Humanitarian Intervention

Catalog description

Humanitarian intervention in internal conflicts builds on a growing consensus for the international community to address genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. There was humanitarian intervention already in the 19th century, undertaken by European states to protect Christians, mostly against the Ottoman Empire. However, it is only after the end of the Cold War that there have been serious challenges to existing legal and political notions of state sovereignty and war. Since then, intervention has come to be better known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), an emerging norm of war with a just cause. This class will take a case study approach to address the political, legal and ethical aspects of R2P. It will discuss crucial questions, when and how is it just to intervene?; what are the outcomes of intervention or the lack of it? The goal is to portray problems and responsibilities of an array of state and non-state actors using the interesting and difficult humanitarian emergencies of Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, East Timor, Rwanda, Darfur and more recently Libya and Syria. While cases will enable students to experience interventions (or lack of intervention), through the behavior of actual participants, a survey of the main norm-setting documents will serve to establish a genealogy of R2P, as well as the political and intellectual arguments that lay out its justification and limits.