Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article   Humanitarian intervention lies at the intersection of realism and liberalism, where power and the material interests of states meet human rights and the responsibilities of sovereignty. Military intervention for avowed humanitarian purposes has been common since the end of the Cold War and has re-energized the debate about when states can and should use military force. The literature on humanitarian intervention re-examines long-held ideas about the relationships between state sovereignty and human rights, between politics and ethics, between peace and justice. This re-examination has led to a discernible shift in the balance of opinion over the past two decades from the primacy of state sovereignty and the principle of nonintervention to an emphasis on human rights and the effort to find an agreed threshold for legitimate intervention. Humanitarian intervention – more accurately, humanitarian military intervention – is “military intervention in a state, without the approval of its authorities, and with the purpose of preventing [or ending] widespread suffering or death among the inhabitants” ( Roberts 1993 :429). The essential characteristics of humanitarian intervention are the use of military means in a contentious political environment to achieve socioeconomic objectives: to keep people alive and communities functioning by providing basic necessities, ... log in or subscribe to read full text