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The South, the West, and the meanings of humanitarian intervention in history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2020

Patrick Quinton-Brown Open the ORCID record for Patrick Quinton-Brown [Opens in a new window]
Patrick Quinton-Brown*
Affiliation:
St Antony's College, University of Oxford
*
*Corresponding author. Email: patrick.quinton-brown@sant.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

As it has been written, the history of humanitarian intervention is all too Whiggish and all too white. By conceptualising humanitarian intervention in the way that they do, orthodox histories should be seen as entangled in debates about the origins of human rights but also, perhaps more crucially, debates about the various formations and reinventions of human rights. Alternative codifications of rights reveal the historical possibility of a Southern practice of what we would almost certainly call ‘humanitarian intervention’. The record of a radical Third World practice to save strangers from the atrocities of colonialism and extreme racism is also a record of Western states playing staunchly sovereigntist roles, of the West's late devotion to Westphalia. To sketch out such a counterhistory is to argue the following: at a threshold moment in the international-political life of the Responsibility to Protect, it is the terms, range, and domain of the intervention debate that must be re-formulated and re-evaluated.

Keywords

Humanitarian InterventionResponsibility to ProtectGlobal SouthInternational Society
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 514 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2020

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References

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6 Simms and Trim, ‘Towards a history’, pp. 18–19. If Europe has served ‘as the origin, engine, and telos of historical knowledge’ of international law, is this not also true of humanitarian intervention? For a discussion of Eurocentrism in the history of international law, see Koskenniemi, Martti, ‘Histories of international law: Dealing with Eurocentrism’, Rechtsgeschichte, 19 (2011), p. 158Google Scholar.

7 Rather than drawing on ‘longstanding indigenous concepts of the immorality of tyranny … Asian and African experiences of intervention in the 1970s to a great extent reflected the experience of the Western world’. Simms and Trim, ‘Towards a history’, pp. 18–19; on the developing world and sovereignty as a ‘license to kill’, see Evans, Gareth, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocities Once and For All (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), pp. 11, 19–31Google Scholar.

8 R2P's most ardent supporters are keen to remind us. See, for example, Evans, The Responsibility to Protect, pp. 38–50.

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15 Compare to ‘traditional sovereigntists’ in accounts like Evans, Responsibility to Protect, pp. 11–30.

16 Hedley Bull (ed.), Intervention in World Politics, p. 1.

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19 Tesón, Humanitarian Intervention, p. 5. Richard Lillich emphasises that there must be an ‘imminent or ongoing gross human rights violation’ and Rosalyn Higgins writes of ‘gross human-rights violations’. This was also the position adopted by the International Law Association in 1975. Lillich is quoted in Wheeler, Saving Strangers, pp. 42–3; Higgins, Rosalyn, Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar; International Law Association, Report of the Fifty-Sixth Conference Held at New Delhi: December 29th, 1974 to January 4th, 1975 (London: International Law Association, 1976), pp. 217–22.

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22 Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 2.

23 Holzgrefe would limit ‘force’ to military force in particular. Others would broaden the scope to economic sanctions and, less frequently, diplomatic sanctions. See, for example, Holzgrefe, J. L. and Keohane, Robert (eds), Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weiss, Thomas, Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 5–8Google Scholar; Welsh, Jennifer (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 3Google Scholar.

24 ‘Humanitarian intervention’ is probably a nineteenth-century neologism, but references to ‘humanity’ and ideas like the ‘rights of man’ are much older. See Rodogno, Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 18–36.

25 Simms and Trim, ‘Towards a history’, p. 3.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 See Fabian Klose, ‘Humanitarian intervention as an entangled history of humanitarianism and human rights’, in Michael Barnett (ed.), Human Rights and Humanitarianism: A World of Difference? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Andrew Thompson, ‘Humanitarian interventions, past and present’, in Klose (ed.), The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention, pp. 331–56.

29 Compare to the discussion in the introduction to the 2013 special issue of Review of International Studies: MacMillan, John, ‘Intervention and the ordering of the modern world’, Review of International Studies, 39:5 (2013), pp. 1039–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 On the many lives of humanitarianism, for instance, see Barnett, Michael, Empire of Humanity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

31 See Getachew, Adom, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)Google Scholar; Burke, Roland, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jensen, Steven, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare with Eckel, Jan, ‘Human rights and decolonization: New perspectives and open questions’, Humanity, 1:1 (2010), pp. 111–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moyn, Last Utopia.

32 A/810, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 9 December 1948.

33 An antiquated humanitarian concern with its own complex history, which as Lynn Hunt shows, may have fell into favour in Western culture during the Enlightenment. See Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007)Google Scholar. For a discussion, see Moyn, Sam, Human Rights and the Uses of History (New York: Verso, 2014), pp. 1–19Google Scholar.

34 Vincent then makes reference to ‘the extraordinary deprivation of the right to life’, specifically. Vincent, R. J., Human Rights and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 126–7Google Scholar.

35 See, for example, Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (London: Allen Lane, 1977)Google Scholar.

36 The language of ‘routine abuse’ and ‘acts of killing’ comes from Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 34.

37 Simms and Trim, ‘Towards a history’, p. 3.

38 Rodogno, Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, p. 4.

39 Research on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century battle against the transatlantic slave trade, reflected in the British Royal Navy's interferences on the West African Coast, is the key exception. As it has been applied, however, this argument returns our gaze not only to great European founders, but to singular practice. See Fabian Klose, ‘Enforcing abolition: The entanglement of civil society action, humanitarian norm-setting, and military intervention’, in Klose (ed.), The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention, pp. 91–120; Maeve Ryan, ‘The price of legitimacy in humanitarian intervention: Britain, the right to search, and the abolition of the West African slave trade, 1807–1867’, in Simms and Trim (eds), Humanitarian Intervention, pp. 231–56.

40 Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 50.

41 Ibid., pp. 74, 78, 13, 172, 170, 209.

42 Wheeler acknowledged the ties of his work to turn-of-the-century liberal hegemony. In a 1992 article for Millennium, he noted the ‘growing interest, especially among liberal opinion in the West, in the idea of permitting a legal right of humanitarian intervention in international society’. Wheeler, Nicholas, ‘Pluralist or solidarist conceptions of international society: Bull and Vincent on humanitarian intervention’, Millennium, 21:3 (1992), p. 1Google Scholar.

43 International Commission on State Sovereignty and Intervention, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), p. xiiGoogle Scholar.

44 Evans, Gareth and Sahnoun, Mohamed, ‘Preface’, in Weiss, Thomas and Hubert, Don (eds), The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), p. vGoogle Scholar; see, for example, Weiss and Hubert (eds), The Responsibility to Protect, pp. 47–79.

45 Ibid., p. 47. The World Summit Outcome Document would list four broader categories of atrocity: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. See A/RES/60/1, ‘World Summit Outcome Document’, 24 October 2005.

46 Oppenheim, Lassa, International Law: A Treatise, Vol. 1, eds Robert Jennings and Arthur Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 442Google Scholar.

47 See Bass, Freedom's Battle.

48 Mill, J. S., ‘A few words on non-intervention’, in Robson, John (ed.), Essays on Equality, Law, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 111–24Google Scholar.

49 Gandhi, Mohandas, Freedom's Battle, ed. Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti (Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg, 2003)Google Scholar.

50 Mohandas Gandhi, ‘Letter to every Englishman in India’, in Rajagopalachari (ed.), Freedom's Battle.

51 Mohandas Gandhi, ‘Statement before the Ahmedabad trial’, in Rajagopalachari (ed.), Freedom's Battle.

52 Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's Ghost (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 102Google Scholar. Phillipe Sands offers a history of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’ but does not mention George Washington Williams or the Belgian Congo or colonialism or apartheid. What I am saying is that, without abandoning Nuremberg, Lemkin, and Lauterpacht, we must understand atrocity as it came to be variously understood, for example, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as legal vocabulary and as political vocabulary. See Sands, Phillipe, East-West Street (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016)Google Scholar.

53 ‘An open letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II’ by George Washington Williams is reprinted in Franklin, John Hope, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 242–54Google Scholar.

54 Quoted in Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, p. 257.

55 Insofar as it rejects Whiggishness on the basis of another singular true meaning. We should, however, conceive of a distinct practice of humanitarian intervention for the promotion of ‘civilisation’, as one formulation among others. In reaasserting historically this particular strand of meaning, consider, for instance, ‘Whose right to intervene? Universal values against barbarism’, in Wallerstein, Immanuel, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (London: The New Press, 2006), pp. 1–29Google Scholar.

56 Only by fixing a very narrow definition of atrocity crimes could it be argued that during the Cold War ‘it is hard to find examples where states looked beyond their own territorial and colonial borders … to demonstrate – by acting to halt or avert new or continuing atrocity crimes – that they indeed had, in Hedley Bull's evocative phrase, “purposes beyond themselves”’. Evans, The Responsibility to Protect, p. 16.

57 Glanville writes that Third World arguments in support of sovereign self-government and anti-apartheid action were often premised on human rights. ‘Traditional’ rights of sovereignty were hence contested, sovereignty was accepted as a responsibility. Still, we are told that this era of international society should be understood as ‘firmly non-interventionist’; ‘sovereigns were not held accountable to international society’, ‘increased monitoring and reporting was not the same as enforcement’, legitimate ‘scrutiny and condemnation’ was not intervention. But can the point hold? On what grounds does it hold? When does it fall apart? See Glanville, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect, pp. 164, 130–70.

58 A/RES/1513(XV), Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 14 December 1960.

59 A/RES/3068(XXVIII), Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, 30 November 1973.

60 A/810, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 9 December 1948.

61 Twenty-six abstained. See A/RES/3068(XXVIII).

62 A/31/104, S/12092, The Chairman of the Special Committee Against Apartheid to the Secretary-General, 1 June 1976.

63 A/31/104, S/12092. Emphasis added.

64 After relenting to the 1977 arms embargo, the United States and the United Kingdom vetoed against more far-reaching sanctions again in 1988. Thatcher notably denounced the ANC as a ‘typical terrorist organisation’ just a year prior at the Vancouver Commonwealth Summit.

65 See especially para. 7 in A/RES/1513(XV).

66 Bogra, Mohammad Ali, ‘Address of Pakistan during the opening session’, in Abdulgani, Roeslan (ed.), Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung (Jakarta: Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1955), p. 109Google Scholar.

67 As suggested by the first article of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. See Burke, Decolonization, pp. 35–59; on the relationship of self-determination to international order-making and nondomination, see Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire; on the idea of a wide Bandung ethic, see, for instance, Okafor, Obiora Chinedu, ‘The Bandung ethic and international human rights praxis’, in Eslava, Luis, Fakhri, Michael, and Nesiah, Vasuki (eds), Bandung, Global History, and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 515–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 A/5763, Declaration Adopted by the Second Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries held in Cairo, 10 October 1964.

69 A/5763, Declaration on the Struggle for National Liberation Adopted by the Fourth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries held in Algiers, 9 September 1973.

70 Charter of the Organization of African Unity, United Nations Treaty Series, 479:6947, 25 May 1963.

71 See Akinyemi, A. Bolaji, ‘The Organization of African Unity and the concept of non-interference in internal affairs of member states’, British Yearbook of International Law, 46 (1972–3), pp. 394–7Google Scholar; Elias, T. O., ‘The Charter of the Organization of African Unity’, The American Journal of International Law, 59:2 (1965), pp. 243–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 ‘Address to the Conference of African Heads of State and Government, 24 May 1963’, in Nkrumah, Kwame, Revolutionary Path (London: Panaf, 1973), p. 241Google Scholar.

73 On the African High Command and other attempts at regional defense systems, see Imobighe, T. A., ‘An African High Command: The search for a feasible strategy of continental defence’, African Affairs, 79:315 (1980), pp. 241–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Adebajo, Adekeye and Landsberg, Chris, ‘The heirs of Nkrumah: Africa's new interventionists’, Pugwash Occassional Papers, 2:1 (2001), pp. 65–90Google Scholar.

74 Nkrumah, ‘Address to the Conference of African Heads of State and Government’, p. 235.

75 A/6700, Report of the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 2 October 1967; Dube, Emmanuel, ‘Relations between liberation movements and the OAU’, in Shamuyarira, N. M. (ed.), Essays on the Liberation of Southern Africa (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1971), p. 27Google Scholar.

76 See Imobighe, ‘An African high command’, pp. 247–9.

77 Quoted in ‘OAU ministerial meeting hears call for a combined African defence force’, Jordan Times (25 June 1977). See also ‘OAU asks for a military force’, New York Times (28 January 1977).

78 ‘OAU ministerial’, Jordan Times (25 June 1977).

79 See the General Declaration reprinted in The First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Havana: Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1966), pp. 153–8.

80 The First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, p. 19.

81 See ‘Speech by Fidel Castro in the closing session’, in The Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian, and Latin American Peoples: A Staff Study (Washington, DC: US Printing Office, 1966), pp. 93, 91, 89.

82 The resolution adopted by the Council of the OAS on 2 February 1966 is reprinted in The Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian, and Latin American Peoples, pp. 145–6.

83 Letter to the President of the Security Council, S/7123, 8 February 1966.

84 Letter to the Secretary-General, S/3689, 25 October 1956.

85 A/C.1/SR.831, Official Records of the First Committee, 4 February 1957; A/C.1/SR.834, Official Records of the First Committee, 6 February 1957.

86 A/C.1/SR.839, Official Records of the First Committee, 8 February 1957.

87 Compare with the arguments of the Indian delegation: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘imposed the moral obligation upon States to promote respect for human rights’, that ‘intervention by the collective body of the United Nations for the sake of freedom and in accordance with the principles of the Charter was appropriate international action’. See Yearbook of the United Nations (New York: UN Department of Public Information, 1950), pp. 398–400.

88 A/C.6/SR.889, Official Records of the Sixth Committee, 3 December 1965.

89 Quoted in Gleijeses, Piero, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), p. 30Google Scholar. The key references are Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom.

90 A/5763, Declaration Adopted by the Fifth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries in Colombo, 19 August 1976.

91 The Swedish-produced documentary History Will Absolve Me was played on Havana national television on 23 July 1977. Castro's statements to an unidentified interviewer are reprinted in ‘Castro in TV film discusses Angola, Southern Africa’, LANIC, University of Texas at Austin, available at: {http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1977/19770723.html}.

92 ‘Closing speech to the First Party Congress, 22 December 1975’, in Taber, Michael (ed.), Fidel Castro's Speeches, Vol. 1 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1981), p. 80Google Scholar.

93 Mandela, Nelson, ‘Speech on July 26, 1991’, in Waters, Mary-Alice (ed.), How Far We Slaves Have Come (Atlanta, GA: Pathfinder Press, 1991), p. 12Google Scholar.

94 Kissinger, Henry's comments in ‘News Conference, San Jose, February 24, 1976’, Department of State Bulletin, 74:1916 (1976), p. 350Google Scholar.

95 See, for example, the Declaration of Heads of State or Government of the Non-Aligned Countries reprinted in The Conference of Heads of States or Government of Non-Aligned Countries (Belgrade: Editions Jugoslavija, 1961), pp. 253–61.

96 See the Bandung Final Communiqué reprinted in Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung, pp. 161–70; Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India, United Nations Treaty Series, 299:4307, 29 April 1954; A/RES/20/2131, Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty, 21 December 1965.

97 See, for instance, Keene, ‘International hierarchy and the origins of the modern practice of intervention’, pp. 1079–82.

98 Wheeler, Saving Strangers, pp. 2, 21–52.

99 ‘[I]t is not our perspective but the historical record itself that can be called Eurocentric.’ Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 2. If the ‘examples are mostly drawn, in one form or another, from the experience of the Western world’, this merely ‘reflects the historical record’. Simms and Trim, ‘Towards a history’, p. 18.

100 Ibid., p. 11.