Humanitarian Intervention edited by J L Holzgrefe and Robert O Keohane

...Instead, they should seek strong partnerships with effective neighbors, support from larger powers, and effective regional arrangements that will relieve them of defense spending, provide security and economic benefits for their people, and secure local and eventually regional stability...

...to relieve the suffering of millions of displaced persons...

...This book helps explain why that has been the case...

...The recent situation in Liberia is a case in point...

...Few subjects are more important in our time...

...The story becomes more complex as these underlying issues are translated into the specifics of the UN Charter, which provides only two legitimate reasons for a state's resort to the use of force-in self-defense or with the approval of the Security Council...

...It was not until NATO's American-led intervention in Kosovo in 1999 that the United States was finally prepared to take military action for primarily humanitarian reasons without prior UN authorization...

...and the reactions of the great powers are often complex...

...Still, as Stromseth says simply, the customary international law approach better protects the human rights of victims of atrocities by, at least, being open to an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention...

...Unlawful acts, Franck writes, should not be penalized when obeying the law would have led to a far worse result...

...As the century progressed, however, mass murder, human abuse, and the attendant flows of desperate refugees became endemic: the Holocaust, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the Iraq massacres, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo...

...The book's focus is, in the first instance, on the unresolved tensions between international law and morality-between the increasingly questionable and outdated Westphalian concepts of sovereignty formed in the seventeenth century to serve absolute rulers, and the circumstances of our modern world, with its porous state structures and new ethical impulses to prevent evil and suffering wherever found...

...Thomas Franck argues for bridging the resulting chasm between legality and moral legitimacy pragmatically...

...In Power's view, these are all tragic excuses for a persistent lack of will...

...One suspects, however, that Bush's policies are aberrations and that the international system will eventually right itself...

...Allan Buchanan, Stromseth, and others support the incremental evolution of customary international law...

...Some may find it quaint that the writers are largely focused on the legalities of humanitarian intervention at a time when George W. Bush has asserted our unilateral right to make preemptive war, is systematically weakening a wide range of international treaty systems, threatens the UN with "irrelevance," and makes frustration of an international war crimes court a national priority...

...There is no provision in the UN Charter that justifies humanitarian interventions...

...Today, of course, we are confronted with Liberia and the Congo...

...George Jaeger was chairman of NATO's Political Committee and is diplomat-in-residence at Middlebury College...

...This reconceptualizing of sovereignty is also Keohane's theme...

...The hope is that a succession of internationally accepted humanitarian interventions might gradually produce a new normative consensus and legal precedents...

...of hiding behind alleged lack of information or consensus...

...As the cold-war systems dissolve, new states emerge, previously dependent states struggle for survival, and weak or artificial states disintegrate under ethnic strains that premature democracy is unable to contain...

...Interventions based mainly on humanitarian grounds have so far been rare...

...This burgeoning humanitarian movement has, as we know, accomplished much and relieved much suffering, but it has even more often failed to do so...

...External interventions in such situations, as in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, and now Afghanistan, are therefore justified not only by concern to alleviate immediate suffering, but also by the broadly destabilizing consequences of continued disorder...

...That such a process faces obstacles is obvious...

...A major issue for international lawyers, who are the main contributors to this book, is to find possible ways of modifying current international law to justify sound humanitarian interventions in the future...

...The conundrum is how to achieve this without destroying the essentials of sovereignty (to which most states remain ferociously attached) or producing a political crisis over any effort to modify the UN Charter...

...response has been one of inaction or delay...

...Even in bad neighborhoods, however, incremental expansion of regional zones of civil order and peace should be the priority...

...Yet most of the contributors also warn that after NATO's intervention in Kosovo, which technically contravened the UN Charter, the status quo is no longer tenable...

...In sum, these are frankly academic essays, chock-full of insights and ideas, but not easy to read...

...the practical and moral criteria justifying intervention are still in an early formative stage...

...None of the authors claims to have found the answer...

...She rejects formal efforts to amend the charter as politically illusory (since not only most second- and third-world countries, but Russia, China, and even the United States would strenuously oppose weakening their own sovereignty provisions...

...in short, to respond to our understanding of the common humanity we all share and to be our brothers' keepers...

...As Samantha Power documented last year in A Problem from Hell, the United States, like other states, has, until recently, been consistently unwilling to intervene militarily to stop ongoing genocides or other human-rights abuses...

...George Jaeger When can a country rightful-ly intervene in another sov-ereign state for humanitar-ian reasons...

...each case is unique...

...To succeed, these and similar states, Ignatieff argues, should therefore abjure nationalism and temptations of "sovereign" independence in the classic sense, which only perpetuate their incapacity...

...Chaos, Ignatieff argues, has replaced tyranny as the main twenty-first century challenge...

...Troubled regions in good neighborhoods are likely to find this easier to do...

...of scruples over infringing on sovereignty...

...As a result, large numbers of contemporary "states" no longer have even the most essential characteristics of classic "sovereignty" but are failing shells whose weakness severely threatens themselves and their neighbors...

...With modern communications have come greater knowledge and increased outrage, and for many the moral urge to act: to stop chaos, carnage, politically contrived rapes and famines, torture and other shocking abuses of human rights...

...Unthinkable throughout recent centuries, when the internal affairs of states were strictly off limits, this question has now become a major issue of law and public conscience...

...Although often "deeply concerned," as in Rwanda, and sometimes willing to provide post-facto relief, the official U.S...

...In that case, these essays should make a real contribution...

...The most exciting essays in this volume, by Michael Ignatieff and Robert Keohane, transcend all these issues and "unbundle" sovereignty itself...

...Jane Stromseth, former director of Humanitarian Affairs at the National Security Council, sets out some of the options...

...She also judges such reform impractical, since no revision would precisely foresee the particular parameters of future humanitarian crises...

...The twentieth century began with the Turkish genocide against the Armenians (1894-1915...

...Stromseth, too, sees merit in this "excusable breach" approach to humanitarian interventions not formally authorized by the UN, but cautions that the resulting tensions between legality and legitimacy could erode both...