Humanitarian responsibilities and interventionist claims in international society

Abstract

This article calls for a widening of the debate about humanitarian intervention to incorporate insights from constructivism, ‘Welsh School’; Critical Security Studies, and critical approaches to Third World International Relations. After identifying a series of problems with the contemporary debate, which is dominated by the English School, it calls for a broadening of the concept of intervention and suggests a need to rethink the meaning of humanitarianism and terms such as the ‘supreme humanitarian emergency’.