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...Limits to Humanitarian Intervention. Alan Kuperman. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001. 176 pp.
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002. 656 pp.
At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. David Rieff. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. 288 pp.
Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire. Marie Beatrice Umutesi. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 284 pp.
Humanitarianism is now a legitimate goal for nations to pursue. Indeed, it is widely agreed that the international community has a responsibility to intervene in the event of genocide, massive abuse of human rights, and refugee flight. But this is a new ideal which emerged only in the last thirty years following debates about whether sovereignty trumped the responsibility to intervene in places like Biafra, Bangladesh, and especially in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge reign. This debate is now over: humanitarianism can trump sovereignty. Among other things, this means that genocide is a crime which must be responded to and refugees are entitled to assistance. But this leads to the next question: how in a world of sovereign states with their own laws, armies, courts, and police are such ideals achieved? In other words, in the real world, how can these newly sacred ideals be implemented? Given that there is no international police force or military, how will the international community respond when international humanitarian laws are violated?
A number of international humanitarian operations undertaken within this "responsibility to intervene doctrine" can now be used to evaluate how these ideals fare in the real world of international politics. Since 1980, these include the humanitarian airlift to Ethiopia in 1985, the humanitarian and military intervention in Somalia in 1992-3, interventions in the Balkans in the early 1990s, the humanitarian relief operation following the 1994 Rwanda genocide and refugee crisis, the NATO-led military and humanitarian intervention in Kosovo in 1999, and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was partly justified on such "humanitarianism trumps sovereignty" grounds. In 2005-06, there are continuing calls for international intervention in the Darfur region of Sudan.
In the process of undertaking humanitarian interventions, the capacity of the international community to respond is revealed. Indeed, the strengths of the new international humanitarian relief regime are now even taken for granted, and include the responsibility of governments to protect human rights, a defined role for independent peace-keepers, and the responsibility of UN, governmental, and non-governmental agencies to safeguard the victims of war, famine, and other catastrophes. But many weaknesses of the international humanitarian system of are also now apparent.
The failure of the United Nations (and the United States) to respond militarily during the 1994 Rwanda genocide is typically cited as a paradigmatic example of what damage humanitarian inaction can cause. But this awareness is tempered by the observation that excessive involvement puts humanitarians themselves at unacceptable risk. Indeed, while the lack of political will is viewed as a problem, so are the dangers implied by "Crossing the Mogadishu Line," a reference to the 1993 intervention by the US military...
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