Introduction

A remarkable development of the post-Cold War era has been the routine use of military force to protect human beings trapped in the throes of wars. With the possible exception of the 1948 Convention on Genocide, no idea has moved faster in the international normative arena than “the responsibility to protect,” the title of the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). At the same time, international dithering in Darfur, northern Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) indicates the dramatic disconnect between political reality and pious rhetoric, as do the world powers’ inconsistent responses to civilian vulnerability in Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, and most especially Syria, as well as the host of other ad hoc reactions to a motley assortment of nonstate actors ranging from Al Qaeda to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to Boko Haram.

The two are rarely in synch. Sometimes norm entrepreneurs scramble to keep up with political reality, and sometimes they are ahead of the curve. In this case, depicting instances of crises that may have warranted the responsibility to protect – or “R2P,” as it has come to be known in international circles – on a graph would reflect a steady growth since the early 1990s, whereas the curve depicting the operational capacity and political will to engage in humanitarian intervention would resemble the path of a roller coaster. Hence, the US-led and UN-approved intervention in northern Iraq in 1991 took place largely without any formal discussion of moral justifications. In spite of continual fireworks in debates about international responses to conscience-shocking events from Central Africa to the Balkans, the September 2005 World Summit represented the zenith of international normative consensus about R2P, which has endured since 2009 in a series of annual General Assembly interactive dialogues on the responsibility to protect. With only a handful of states – Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Venezuela – expressing outright opposition to the R2P doctrine and seeking to roll back normative progress, these discussions continued to crystallize the R2P’s normative status and also led to the establishment of a new UN bureaucratic unit in the shape of the joint office at UN headquarters.1 At the same time, the blowback from 9/11 and the war on terrorism and in Iraq during the first decade of the twenty-first century resulted in a nadir in the actual practice of humanitarian intervention. Security Council action to forestall atrocities in Libya in March 2011 represented a new upswing in the implementation of R2P. Council resolution 1973 authorized prompt, robust, and effective international action to protect Libya’s people from the kind of murderous harm that Muammar al-Qaddafi inflicted on unarmed civilian protestors and the opposition, whom he called “cockroaches” – eerily echoing terminology wielded by Rwanda’s genocidal regime in 1994. At the same time, the international paralysis in Syria resulted in record-breaking bloodshed and displacement, and the lack of peacebuilding in Libya created chaos and suffering that made some long for the days of the deposed despot.

This book is about the need to override state sovereignty and rescue suffering civilians who live in a state that is unable or unwilling to protect and succor them. Have we entered the beginning of a new normative era? Are we witnessing a new dawn or dusk for the practice of humanitarian intervention? This short volume seeks to answer these questions in five chapters.

Chapter 1, “Conceptual Building Blocks,” places before the reader notions to be kept in mind throughout the book. It begins by parsing the contested notion of humanitarian intervention itself. It continues with the two main principles of the Westphalian order: state sovereignty as encapsulated in UN Charter Article 2(7) and the basic “hands-off” of non-intervention in domestic affairs. At the same time, they are complemented by a fundamental tension in the Charter’s Preamble and Articles 55 and 56 and elsewhere: namely, a respect for fundamental rights. Another building block is a discussion of the nature of continuity and change in world politics, or the extent to which nothing is new or much has changed – a discussion, like most of international relations, that revolves around the anarchical nature of the international system.

Chapter 2, “‘Humanitarian’ Interventions: Thumbnail Sketches,” provides a historical overview of numerous cases of humanitarian intervention in order to provide empirical background to understand the controversy surrounding this notion in the contemporary world order. There are brief discussions of the examples of colonial “humanitarian” interventions, as well as those between 1945 and 1990 when the UN Charter regime was circumscribed by the East–West conflict. The explosion of interventions with largely humanitarian justifications in the post-Cold War era follows; and because of their continuing salience for the contemporary debate, the trends of the turbulent 1990s are discussed in depth. The chapter then highlights four crises – in the DRC, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Darfur – where there has been little evidence of any new imperative to save strangers in spite of substantially new discourse about the responsibility to do so. The section concludes with the council’s inconsistent responses to civilian vulnerability and mass atrocities in Libya, Syria, and Côte d’Ivoire. These cases show a shift away from the hostility to R2P’s implementation encountered during the George W. Bush administration, especially in the wake of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also reveal that, although normative consensus is robust, practical action still lags behind and is unevenly implemented. And the story is further complicated with the new medievalism in the scourge of attacks by fundamentalist terrorist groups that manipulate religion for political purposes.

Chapter 3, “New Wars and New Humanitarianisms,” discusses the contemporary reality of armed conflicts and of outside efforts to come to the rescue. Much of the ugly reality consists of the challenges on the ground from what are dubbed “new wars,” which by now is a somewhat dusty label. Another part is the variety of humanitarian experiments and reactions in the post-Cold War era, called “new humanitarianisms,” also a shop-worn label but one that accurately depicts a range of challenges for those who try to help war victims. Determining precisely what is “new” is an important part of the conceptual and actual battle. A final section in this chapter discusses some of the difficulties in trying to measure the impact of outside military forces.

Chapter 4, “New Thinking: The Responsibility to Protect,” provides the details of the contemporary norm that grew from the Security Council’s inaction in both Rwanda and Kosovo. In the former, it authorized action too little too late, and in the latter it was paralyzed and left the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to engage in “humanitarian bombing” – an oxymoron, and far too much too early for some observers. A way to square the circle of state sovereignty and human rights emerged from ICISS and its 2001 report, The Responsibility to Protect. No idea is without antecedents, and I dwell on two in detail. The first is the conceptual framework that seeks international access to, and protection of, the growing number of war victims who do not cross an international boundary: internally displaced persons (IDPs). The seismic idea that there was an international responsibility to enforce human rights standards inside the boundaries of states grows from the work of Francis M. Deng and Roberta Cohen. The controversial use of the bully pulpit by the UN’s seventh secretary-general, Kofi Annan, also contributes to the story, as does the acknowledgment of R2P by the 2005 World Summit and the subsequent General Assembly debates on this essentially new middle ground in international relations.

Chapter 5, “So What? Moving from Rhetoric to Reality,” concludes by examining what difference changing norms make to victims on the ground. In looking toward the next decade, further normative progress is of secondary importance. It is far more crucial to understand and address the political shortcomings standing in the way of making R2P an operational reality – of turning “here we go again” into a genuine “never again.” Many developing countries still fear humanitarian intervention as a subterfuge for big-power meddling. However, General Assembly debates over the last decade have revealed that there is indeed consensus, with only a few states, indeed the usual suspects, totally remaining outside the R2P fold. The international community of states appears to be recovering from the US and UK ex post facto morphing of the justification for the war in Iraq into some vague humanitarian benefits. The overwhelming military strength of the United States, however, continues to raise questions as to what happens when any US administration is ideologically opposed to military deployment for human protection purposes – can other actors go it alone? Can they rally sufficient force to effectively address the stated goals? Moreover, even when the administration at the helm is sympathetic to R2P,...