In the context of a single state, feasibility can be further broken down into two main constituent parts: military and political feasibility. In regards to political feasibility, rallying public support for wars has become increasingly difficult in a post-Cold War era, as the number of credible threats to the integrity of Western states has dwindled drastically.
Governments are unlikely to engage in an intervention without sufficient public support. Due to this fact, humanitarian discourse has become the primary legitimizing force for foreign interventions, particularly by the United States. On the international front, political feasibility also rests on the consensus within the UN Security Council. Despite the framework of realism which posits that nation-states behave in the manner that will benefit themselves, which would appear to favor unilateral military action, the normative perception in the international system is that interventions require the legitimation of the highest international bodies.
Without a solid pretext for intervention, it is improbable to achieve unanimity amongst the members of the council, as it will likely impact the interests of one of the permanent members. Feasibility, however, will not by extensively analyzed in this study due to the fact that, considering this definition of the term, it is impossible to measure both feasibility and success of a particular humanitarian intervention since an infeasible operation will not be conducted.
To carry out comprehensive case studies determining the feasibility of humanitarian interventions, examples of interventions that never took place would need to be taken into account. By closely examining the associated factors for each intervention and determining the level of national interest by the intervening parties involved, we can determine whether or not there is a relationship between national interest and success in humanitarian interventions through a theory-testing sample case study.
While an exhaustive analysis of all humanitarian interventions to date is beyond the scope of this paper, we will analyze five prominent cases from the s. East Timor, Bosnia and Kosovo were cited above as examples of success in conducting a humanitarian intervention, while Somalia and Rwanda are considered examples of failure. Beyond this numerical metric, however, the aim of the TNI was to make East Timor so chaotic as to be virtually ungovernable, and the intervention certainly thwarted this goal.
Once NATO become intimately involved in the conflict through Operation Deliberate Force, the number of lives lost dropped dramatically. These facts make it clear that while the UN effort can be considered a failure, the NATO operation was fully successful. The counterargument that the reputation of the US was at stake was not taken seriously by the government. The fact that the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo spanned four separate NATO operations, each of which could be considered separately as a success or failure, means it is not simple to characterize the entirety of the Kosovo intervention as a pure success or failure.
While the bombing campaign by Operation Allied Force did not directly save any lives, two of the other three branches can be credited with saving thousands while only hundreds of lives were lost. The final branch, that of KFOR, likely saved more lives than the Serb and Roma citizens that were killed, but it is impossible to know even approximately how many.
While not a complete success, the number of lives saved can place the Kosovo intervention in that category. While the United States, the primary player in Kosovo intervention, lacked any direct economic or political interests in Kosovo, the integrity of NATO as a cohesive alliance was at stake.
Considering the importance of the alliance to the United States, and the potential confrontation within the organization that would have ensued had the United States not taken part, the Kosovo crisis became a more pressing national interest, according to our definition of the term, than it would have otherwise been. Over the course of the crisis, however, a combined approximate figure of , lives were lost. The US strategic loss in the Battle of Mogadishu cemented perception of the whole US operation as a failure in the public imagination as well.
US interests were considered minimal in the case of Somalia, particularly compared to the simultaneous crises that were taking place across the continent. Rwanda is generally considered the prime example of a failure to intervene properly, and the numbers clearly reflect this perception. Despite the relatively large numbers saved by the four intervention missions in Rwanda, the , to , who died over the course of the crisis grossly outstrips that figure.
US apathy to the situation was visible from the outset, and the only concern was that US nationals were evacuated from Rwanda. In the nineteenth century, European powers intervened in Greece to end Ottoman atrocities there.
Humanitarian intervention remains rare. We talk about humanitarian intervention much more frequently than we practice it. Not until did the UN Security Council authorize the use of force against a recognized government for humanitarian purposes. In the early s, the Council identified a range of humanitarian issues as threats to the peace, but stopped short of authorizing force unless the recognized government granted consent as in the cases of Haiti and Rwanda in , or it judged that there was no government as in Somalia.
In other cases, the Council refused to authorize intervention because the relevant government was opposed to it Kosovo , or insisted that it would only authorize intervention once consent was granted as in the case of East Timor. Humanitarian intervention is as likely to be conducted by non-Western states as it is by Western states. There is a widespread view — that humanitarian intervention is an action that Western countries carry out on non-Western, or post-colonial, countries.
However, this is not the case for two reasons. Firstly, since the Second World War, as many humanitarian interventions have been conducted by non-Western countries than by those in the West. Secondly, Western interventions have tended to focus on states in, or near, the West itself — for example Kosovo, Bosnia and Libya.
The African Union was the first international organization to codify a right of humanitarian intervention. Many Afghans would say no, saying that at least the Taliban were able to provide one thing: basic physical security.
Now, this argument may not cut any ice with upper and middle class people in the North that live in safe suburbs or gated communities. But talk to poor people anywhere, and they put great value on ridding their shantytown communities of criminals and drug dealers. One cannot dissociate the US expedition in Iraq, now widely accepted as a brazen imperial venture, from the precedents created by humanitarian intervention in the Balkans and Afghanistan.
When it became clear that there were in fact no WMDs, the Bush administration retroactively justified its intervention on humanitarian grounds: getting rid of a repressive dictatorship and imposing democratic rule.
The rest is history: Iraq today is a base for US geopolitical control of the oil-rich Middle East; a state propped up by US military power, its oil resources and its wealth geared primarily to serve the West; a drastically weakened polity threatened by the centrifugal forces of ethnic and sectarian conflict; a society where secular values and the status of women have been eroded by fundamentalism and a high level of physical insecurity exists owing to rampant crime and terrorism criminals and terrorists.
As for economic conditions, per capita output and living standards are well below their pre-invasion levels and the population lives in a state of chronic insecurity, with 55 percent of Iraqis lacking access to safe water, one million people lacking food security, 6.
This is the deplorable state to which humanitarian intervention has reduced what used to be one of the most advanced countries of the Middle East in terms of human development indicators. The Libyan case will perhaps go down as one of the worst abuses of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. At first, the events there unfolded pretty much like those in Egypt, with the popular uprising seemingly on the way to deposing a corrupt dictatorship.
But the dictator, his military forces, and his social base held on, and fought back with military power, inflicting civilian casualties and undoubtedly committing human rights violations in the process. At that point, the situation degenerated internally into a civil war. Repeat: Gaddafi was no isolated dictator; he had a base; this was a civil war. Outside Libya, defectors from the Gaddafi regime managed to get the United Nations Security Council to obtain a resolution to impose a no fly zone over much of Libya, which the United States, England, France and NATO immediately leaped to impose to the consternation of Germany, China, Russia and other countries that abstained from the Security Council resolution.
The Libyan intervention will be remembered as one that was not based on actual genocide, indeed not even on potential genocide but on a rhetorical threat of revenge that went viral in the media. In his March 11 speech, Gaddafi urged his supporters to "show no mercy" and go "house to house" in Benghazi, which US President Barack Obama seized on to warn that genocide was about to take place. Indeed, after NATO went to war, human rights investigators from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found no evidence of genocide, deliberate targeting of civilians, aircraft or anti-aircraft guns being used on protestors and crowds, or mass rape.
It is simply to point out that there was no evidence for the genocide and massive and systematic violations of human rights that formed the pretext for intervention. What we had was a series of interviews and images that was being subliminally projected by CNN as genocide. The struggle between Khadafy and the NATO-led rebels degenerated into a war of attrition, bringing about a worse situation for civilians than that which prevailed before the intervention in terms of people killed and wounded, buildings and roads being destroyed, and economic suffering.
In the end, it was the offensive use of NATO airpower against Khadafy forces in Tripoli and later Sirte, not the rebel forces on the ground, that broke the stalemate and defeated Gaddafi. Before NATO intervened, a victorious Libyan domestic uprising, like those in Tunisia and Egypt, was possible, though these would have had its twists and turns. After NATO came in, the Libyan process became one of an external force aggressively imposing one of the factions in a civil war on the country.
The sorry record of contemporary humanitarian intervention shows that it must not be deployed except under very, very exceptional circumstances for the following reasons:. Second, humanitarian military intervention often creates a worse situation than that which existed;. Third, humanitarian intervention sets a very dangerous precedent that is used to justify future violations of the principle of national sovereignty. He has been badly affected by drought and the economic crisis.
In Zimbabwe the first rains used to come in October, but now they are getting later. Amid ongoing violent conflict, rising hunger and the effects of climate change, the pandemic will continue to have an impact in As the health and non-health effects of COVID merge with other shocks, humanitarian programming is also adjusting to treat it in a more integrated manner. A year-old Rohingya refugee covers herself and her month-old niece. Both go for a walk in the early morning at the Kutupalong camp to warm up from the cold inside their shelter.
The United Nations and partner organizations aim to assist million people most in need across 56 countries.
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