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Much ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of U.S. president Barack Obama's decision not to strike the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after that regime launched a deadly chemical weapons attack in 2013. Often missing from those debates, however, are the perspectives of Syrians themselves. While not all Syrians oppose Assad, and not all opponents endorsed intervention, many Syrian oppositionists resolutely called for Obama to uphold his “red line” militarily. As part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay analyzes diverse expressions of such opinion and finds that they highlight three dimensions of the ethical case for limited strikes against Assad. First, they remind us that the ethical context of the red line question was many Syrians’ sense of abandonment by the international community. Second, they emphasize the ethical stakes of the limited strikes; namely an opportunity to hold the Syrian regime accountable, weaken it from within, and thus change the equation of the war. Third, they make sense of the ethical consequences of the nonintervention outcome, and especially its effect in deepening civilians’ despair, accelerating extremism, and convincing Assad and his allies that they could kill with impunity. These views controvert both legalistic arguments precluding military intervention and assumptions that U.S. intervention is always imperialist and warmongering. In this case, consideration of the case for military intervention from the viewpoint of those on whose behalf the intervention would have taken place challenges us to think deeply about circumstances in which limited strikes might be not only ethically justified but also imperative.

India is gradually changing its course from decades of inward-looking economics and strong anti-Western foreign policies. It has become more pragmatic, seeing important economic benefits from globalization, and some political benefits of working with the United States to achieve New Delhi's great-power aspirations. Despite these changes, I argue that India's deep-seated anti-colonial nationalism and commitment to strategic autonomy continues to form the core of Indian identity. This makes India's commitment to Western-dominated multilateral institutions and Western norms, such as humanitarian intervention, partial and instrumental. Thus, while Indian foreign-policy discourse shows little sign of seeking to fully challenge the U.S.-led international order beyond largely reformist measures of building parallel institutions such as the New Development Bank, India will continue to strongly resist Western actions that weaken sovereignty norms.

It is generally assumed that, when judging the proportionality of a humanitarian intervention, the relevant costs that must be factored into the equation are not only those brought about directly and immediately, but also those brought about via the interceding agency of other parties; the mediated consequences. Here I want to challenge that assumption. First, I argue that rebels fighting off an oppressive regime cannot reasonably be held to a standard of proportionality under which mediated consequences count fully in the calculus. Given this, I ask whether we can justify holding international rescuers – using similar means in pursuit of similar ends – to a more stringent standard. If the answer is yes, then curiously it turns out that an intervention might fail to satisfy the principle of proportionality despite its expected costs and consequences being identical to those of an insurrection which is rightly judged to satisfy that principle. I argue, however, that every attempt to justify the asymmetry has shortcomings. If this is right, then the standard of proportionality to which we hold states or coalitions engaged in armed international rescue operations should be reviewed and, arguably, relaxed.

Humanitarian intervention has always been more popular in theory than in practice. In the face of unspeakable acts, the desire to do something, anything, is understandable. States have tended to be reluctant to act on such desires, however, leading to the present situation in which there are scores of books and countless articles articulating the contours of a right—or even an obligation—of humanitarian intervention, while the number of cases that might be cited as models of what is being advocated can be counted on one hand.

The paper asks whether humanitarian intervention is legal and reviews contemporary legal arguments on both sides. It finds that both views are sustainable by conventional accounts of the sources of international law; humanitarian intervention is at once legal and illegal. The paper then considers the implications of this for the idea of the rule of law in world politics. The power of international law in this case comes from its utility as a resource for justifying state policies, not as a means for distinguishing compliance from non-compliance. Law remains important to world politics, but in a different way than usually understood.

The NATO-led intervention in Libya, Operation Unified Protector, is noteworthy for two central reasons. First, it is the first instance in over a decade of what Andrew Cottey calls “classical humanitarian intervention”—that is, humanitarian intervention that lacks the consent of the government of the target state, has a significant military and forcible element, and is undertaken by Western states. Not since the NATO intervention in 1999 to protect the Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing has there been such an intervention. To be sure, since 2000 there have been some robust peace operations that fall in the gray area between classical humanitarian intervention and first-generation peacekeeping (such as MONUC, the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo). But, even if these operations were to some extent forcible, they had the consent of the government of the target state.

“The Moral Standing of States” is the title of an essay Michael Walzer wrote in response to four critics of the theory of nonintervention defended in Just and Unjust Wars. It states a theme to which he has returned in subsequent work. I offer four sets of comments. First, by way of introduction, I describe the controversy between Walzer and his critics and try to identify the central point of contention. Second, I make some observations about the wider conception of global justice suggested by Walzer's remarks, emphasizing the extent of the difference between this conception and the traditional view of a “society of states” to which it stands as an alternative. The central value in Walzer's conception is collective self-determination, so I comment about its meaning and importance. Finally, I consider whether and how concerns about the moral standing of states bear on the kinds of cases of humanitarian intervention that the world community has actually faced since the book and article were written, particularly since the end of the cold war.

Legal debates about humanitarian intervention—military intervention by one or more states to curb gross human rights violations occurring in another state—tend to assume that its legitimacy is irrelevant to its legality. Debates among philosophers and political theorists often assume the inverse, that the legality of humanitarian intervention is irrelevant to its legitimacy. This paper defends an alternative account, one that sees the legality and legitimacy of humanitarian intervention as intertwined. This account emerges from a conception of international law as a legal domain that structures global politics by treating sovereignty as a legal entitlement that it distributes among the multitude of legal actors that it recognizes as states. Drawing on a long standing debate among domestic legal theorists about the rule of law, it first identifies formal constraints on the UN Security Council‘s discretion to authorize the use of force to end human rights violations. Developing a distributive conception of international human rights, it then identifies substantive considerations that shed further light on the legality of intervention. It suggests that members of the Security Council must give reasons when exercising their discretion to authorize the use of force and that some reasons might divest a member's vote of legal validity.

T he first question that we have to ask about promoting democracy is the question of agency: Who are the promoters? Most of the recent arguments have focused on the state, that is, on the already democratic states and, particularly, the United States. Regime change, it is commonly thought, is a state project, and so we need to think about the means that states might use for the sake of this project. Crucially, when can they use force? My own view is that they can never rightly use force to create a democratic regime in someone else’s country. The old arguments for ‘‘nonintervention,’’ first made by John Stuart Mill, still hold. But once states have used force for some other legitimate purpose, to defeat the Nazis, for example, or (hypothetically, since we did not do it) to stop a massacre in Rwanda, they can continue to use it; they may even be obligated to continue to use it, for political reconstruction. Absent some such overriding purpose, I do not believe that sending an army across the border is a good democratic move; nor is it likely to be an effective way to promote democracy. Even if a morally necessary humanitarian intervention produces a change of regime and opens the way for democratization, we need to be realistic about what kinds of politics are possible after an extended period of ethnic cleansing and mass murder. A devastated country in which the killers and the people they tried to kill (and whose relatives they did kill) live side by side is not a likely setting for democratic deliberation, popular engagement, and nonviolent opposition. Sometimes all that we can demand in replacing a murderous regime is a nonmurderous regime. Democratization will have to wait for the (slow) development of peaceful coexistence and mutual trust. An occupying army may aid that development, but it is not itself, and should not try to be, an agent of political transformation. States can also encourage democratization without using military force— through diplomacy, say, or ideological argument. But I suspect that they are more effective in protesting and perhaps restraining the worst abuses of nondemocratic, authoritarian regimes. The heavy hand of state bureaucracy, working

At the 2005 World Summit, the world‘s leaders committed themselves to the “responsibility to protect”, recognizing both that all states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and that the UN should help states to discharge this responsibility using either peaceful means or enforcement action. This declaration ostensibly marks an important milestone in the relationship between sovereignty and human rights but its critics argue that it will make little difference in practice to the world’s most threatened people. The purpose of this article is to ask how consensus was reached on the responsibility to protect, given continuing hostility to humanitarian intervention expressed by many (if not most) of the world‘s states and whether the consensus will contribute to avoiding future Kosovos (cases where the Security Council is deadlocked in the face of a humanitarian crises) and future Rwandas (cases where states lack the political will to intervene). It suggests that four key factors contributed to the consensus: pressure from proponents of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, its adoption by Kofi Annan and the UN’s High Level Panel, an emerging consensus in the African Union, and the American position. Whilst these four factors contributed to consensus, each altered the meaning of the responsibility to protect in important ways, creating a doctrine that many states can sign up to but that does little to prevent future Kosovos and Rwandas and may actually inhibit attempts to build a consensus around intervention in future cases.

What does the world's engagement with the unfolding crisis in Darfur tell us about the impact of the Iraq war on the norm of humanitarian intervention? Is a global consensus about a “responsibility to protect” more or less likely? There are at least three potential answers to these questions. Some argue that the merging of strategic interests and humanitarian goods amplified by the intervention in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the world's most powerful states will act to prevent or halt humanitarian crises. Others insist that the widespread perception that the United States and its allies “abused” humanitarian justifications to legitimate its invasion of Iraq has set back efforts to build a global consensus about humanitarian action. A third group argues that the “responsibility to protect” inhibits the potential for abuse and, as a result, consensus is likely to strengthen post-Iraq for precisely this reason. Through a detailed study of the international engagement with Darfur, I suggest that the latter two arguments have merit but need to be adjusted. I argue that the humanitarian intervention norm has changed in two subtle ways. First, while the strength of the norm itself has not changed, the credibility of the United States and U.K. as “norm carriers” has been significantly undermined. Second, while the “responsibility to protect” has been invoked to support international activism, it has also re-legitimated anti-interventionist arguments.

Since the September 11 attacks, a new security agenda has swept aside much of the old sensitivity and apathy about intervening in “failing” states. The war on terror has redefined “governance” from concentrating on issues of economic viability and popular rights to a focus on the capacity of states to generate sufficient “order” to deter or capture the agents of the new transnational security threats: terrorists, smugglers, money launderers, the carriers of zoonotic disease. As part of this process, the governance standards of other states became part of Western states' own security agendas, generating new, self-interested incentives for aid and intervention. In this article, I explore the possibilities for developing a realist-informed normative framework for humanitarian intervention in the context of the post–September 11international concern with transnational threats.

The war in Iraq has reignited the passionate humanitarian intervention debate. President George W. Bush surprised many observers in his second inaugural address when he promised to oppose tyranny and oppression, and this in a world not always willing or ready to join in that fight. Humanitarian intervention is again on the forefront of world politics.

Elshtain presents a case for the primacy of politics if one would argue persuasively about international justice. Without political stability, all attempts to assist developing states, or to sustain persons caught in the chaos of “failed states,” must fail. A concept of justice lies at the heart of this discussion and revolves around the fundamental questions of to whom justice is owed and in what justice consists.Have we any obligations beyond our own borders? If so, what form do these take? These questions are addressed by developing a concept of comparative justice indebted to the just war tradition and tying it to the equal moral regard of persons. This leads, in turn, to two further difficulties. First, what does it mean to make a claim under the equal regard norm? Just war criteria posit certain universal claims in a political universe in which particular bodies politic either respond, or do not, to such claims in light of their own principles and interests. The article develops a citizenship model for cases of humanitarian intervention, rejecting any and all approaches that involve an asymmetrical valuing of human life.Second, who can be called upon to use coercive force in behalf of justice? Elshtain argues that all states have a stake in creating and sustaining an international system of equal regard. But, at present, there is no universal body that can be turned to with any confidence in situations of catastrophic violence, like ethnic cleansing. UN Peacekeepers are effective only after a measure of order is restored. As a result the state, or states, with the greatest capability to project power bears the lion's sharer of responsibility for enforcing an equal regard norm. Elshtain acknowledges the difficulties of articulating a strong universal justice claim while assigning a particular state, or states, and their people a disproportionate enforcement burden. But that best describes the present moment and it is better by far that those with power deploy that power within a framework of principles and constraints rather than solely along the lines of classic realpolitik.

In his millennium report to the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked, "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica--to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity? ... We confront a real dilemma. Few would disagree that both the defence of humanity and the defence of sovereignty are principles that must be supported. Alas, that does not tell us which principle should prevail when they are in conflict." (1) Annan's remarks force us to confront some uncomfortable facts: The fiftieth anniversary of the Genocide Convention was haunted by the shameful neglect of Rwanda. The Mogadishu fiasco, the cruel ambiguities of Srebrenica, the silence over Chechnya, and the confusions of the Kosovo intervention fed a contentious debate on the circumstances, authority, and means to intervene. Nonetheless, human rights and humanitarian discourses asserted themselves in international affairs throughout the 1990s: "Once synonymous with the defence of territory from external attack, the requirements of security today have come to embrace the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence." (2)

This article discusses the moral principles underlying the idea of humanitarian intervention. The analysis is in two parts, one historical and the other philosophical. First, the article examines arguments made in late medieval and early modern Europe for using armed force to punish the violation of natural law and to defend communities from tyranny and oppression, regardless of where they occur. It seeks to understand how moralists writing before the emergence of modern international law conceived what we now call humanitarian intervention.In the context of international law, humanitarian intervention is usually understood to be an exception to the nonintervention principle. However, the natural law tradition regards international law as less important than the moral imperative to punish wrongs and protect the innocent.Second, the article considers how humanitarian intervention is justified within the reformulation of the natural law tradition displayed in recent efforts to theorize morality along Kantian lines. In this reformulation, humanitarian intervention is a product of the duty of beneficence and, more specifically, of the right to use force to protect the innocent. The article draws upon the biblical injunction “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor,” which has become a centerpiece of the modern reformulation, and briefly explores its application to humanitarian intervention in the context of international relations today. This reformulation of natural law explains why, despite modern efforts to make it illegal, humanitarian intervention remains, in principle, morally defensible.

Determining who, or indeed what, is to respond to prescriptions for action in cases of international crisis is a critical endeavor. Without such an allocation of responsibilities, calls to action–whether to protect the environment or to rescue distant strangers–lack specified agents, and, therefore, any meaningful indication of how they might be met. A fundamental step in arriving at this distribution of duties is identifying moral agents in international relations, or, in other words, identifying those bodies that can deliberate and act and thereby respond to ethical guidelines. Often, the most effective and relevant moral agents in international relations are not individuals but institutions. However, it is necessary to qualify any claim that institutions can bear duties in international relations. Not only must they possess capacities for decision-making and purposive action, they must also enjoy the conditions under which specific duties can be discharged. The importance of this latter stipulation can be usefully illustrated by examining the disparate circumstances within which states–those that exercise positive sovereignty and those that are sovereign only in name–are expected to act.

In recent years, American military forces have been deployed in an ever-expanding array of humanitarian, peacekeeping, peacemaking, and nation-building operations. In practice American forces have often been reluctantly committed, and almost always with an extreme emphasis on force-protection and the avoidance of American casualties. Often this issue is discussed in the framework of perceived political constraints on American use of the military – in terms of how many casualties the American public will accept in exchange for a given mission. Beneath the level of the political constraints on American leaders, there lies a deeper tension having to do with the implicit moral contract between the United States and its military personnel. Although military personnel are required to follow all legal orders, morally the traditional contract between soldier and state rests on shared assumptions about the purposes for which national militaries will and will not be used.

States have long taken exception to the notion of humanitarian intervention because it threatens to undermine a bedrock principle of international order: national sovereignty. In the case of Kosovo, however, NATO's nineteen member states chose not only to put aside their concerns for national sovereignty in favor of humanitarian considerations, but also to act without UN authorization. This essay examines the ways in which states – European states in particular – are rethinking historic prohibitions against humanitarian intervention in the wake of the Kosovo war. It focuses on two approaches:Efforts to reinterpret international law so as to demonstrate the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention andEfforts to build a political consensus regarding when and how states may use force for humanitarian endsWhile efforts to weaken prohibitions may succeed, thereby facilitating future interventions, resolution of the tension between legitimacy and effectiveness in defense of human rights will continue to elude the international community unless a political consensus can be achieved.

One of the most remarkable features of contemporary international relations is the new prestige accorded universal standards of human rights. However, NATO's attempt to redeem the promise of human rights by way of military intervention during the recent Kosovo crisis may have established a disturbing precedent for humanitarianism. The Alliance exploited the capabilities of precision weaponry and digital information systems to wage war with air power alone, thus avoiding entirely the deployment of ground troops and the domestic political exposure such a deployment inevitably involves. The best available evidence is that this approach had little immediate effect on the atrocities carried out by Serbian troops in Kosovo and that NATO's overriding concern with casualty-avoidance in war undermined both the effectiveness and the moral legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. Even more disturbing is the question whether NATO's action implies that states endowed with the advanced military assets that were brought to bear against Serbia will adopt a casual policy on the conduct of limited war, a policy at odds with the lessons of the twentieth century.

At a time when some informed Muslims believe Islam to be “set on a collision course with the West” and some Christians warn of a “perhaps irrational but surely historical reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage,” it may be helpful to ask what both traditions teach about current issues of joint concern. One of the most urgent of these issues is the question of forcible humanitarian intervention. Setting aside broader questions of interpretation, such as the extent to which Islam can be identified with political radicalism and Christianity with Western political interests, this essay compares Muslim and Christian teachings on this issue. Both traditions have had to confront questions of political violence, suffering, and war since at least the time of the conversion of Constantine in one case (1,600 years ago) and the founding of the first Islamic state at Medina in the other (1,300 years ago). The central argument in this essay is that there is a surprising measure of agreement between the two traditions on the question of forcible humanitarian intervention, enough to provide the basis for a shared doctrine.

The capacity to focus on the issue of humanitarian intervention represents what Joel Rosenthal has noted as the maturation of the field of ethics and international affairs. If nothing else, the debate surrounding this vexed issue has demonstrated that we have left behind the so-called oxymoron problem: there is no reason now to be defensive about bracketing the terms “ethics” and “international relations.” One can hardly talk about Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia, or any cases of possible outside intervention, without recognizing from the very beginning that ethical dilemmas abound in the way we define our goals, our interests, and the means we use to pursue them. Even Samuel P. Huntington, not usually known to be a moralist, has asserted that “it is morally unjustifiable and politically indefensible that members of the [U.S.] armed forces should be killed to prevent Somalis from killing one another.” Whether or not one agrees with that assertion (I do not), one may note that Huntington speaks in terms of moral justification and regards his view of morality to be, in effect, self-evidently true. Thus even archrealists invoke morality in urging their preferred policies.The discussion in this essay proceeds in three unequal stages. First, I present a brief and oversimple sketch of the objective and subjective changes in the broader milieu of international relations as they relate to humanitarian intervention. Second, and more substantially, I survey and analyze the arguments justifying or opposing the notion of humanitarian intervention from realist and liberal perspectives. Finally, I offer the beginnings of my own argument and consider the enormous difficulties of undertaking humanitarian intervention with any degree of effectiveness and consistency.

This essay explores several moral attitudes that undergird a commitment to humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian intervention is usually understood to mean assistance or relief, often in the form of a rescue response by the international community to such emergencies as natural disasters, systematic human rights violations, or genocides that take place within the borders of sovereign states. But the term can equally mean aid before the fact, or prevention, as well as longer-term commitments to international justice that go beyond emergency relief. Whether the aid is relief or prevention, short- or long-term, and however it relates to broader questions of international justice, the same question applies: How do we come to feel the ethical imperative to ally ourselves with those outside our borders? If, as Kant puts it, “ought implies can,” then what makes the “oughts” of intervention psychologically feasible? Of course in international affairs the issue is, more typically, whether certain proposed interventions are politically feasible, Do they promote our national interest? Are they cost effective? Even more practically, will food relief get where it is intended to go? Do the rules of military engagement allow us to protect the victims we are trying to help?

Although humanitarian intervention is never politically neutral, Mapel maintains that this point can be overdrawn. Arguing that humanitarian agencies cannot always actively pursue political agendas, Mapel asserts that the objectives of such missions must be determined on a case-by-case basis. Pushing the issue a step further, he argues that in deciding whether there is an obligation to intervene, the nature of the conflict, the costs and risks of intervention, and other factors must all be taken into consideration. Mapel concludes in support of Winston's call for a standing UN military force for humanitarian interventions but notes that debates over the objectives of interventions and the nature of justice in complex situations remain obstacles to the establishment of such a force.

Pasic and Weiss examine the limitations and the ethical dilemmas of the humanitarian impulse in light of the recent surge in humanitarian intervention. The authors use the experience of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the former Yugoslavia as an example of the way in which politics and humanitarianism are inextricably intertwined. They describe a spectrum of intervention, from rescue to restorative to revolutionary efforts. Rescue efforts often fail to address the underlying political problems, but for a rescuing nation to commit to “revolutionary” intervention and sustained support raises the issue of state sovereignty. Asserting that humanitarian intervention is a highly ambiguous principle, the authors warn of the dangers of politically driven rescues that often force trade-offs between the pursuit of rescue and political order.