world.
Views of target populations are also crucial to the success of in post-intervention
reconstruction efforts. No stable post-intervention politics are possible without some form of
acceptance and local legitimacy for the regime interveners put in place. Emphasis in these
operations on elections, “ownership” of policies and programs, and local capacity-building are
all practical effects of interveners’ recognition that intersubjective understandings and normative
judgments of the intervened-upon have powerful effects on the ground.
Finally, a constructivist analysis of these normative tensions does not lead us neatly to
some blanket conclusion that, “This should be our humanitarian intervention policy.” To the
contrary, it shows why we should be suspicious of blanket prescriptions of this type.
Formulating a general policy would require us to specify a priori which among several
conflicting norms we will privilege regardless of circumstance or consequence, yet the ethics of
these interventions depends very much on both.
Circumstances and context matter a great deal in deciding whether force is a moral
response to humanitarian crisis. Attitudes of the victims, local politics in the target state,
availability of willing interveners and motives of those interveners will all differ across cases and
rightly should influence our judgments about whether intervention is desirable. Consequences,
too, are integral to our moral judgments of these interventions. Violent intervention is a means,
not an end. Whether humanitarian intervention is a good thing depends critically on whether it
achieves, or can reasonably be expected to achieve, the moral goals proponents set for it and at
what price. Again, this will vary. In some cases, there might be a straightforward military
strategy that one could reasonably expect will save many lives at the cost of few. In other cases,
1
1
See also Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle
East Politics Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Revised June 2006
29
Convention