war can never be a humanitarian war, for the concept is simply an oxymoron in
humanitarian terms. This issue will be examined in more depth in Chapter 4. But for
now it raises the question of whether humanitarian intervention as understood by,
say, a Nicholas Wheeler, is simply too different to be conceptually reconciled with
the humanitarianism of the ICRC. Alex Bellamy captures the issue nicely. “Read
through the Red Cross’ understanding of humanitarian principles, not one act of
armed ‘humanitarian’ intervention discussed by pluralists and solidarists could earn
the label ‘humanitarian’.”^110
Arguably the key to this is whether they are both concerned with dealing
with the same problem. To some extent they are. The justification for humanitarian
intervention is often seen as being the egregious violation of human rights,
something that is of course of central concern to many professional humanitarians,
even if they sometimes see themselves as somewhat distinct from the promotion
and protection of human rights. What Chapter 5 will attempt to do is reject a
rigorous distinction between the spheres of humanitarianism and human rights,
while arguing that by describing the “humanitarian” uniquely as that which comes
into being in response to human rights violations, international political theory
often neglects the way the social construction of human rights itself relies on pre-
existing humanitarian commitments. The assumption that humanitarianism
depends on human rights, which often leads to arguments that humanitarianism
should ground itself in human rights, is in this sense misleading. Furthermore, it
risks obscuring the important role of self-help in rights-struggles.
It is however, understandable, for in examining humanitarian intervention,
international political theorists are often actually merely probing the clash between
their core concerns of sovereignty, rights and justice. Their starting point is not
humanitarianism as such, but rather the circumstances in which sovereignty may or
may not be breached in the name of rights, and how this relates to theories of
(international or global) justice. This is clearly true of English School writers such as
Wheeler, who notes that “[the] reason for focusing on the subject of humanitarian
110
Alex J. Bellamy, "Humanitarian Responsibilities and Interventionist Claims in
International Society", Review of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 340.