Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-first Century: Principles, Methods, and Approaches

Chapter Eight: Humanitarian Intervention

3333333333333333334 23333333333333 chapter eight Humanitarian Intervention 101 Humanitarian intervention is a recent and highly visible method of conflict resolution that recasts the traditional third-party intervention role into novel and highly controversial forms. On one level, it is an extension of preventive diplomacy; it involves attempting to stop largescale human rights abuses or to prevent the outbreak of conflict and create the conditions for a durable, positive peace. A special form of peacekeeping, humanitarian intervention takes a multidimensional approach to conflict and involves a range of civilian and military actors and processes. It combines diplomatic-level and local-level mediation and conciliation, an expanded range of peacekeeping activities, administration and governance, relief and humanitarian action, and postconflict reconstruction . A series of successfully adapted peace support operations in Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique in the early 1990s saw humanitarian intervention quickly take over as the UN’s primary method for dealing with complex and intractable civil wars. Today, humanitarian intervention is at the center of any international discussions about how to respond to the outbreak of serious internal conflict. Initially, humanitarian intervention promised to be the silver bullet for an international conflict resolution system under strain from a series of vicious and bewildering internal conflicts in the former Soviet Union and Africa. These “new wars” (Kaldor 1999) proved resistant to traditional methods of conflict management—negotiation, mediation, involvement by international organizations, peacekeeping—and posed a complex array of security management challenges. Multidimensional humanitarian operations that simultaneously tackled the political, humanitarian , and economic aspects of conflict appeared to offer an alternative and potentially more effective approach . At the same time, international conditions permitted an unprecedented level of cooperation within the UN Security Council. With its newfound freedom, buoyed by early success, the UN embarked on a spectacular expansion of its activities , applying various types of humanitarian peacekeeping missions as its new conflict resolution tool of choice. Between 1948 and 1988, the UN had launched a total of twelve peacekeeping operations (plus two small observer missions); but from 1989 to 2004, twenty-nine new operations were initiated (United Nations 2008). In 1988, there were just five peacekeeping missions involving 9,950 military personnel from twenty-six contributing countries; only five years later, the UN had eighteen ongoing operations involving 80,000 troops from seventysix different member states (Findlay 1996: 2–3). Following a period of retrenchment in the late 1990s, the UN’s involvement in peace support operations grew once more, and in November 2007, the UN had seventeen UN operations deploying 100,500 military and civilian personnel (United Nations 2008). In addition, the UN currently has eleven smaller “political and peace-building missions” operating in countries such as Somalia, Burundi , Guinea-Bissau, Nepal, and Tajikistan (United Nations 2008). Regrettably, and some would say inevitably, the UN’s initial enthusiastic burst of activity culminated in a series of devastating failures in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, 102 CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY as well as an inevitable overstretch of the Organization’s conceptual and institutional resources. The effect of these failures initially cast doubt on the effectiveness of humanitarian intervention as a conflict resolution method and led to a period of retrenchment and intense self-reflection (see Boutros-Ghali 1995). In many ways, the UN was ill prepared for the challenges thrown up by the security environment of the post–Cold War system, lacking both the necessary conceptual and legal-normative framework for intervening in domestic conflicts, as well as the organizational capacity for launching so many complex, multidimensional operations. As we write in 2009, we find ourselves in a period of transition—an interregnum—for UN peacekeeping and conflict resolution, as it struggles to develop more appropriate forms of humanitarian intervention that can effectively cope with the challenges posed by intractable internal wars. In this chapter, we assess the present operation of humanitarian intervention as a form of international conflict resolution, cognizant that current theory and practice are in a state of flux and that the fundamental legal-normative issues raised by its practice are highly contested. Humanitarian operations can be undertaken by a number of different actors—individual states, coalitions of willing states, regional organizations, or the UN. In fact, subcontracting all or parts of humanitarian operations to other international actors has been suggested as a way of relieving some of the pressure on the UN to deal with the numerous internal conflicts presently affecting large parts of the world. It should also help to overcome the reluctance of...