Paradoxes in Humanitarian Intervention
The rash of humanitarian interventions since the end of the cold war has posed serious
analytical problems for international relations (IR) scholars. Traditional security scholars have
struggled to understand the nature of “humanitarianism” as an interest, often with the result that
they simply discount it and emphasize other possible motivations for intervention. In these
analyses, the intervention in Somalia is explained as an effort to export US values, intervention
in Haiti was about refugees, interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo are explained by the need to
protect NATO’s credibility and maintain stability in Europe.
Humanitarianism was only
window-dressing in every case. Constructivists, legal scholars, and an increasing number of
policy analysts have taken humanitarianism more seriously as a source of state action. They
point to the increasingly dense network of human rights norms, law, and transnational activist
groups that all persuade (or coerce) policy makers and publics to support these interventions.
The analytic problem for this group has been to understand why humanitarianism produces the
sorts of actions it does in world politics and why its influence and effects seem so inconsistent
and varied. Humanitarian concerns do not always produce interventions (as the Rwanda case
makes painfully clear) nor do they produce interventions of the same kind.
Humanitarianism is not some single isolated impulse nor does it consistently produce
identical effects. This seems obvious but analytically we have tended to treat norms and values
like humanitarianism in isolation, trying to attach particular causal significance to each one
individually. This ignores the relationship among norms and the ways they interact. Norms
never function in a vacuum; they are always part of some larger normative structure. To
1
Michael Mandelbaum, “Foreign Policy as Social Work” Foreign Affairs v.75, no.1
(Jan/Feb 1996):16-32 at 17; Richard Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Force in the
Post-Cold War World (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1994).
Convention