intervention is that it poses the conflict between order and justice in international
relations in its starkest form”.^111 While the English School has delivered some of the
key works of interest to international political theorists about humanitarian
intervention, such as Wheeler’s Saving Strangers , there is a definite sense in which
it rarely escapes its initial focus on the circumstances in which the norm of non-
intervention might justifiably be overridden.^112 English School considerations of
humanitarianism still broadly take place on the terms laid out by Hedley Bull over
thirty years ago in his examination of the question of order versus justice.^113 This, as
Alex Bellamy astutely notes, leads us to a situation in which “humanitarianism is
viewed through the lens of intervention rather than as a self-contained concept or
group of practices”.^114 This creates a fundamental bias in what we think of as
“humanitarian”. “The key characteristic, therefore, is not the scale or nature of
human suffering but whether that suffering requires outside intervention to
alleviate it.”^115 Bellamy notes that “[despite] the fact that the term ‘humanitarian’ is
used so often, English School writers barely consider what it actually means”.^116 Yet
their work is often central to that of international political theorists, such as Simon
Caney, in their considerations of humanitarian intervention.^117 In the part of
international political theory which draws more explicitly on political theory, much
of the discussion on humanitarian intervention draws on the debate spurred by
Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars. This debate also considers the issue as one of a clash
between sovereignty and rights, with arguments focusing on the moral basis for
111
Nicholas J. Wheeler, "Pluralist or Solidarist Conceptions of International Society: Bull and
Vincent on Humanitarian Intervention", Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, no.
3 (1992): 463. 112
Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 113
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1977), 77-98. 114
Bellamy, "Humanitarian Responsibilities and Interventionist Claims in International
Society": 335. 115
116 Ibid.
Ibid.: 340. For a partial exception, see Nicholas J. Wheeler, "Agency, Humanitarianism
and Intervention", 117 International Political Science Review 18, no. 1 (1997).
Though of course he would prefer the title of “global political theorist”. Caney, Justice
Beyond Borders.