Humanitarian Intervention and Pretexts for War

Abstract

The legal status of humanitarian intervention poses a profound challenge to the future of global order. The central question is easy to formulate but notoriously difficult to answer: Should international law permit states to intervene militarily to stop a genocide or comparable atrocity without Security Council authorization? That question has acquired even greater significance in the wake of military interventions in Kosovo and Iraq, and nonintervention in the Sudan. Concerted deliberation on these issues, however, has reached an impasse. A key obstacle to legalizing unilateral humanitarian intervention (UHI) is the overriding concern that states would use the pretext of humanitarian intervention to wage wars for ulterior motives. In this article, I argue that it is just as likely, or even more likely, that the impact on states would be the opposite. Drawing on recent empirical studies, I contend that legalizing UHI should in important respects discourage wars with ulterior motives, and I discuss changes to international legal institutions that would amplify that potential effect.

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