27 - Humanitarian Intervention and US Power

Summary

Humanitarian intervention seeks to stop mass atrocities – killings, rapes, ethnic cleansing – within countries. From 1945 until the formal end of the Cold War in 1991, many more noncombatants were killed by violence within countries than by war among them. The examples, since 1991 alone, include Rwanda, the Congo, Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Libya, and Syria. In the Congo alone, violence, but particularly the perilous conditions it created, claimed between 3 and 5 million lives between 1996 and 2003. Thomas Hobbes averred that the state alone could prevent people’s lives from being “nasty, brutish and short”; but in these and other instances, governments were the principal perpetrators of atrocities, which they methodically planned and committed to achieve political ends.