by Adam Roberts

About the author: Adam Roberts is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations and a fellow of Balliol College at Oxford University, England.

After the euphoria, the hangover. In 1991 and 1992, the United Nations was involved to varying degrees in the initiation of three major operations involving elements of humanitarian intervention—in northern Iraq, the former Yugoslavia and Somalia. The results of these operations expose fundamental flaws in the impulse for and practice of humanitarian intervention, to the extent that the whole concept needs to be reconsidered. The question is not so much the endlessly debated one of whether there ought or ought not to be any right of humanitarian intervention in any circumstances. Rather, it is whether any actual or imaginable presence of foreign military forces is properly described by so anodyne [innocent] a term.

Short-Lived Results