing on the realist tradition of thought, Brown argues that thefocus on motives is related to the desire to fnd abstract, logical moral rules thatwill somehow enable the process of judgment to be circumvented, a circumventionthat ignores the central role of political judgment (2003, 47).

To understand the ethics of HI, then, means focusing on intentions more thanon motives. Intentions are nearer to the reasons that Winch argued should be atthe centre of truly understanding the social and political world. An intention canalso be linked to an outcome, thus incorporating a consequentialist approach tothe study of international ethics. In fact, by focusing on the concept of intentions

in our moral evaluations of HI, we can be er grasp the complex ways in whichthis practice not only re ects but actually shapes the international normative andpolitical order. Those arguments that present an ethical critique of intervention onthe basis of purely critiquing the motives of interveners tend to miss this broaderunderstanding.

Rules versus Judgments

The last theoretical topic deserving some a ention is the question of the criteria forwhether or not HI should be undertaken. Whether or not such criteria can actually be developed has remained a point of much debate, a debate that becomes evident by reviewing various reports issued from the perspective of the UN over the last 20years. These reports, beginning with critical responses to failures in Rwanda andBosnia from within the UN system, reveal the di culty in developing criteria forwhen and how to intervene in humanitarian emergencies.

In 1994, the UN and the international community more generally failed to

respond to what rapidly became genocide in Rwanda. In the course of only twomonths, over 800,000 people were viciously murdered in the context of an ongoingethnic con ict between Tutsi and Hutus. What made this catastrophe even worsewas that the leader of the UN peacekeepers already positioned in the country hadwarned of the dangers of an impending genocide (dallaire 2004; Barne 2002).C

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The following year, in the context of an ongoing peacekeeping mission in BosniaHerzegovina, d utch peacekeepers allowed a group of Serb forces to march pastthem, take the town of Srebrenica, and then massacre approximately 10,000 Muslimmen and boys. Combined, these two tragedies led many to question the competenceof the UN peacekeeping system as whole. When Ko Annan, who had served asthe head of the d epartment of Peacekeeping in the UN system during both theseepisodes, became Secretary-General of the UN in 1996, he authorized reports on

both tragedies (United Nations 1999a; 1999b). These reports were highly criticalof the UN system both in terms of decisions about whether or not to intervene(Rwanda) and how to intervene (Srebrenica). They recommended new institutionalstructures within the UN, including changes in the way information should beprocessed and changes in how the v arious departments relate to both the O ce ofthe Secretary-General and the member states.

At the same time as these reports were being issued, the UN was largely ignoredwhen NATO undertook military force against Serbia in response to human rightsviolations in Kosovo. More accurately, the recognition that Russia and China wouldrefuse to allow aggressive peace enforcement tactics against Serbia promptedFrance, the US and UK to turn to NATO forces. This military action, which the UNSecretary-General grudgingly admi ed might have been necessary even withoutUN authorization, further confused the debate over when HI should be allowedand according to what criteria.

These reports and the Kosovo campaign were then followed by a 2000 report that

recommended substantial revisions to the d epartment of Peacekeeping Operations(d PKO) within the UN bureaucracy. Commonly known as the Brahimi Report, itreinforced the traditional UN idea of peacekeeping that relied on the consent of theparties in a con ict. This suggestion moved away from the more aggressive peaceenforcement ideas found in Boutros-Ghalis Agenda for Peace. At the same time,cognizant of failures in Rwanda and Srebrenica, it recommended that if individualswere in danger of being harmed, UN peacekeeping forces should be able to stepin and use force. It also recommended that UN authorization was essential forany justi ed use of military force. As well, it argued for clearer mandates, more

strategic information prior to an a ack, and clearer lines of authority within theUN system. This report led to a major restructuring of the d PKO. It did not lay outany clearly de ned criteria for what constitutes a justi ed military intervention,

but it did frame its conclusions in terms of the need for be er rules governing whenintervention can and cannot take place. The emphasis on a clear mandate from theUN Security Council captured this need for clearer criteria.

This move toward providing clear criteria for when an intervention can takeplace culminated the next year in an important statement on HI. In d ecember2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS),

supported by the Canadian government, issued The Responsibility to Protect , areport that sought to shi the discourse of international humanitarian action andinternational security more broadly away from debates on the right to intervenetoward a discourse surrounding the responsibility of various actors to provide forhuman security. It arose, at least in part, from the frustration of many that while aC

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serious humanitarian disaster was developing in Kosovo, the UN Security Councilwould not authorize military action, which led to NATO undertaking an air warto coerce the yugoslav leadership to halt its actions against the Albanian/Muslimcommunity. The document, however, was overshadowed by the USs post-9/11actions, although it has seen a return in international security debates, particularlythose emanating from the UN. 3

The report is an a empt to reinterpret the rules to conform to new internationalsecurity challenges, particularly those concerning HI. It begins with the principleof non-intervention, and then construes its task as being the de nition of thosecircumstances when that rule can be overridden; in other words, the creation ofa rule for breaking the rules (ICISS 2001, 312). Its section on authority emphasizesthat the Security Council must remain the only source of legitimate authority inthe international system. Challenging or evading the UN Security Council will

undermine the principle of a world order based on international law and universalnorms ( ibid. , 48). In 2004, a UN report continued to insist that the current rules of theUN system simply needed to be be er enforced rather than abandoned. This reportresurrected collective security as a central principle of the international securityorder. The reports subtitle, Our Shared Responsibility suggests a possible moveaway from a rule-governed international security order. But, when considering thedangers of preventive military action, the report falls back upon the UN Charter,stating boldly: We do not favour the rewriting or reinterpretation of Article 51 [statescannot use military force without Security Council authorization] (2004, 63).

These UN reports can be seen as reactions to various failures to respond tohumanitarian emergencies by means of reinvigorating or developing new rules togovern when HI should take place. An alternative to this move to more rules might be some notion of political judgement. Indeed, built into these calls for greatercriteria is actually a place for political judgement. All the reports emphasize thatthe UN Security Council should be the nal arbiter of when and where HIs shouldtake place. The Council is a political body, not a court of law, so making political judgements is what it is designed to do. The Responsibility to Protect report also turnsto the just war tradition as a framing device, a tradition of thought that relies upon

the idea of making judgements rather than conforming to speci c rules in decidingwhen and where to intervene. 4 d ecisions as to how to respond to humanitarianemergencies might be helped by clearer criteria. At the same time, the diversityof human experience, the current political structure of the international systemand the lack of a single agreed upon set of moral and political norms to governour shared political life suggest that perhaps re ned political judgement is moreimportant than a purely rule-governed political order. 5

3 There exists an NGO devoted to promoting the Responsibility to Protect agenda, whichcan be found at .

4 See Rengger (2002) for more on the just war tradition as a way to make political judgements rather than as a w ay to enforce speci c rules.

5 For more on the complexities of rules in the international political system, see Lang,Rengger and Walker (2006).

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The Case of Sudan

In order to make some of these theoretical points more concrete, this section will brie y explore one particular HI, the joint United NationsAfrican Union missionin Sudan. At the time of writing (August 2008), two distinct UN missions wereoperating in the Sudan: UNMIS and UNAMId . 6 These two missions have di erentmandates, although they do seek to cooperate. The frst, UNMIS, was authorizedin March 2005 by Security Council Resolution 1590. Its mandate is to facilitate theimplementation of a peace agreement between the government of Sudan (GOS) andthe main rebel group in the South, the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement/Army(SPLM/A). The GOS and the SPLM/A had signed a peace agreement in January2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which sought to resolve a seriesof con icts throughout the country. Media accounts of the con ict portrayed it

in a shi ing set of binary terms, such as Arab versus African and South versusNorth. In fact, due to the range of di erent migratory and colonization pa ernsthat Sudan has experienced throughout its history, none of these easy binary terms

best captures the con ict (Iy ob and Khadiagala 2006).The UNMIS mandate is a traditional peacekeeping one, designed primarily

to facilitate the implementation of the CPA between the GOS and the SPLM/A.The Security Council authorized 10,000 troops and 715 police, numbers that arequite large in comparison to other missions. The list of tasks that the mission is toaccomplish do not re ect an overly aggressive peacemaking or peace enforcement

approach, re ecting perhaps the cautions of a post-Somalia and post-Bosniad epartment of Peacekeeping; in other words, rather than seek to enforce a peace between warring sides or take sides, this mission was designed to help those whohave already agreed to peace make it happen. There are some hints of a moreaggressive approach, with clause 4(d) of the resolution calling for e orts to protectand promote human rights in Sudan. Also, there is reference in the resolution tothe situation in d arfur, although there is no direct mandate to act in this context.In May 2008, the mission was extended for one more year, primarily to help increating free and fair elections.

The second mission in Sudan, UNAMId, was authorized to deal with thesituation in d arfur, a region in the west of the country. The con ict cannot really be defned by a single set of opponents; as with the larger con ict in Sudan,overlapping ethnicities and religious a liations make it di cult to identify a clearset of opponents (Flint and d e Waal 2005). As a result of the actions of variousgroups, however, the violence in the d arfur region has prompted internationalaction of a more peacemaking sort than the larger con ict throughout Sudan. Inthe summer of 2004, the African Union authorized a small peacekeeping forcedesigned to monitor the Nd jamena ceasefre, an agreement between the GOS

and rebel groups in d arfur, particularly the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM),

6 d etails on the missions come from the UN website, specifcally the UNMIS site at and the UNAMId site .

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which aligned itself with the SPLM/A. A empts to increase the size and mandateof the force were resisted by the GOS, although the force, known as AMIS, dideventually reach almost 7,000 troops. Peace agreements were signed, but variousgroups and GOS-supported militias refused to abide by them.

On 31 July 2007 the UN Security Council fnally approved its own mission tod arfur with Resolution 1769. This created what has become known as a hybridUNAU mission, entitled UNAMId . Although authorized to have almost 20,000troops, its strength at the time of writing was only about 10,000 due to both budgetary and political delays. Unlike UNMIS, its mandate includes the obligationto protect the civilian population against a acks from the militia forces. While itsoverall responsibility is to implement the darfur peace agreement, its more robustcapacity to protect civilians di erentiates it from the UNMIS mission. Although itis o cially mandated to do this, however, there has been li le evidence that it has

e ectiv ely been able to stop much of the main violence.At the same time, the term genocide has been used to describe the activities of

various militias against the citizens of d arfur. In September 2004, US Secretary ofState Colin Powell admi ed before the UN Security Council that genocide was takingplace in d arfur but, in violation of the spirit of the UN Genocide Convention, deniedthat the international community had the obligation to use military forces to stopit. Parallel with this, the newly created International Criminal Court (ICC) began toinvestigate various actors in the d arfur region and the GOS for possible indictmentsfor the crime of genocide. In March 2005, the UN Security Council referred the

situation in Sudan to the ICC for consideration by means of Resolution 1593. In July2007, the ICC Prosecutor issued warrants for the arrest of top o cials in the GOSfor genocide in d arfur. In July 2008 the Prosecutor requested an arrest warrant forthe President of Sudan, Omar Bashir. With this step, the a empt to deal with thesituation in Sudan through a judicial process has increased in prominence.

With these two missions and the activities of the ICC, the HI in Sudan re ectssome of the dilemmas identi f ed above. First, should the two missions be called HIs?Both were designed to implement peace agreements and bring about an end to along-standing con ict. As a result, it would seem they should be. yet, coupled with

the moves by the ICC to prosecute those responsible for perpetuating the con ictand creating a genocide, these two interventions seem to be part of somethingdi erent. Elsewhere, I have argued that some interventions change from beinghumanitarian to punitive (Lang 2008, 5877). Punitive interventions, while they mayhave a humanitarian component, are designed to punish those who brought aboutthe violation of human rights that the intervention is seeking to halt. UNMIS is lessoriented to a punitive operation, but UNAMId has a stronger punitive element.While not cooperating with the ICC at this stage the mission of UNAMId includesa rule of law component, an element found in an increasing number of HIs. This

rule of law element of the mission includes helping to create judicial capacity, buildprisons and create a more e ective penal and judicial infrastructure. 7

7 See, for instance, the UNMId press release on these ma ers at .

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The increasingly punitive dimension of these HIs does not mean that HI hasradically changed its meaning. It does mean, however, that this new hybrid punitivehumanitarian form of intervention is playing a role in constituting a di erent kindof international order. Rather than the peacekeeping of the Cold War or even thepeacemaking of the early post-Cold War era, a punitive ethos is one of the de ningfeatures of the international order today. It is in part linked to a US political cultureof punishment, but is also linked to the increasingly vocal activities of variousNGOs pushing for justice in situations around the world. These calls for justicefrom human rights organizations o en include calls for punishment; the welcomeof the indictment of the Sudanese president demonstrates exactly this kind ofethos. There are certainly elements of traditional humanitarianism in UNMIS andUNAMId , but the point being made here is that their links to, and elements of,a more punitive ethos suggest how HI might need to be further de ned in the

future.Exploring the intentions of the two missions also raises some important questions.

The intentions of the missions are best captured in the two mandates. In fact, almostall the reports issued by the UN have emphasized the importance of clearly de nedmandates. The mandate of UNMIS, the rst mission, is focused primarily on assistingthe parties that signed a peace treaty; most of the operative clauses in UN SecurityCouncil Resolution 1590 use the word assist to describe the tasks of the mission.The second mission, UNAMId, has a stronger peacemaking mandate; many of theoperative clauses of UN Security Council Resolution 1769 deal with establishing a

secure environment and contributing to the protection of human rights and goodgovernance. As evidenced by the mandates of the two resolutions, these missionscombined would seem to be clearly de ned HIs, contributing to a peace agreementand the protection of human rights throughout the country.

When dealing with the UN, however, intentions are not so easily captured bysimply reading mandates. Because the UN is composed of states, it is sometimesdi cult to identify it as a clearly de ned agent that can be considered to even haveintentions. 8 The question of whether or not the UN can have intentions is furthercomplicated by the di erent agencies involved in the creation and execution of

peacekeeping missions. The Security Council de nes the mandate, where the vepermanent members have the most power and in uence. yet the mission is thenoperationalized by the d epartment of Peacekeeping. Finally, the soldiers that endup serving in the mission are seconded to the UN, but do not necessarily drop theircommitments to their own states. These overlapping roles of di erent agents in theformulation of peacekeeping missions make nding intentions a di cult ma er .

Outside of the di culties in nding what the exact intentions are of the UNin these missions, the problem of motives also remains. In the case of Sudan, forinstance, one can examine the motives of the US, arguably the most powerful state

8 Related to this, although not central to the points being made here, is that it is sometimesdi cult to hold the UN responsible for any events in the international system, sinceits actions are really those of the states involved. For two accounts of the UN as aresponsible agent, see Lang (2003b) and Adelman (2008).

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in the system at the current moment. On the one hand, some have argued that theBush administration was spurred to act more aggressively in Sudan a er the a acksof 11 September 2001, leading it to view countries like Sudan as potential terroristhotspots where it would need to remain engaged for its own national interests(Iyob and Khadiagala 2006, 11921). On the other hand, the US did declare thatgenocide was taking place, even though it claimed it had no legal responsibility toact.

d espite these complications of motives and intentions, however, one can stillargue that these interventions are humanitarian. The discourses surrounding bothmissions, ones imbued with humanitarian purposes, may not perfectly re ect thegovernments intentions, but they do certainly create a larger discursive structureof humanitarianism. Moreover, while the major powers on the Security Councilmay not have the purest motives, other states submi ing troops on the ground

may be involved for more truly humanitarian purposes. While certainly no saint,the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, when sending some of the frst troops ofthe AU mission, stated: Our forces will not stand by and watch innocent civilians being hacked to death like the case was here in 1994 (Jok 2007, 264). Again, thisis not to privilege the motives of the Rwandan president, only to suggest that awide range of motives and intentions can be found in the construction of thesemissions. In terms of outcomes, while violence has not been halted, both missionshave been instrumental in providing relief, protecting refugee camps and creatingnew political and economic infrastructures in Sudan. These e orts may not seem

like a success at this point, but they are key to the rebuilding of the society andwill certainly have a long-term positiv e e ect.Finally, the question of rules and judgement also appears in this con ict. Many

have argued that the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine is tailor-made forexactly this kind of situation. There is a government failing in its responsibilityto protect its citizens so the automatic rule for the international community is tointervene. Indeed, the R2P NGO has issued its own declaration stating exactlythis. 9 At the same time, others are pointing out that this move to an automatic rulelike application of criteria may not be advancing the interests of the international

community as a whole or the people in d arfur. Alex Bellamy, a strong proponentof the R2P idea, has argued that it should not be an automatic set of criteria forintervention. Bellamy suggests disassociating intervention from the R2P criteria,and instead using them as a means to develop more sustained and long-termreforms of the international political structure (2008).

None of these critical comments is intended to demonstrate that the interventionsin Sudan are not HIs or that they should not be undertaken. Rather, they demonstratethat there remain a series of tensions in how we understand the ethics of intervention.Moreover, these same sets of concerns could also be invoked in almost any other

ethical analysis of international a airs. Unlike domestic political issues, ethicaldilemmas seem even more pronounced at the global level, undoubtedly because ofthe diversity of ethical and religious traditions that shape the global system. Being

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a entiv e to these dilemmas and understanding their sources is an important stepin thinking more clearly about ethics and international a airs. 10

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