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I. Introduction
For a year and a half prior to September 11, 2001, I roamed the academic world delivering a paper on humanitarian military intervention. It was a living. But on that day the world changed, and my paper has had to change with it.
With the publication of The Responsibility to Protect: The Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, two eras crossed in the mail. The Report was the work of a blue ribbon international commission and was published by the Canadian government with the blessing of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. "Largely completed before the appalling crimes of September 11, 2001," the Report appeared just three months after them. An artifact of a past so recent and yet so remote, does it remain relevant to the present and the future?
The Report makes a strong case for humanitarian military intervention, where necessary, not just as a right but as an obligation (the "responsibility to protect") of whoever is capable of undertaking it. The Report thus represents a further stage in what is, on paper, the triumphant rise of humanitarian concerns to the forefront of the world's agenda. It is the latest expression of a new moral awareness of the responsibility of each for the "human security" of all, and of all for the "human security" of each. In this, it echoes numerous statements of Kofi Annan, the 1997 Carnegie Commission Report Preventing Deadly Conflict, and the writings of Michael Ignatieff (himself a member of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty).
Yet The Responsibility to Protect also raises the question of just what this supposed responsibility is likely to yield in practice. The authors begin by admitting that humanitarian intervention "has been controversial both when it happens, and when it has failed to happen," and they immediately concede that the most grievous of these failures, that of Rwanda in 1994, has cast doubt on the credibility of intervention as such. This is an issue only exacerbated by 9/11 and its aftermath.
II. Prelude: 1945-1992
Humanitarian intervention was not entirely unknown before the 1990s. If you open Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, one of the most important books of 1977, you will find that he not only...