Intervention in civil strife and international order

Abstract

The intention of this thesis is to examine the significance of intervention in civil strife for international order. Intervention is defined here in purely descriptive terms as a particular sort of international activity. It is distinguished not by its legality or illegality but by observable characteristics which, though complex, are independent of moral, political or legal values. Such a definition differs from the attitudes to intervention that states normally take. Some wish to define intervention as invariably wrong; others see it as justified on occasions, whether frequent or rare.^ The procedure here will be to propose a definition of intervention in civil strife and then to inquire into the circumstances in which it may be considered desirable or undesirable. The criteria of judgement are provided by the fundamental rules of international society which take the form of normative expressions about how states ought to behave. Unlike a system of states, which is defined simply by the interactions between them, the society of states may be said to interact for certain common purposes. The basic rules of that society are those which are essential to the achievement of such purposes, and the measure of order among states is the extent to which these rules are upheld and their purposes realized. Order is not simply the absence of intervention. The task is to ascertain, as far as is possible, the circumstances in which intervention in civil strife accords or does not accord with these rules; and to give some account of the extent to which such intervention contributes to or detracts from order in the contemporary world.