Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law

Description

Anne Orford is Assistant Professor in Melbourne University's Law School. This fine book is good at destroying illusions, but short on proposals for changing things. During the 1990s, advocates of humanitarian intervention promised a world in which democracy, self-determination and human rights would trump national interests and imperial ambitions. Orford examines and refutes claims by governments and international institutions that their use of force for humane ends is good for the peoples that are supposedly being saved. She undermines their claims of prior innocence and selfless intervention. She shows how "The international community is already profoundly engaged in shaping the structure of political, social, economic and cultural life in many states through the activities of, inter alia, international economic institutions. Indeed, intervention in the name of humanitarianism too readily provides an alibi for the continued involvement of those interested in exploiting and controlling the resources and people of target states." As she notes, "the opposition between collective humanitarian intervention and inactivity is a false one. The international community had already intervened on a large scale in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before the security crises erupted, through the activities of international economic institutions and development agencies." She describes how the IMF `restructured' Yugoslavia by imposing cuts in wages and services. She notes, "the post-intervention administration and reconstruction of territories by the international community in turn entrenches an unjust international economic order and a neo-colonial mode of governance." She shows how the current forms of administration, like the post-World War One mandates for the colonies of the defeated powers are a variant of colonialism, not a departure from it. The Peace Implementation Council, not Bosnia's people, runs Bosnia. She concludes, "The principal lesson we should have learned from Yugoslavia or Rwanda was, in other words, not primarily that we need a UN rapid deployment force, but that intellectuals and activists should lobby their government's representatives and directors to oppose support for this model of economic liberalisation and marketisation in Eastern Europe." Speaking just to `intellectuals and activists', she can only urge a `lobby' of governments that are committed to exploiting and ruling other countries.