Response to Reviews by Michael Barnett, Chris Brown and Robert Jackson

Abstract

Life was simpler in the 1990s, for both scholars and practitioners, when the debate was only about ‘humanitarian intervention’. Th e issue was clearly defi ned – when was it right, morally or legally, to use coercive military force against a sovereign state to halt or avert large scale atrocities occurring, with or without its complicity, within its borders. And the policy options were narrow – send in the Marines, or do nothing. I can well understand Michael Barnett’s lament: this was wonderful stuff for classroom discussion. It was also wonderful fodder for diplomatic debate. Th e only problem was that when and where it really mattered – the talismanic cases being Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo – there was absolutely no international consensus for any action, any more than there had been in Cambodia or Uganda or other such cases in decades past, and people suff ered grievously. Th e global North rallied, by and large, to the cry of ‘the right to intervene’, while most countries of the global South – while often prepared to acknowledge that grave human rights violations were occurring – were resolutely determined to maintain the primacy of the traditional nonintervention concept of sovereignty. So either no interventions occurred (as in Rwanda), or when they did their UN mandates were either half-baked (as in Bosnia) or non-existent (as in Kosovo).