Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (WCMW - War and Conflict in the Modern World) [Paperback]

Since the intervention in Kosovo and the lack of action in the face of Rwandan genocide humanitarian intervention - which always seems to mean military intervention - has been a hot button issue in international relations.

Thomas Weiss, a Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York, in Humanitarian Intervention offers an overview of the rise of humanitarian intervention in post-cold war international politics. Although somewhat discredited by the tendency of wars to co-opt humanitarian pretexts in their own war's `just causes' Weiss's work is a sympathetic presentation of the "responsibility to protect", what is in our texting age termed the R2P. There was once a time, when a national sovereignty was in theory all but sacrosanct. To intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state by another external agent was a most egregious affair.

Weiss emphasises that this reliance on the idea of national sovereignty remains integral to an internationalist community of nations and international law. However, under the "bully pulpit" of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan the UN began to enunciate a revised theory of sovereignty which was popularised in a 1999 essay published in The Economist. Annan wrote: " State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined - not least by the forces of globalization and international cooperation. States are now widely to be instruments at the service of their people, and not vice versa. At the same time individual sovereignty - by which I mean the fundamental freedom of every individual enshrined in the charter of the UN and subsequent international treaties - has been enhanced by a renewed and spreading consciousness of individual rights. When we read the Charter today, we are more than ever conscious that its aim is to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them (cited p. 96-97)."

Sovereignty is therefore deemed less as a warrant for individual states to conduct affairs absolutely as it may wish; rather, it is responsibility to secure the individual rights of its citizens. Sovereignty therefore entails the responsibility to protect. Therefore, humanitarian intervention if it is justifiable is only possible where the internationally agreed "fundamental freedoms" - which I presume would constitute Articles 1-3 of the Human Rights apparatus - are violated.

Contrary to my initial impressions that Humanitarian Intervention was just an introductory politics textbook it is disarmingly more intricate than this. In a succinct manner Weiss deconstructs international politics as it struggles to come to terms with a post 9/11 world. The result is a cautious defence of R2P theory but one which, despite early promise, has been stunted by on the hand the lack of conviction on the part of major UN powers and suspicion from developing nations that R2P is just empire-building by any other name on the other.

This is certainly not the last word on R2P; it is not for example the place to read for an ethical critique of humanitarian intervention. If the failure to protect fundamental freedoms is, as is suggested, a crime against humanity then R2P is analogous to a police action. In which case it seems that sovereignty is well and truly reconfigured in a multilateralist direction (which, I think, goes some way to explain the US's reluctance to signing up to the ICC). Likewise, the emphasis of the UN throughout the text strikes me as somewhat idealistic. We have seen that much of the debate over R2P arises from the undefined character of national sovereignty - the UN has been famously loathe to sanction interventions often preferring other international bodies such as NATO to work with or without their bidding. If the multilateralist agenda is not taken up then R2P is not likely to have the support of the community of nations and be all the more prone to accusations of empire-building.