possible or desirable to create a system in which, in response to a human rights
violation, another bearer of human rights responsibility can always be found or
assigned. Perhaps we need to recognise that, in the last resort, we might have to
return to the presumptions of rescue, examined in the previous chapter.
In sum, human rights may be the dominant humanitarian project of our
time, but conceptually, humanitarianism must always remain the broader category.
On a commonsense level, the statement “humanitarianism is a human rights
project” just does not ring true (although, as I suggested in Chapter 1, international
political theory often comes close to making just such a claim). The clear upshot
here is that human rights cannot resolve the contingencies of humanitarian action,
precisely because the latter frequently comes into play where the former ends or
fails. These issues will now be explored further in the context of the controversial
practice of military humanitarian intervention.
III Humanitarian Intervention: Contingency Laid Bare
The question of military humanitarian intervention builds in a particularly
interesting way on the issues raised in the discussion of humanitarian accountability
and human rights, while bringing out all of the ambiguities inherent in the idea of
rescue. As I noted in Chapter 1, the subject of humanitarian intervention has been
examined in great detail by international political theory, as well as in other areas of
international relations theory and international legal theory.^69 I shall not reproduce
all these discussions here, as I have already implicitly addressed the central points
of debate such as thresholds of suffering (Chapter 2), the relationship between
motives, intentions and consequences and the problem of humanitarian violence
69
For excellent collections of the literature, see J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane, eds.,
Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003). Anthony F. Lang, Jr., ed., Just Intervention (Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press, 2003). Terry Nardin and Melissa S. Williams, eds.,
Humanitarian Intervention, NOMOS XLVII (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Jennifer M. Welsh, ed., Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003).