"Humanitarian intervention" as used below means action by international actors across national boundaries including the use of military force taken with the objective of relieving severe and widespread human suffering and violation of human rights within states where local authorities are unwilling or unable to do so. This essay will attempt better to understand decisions about humanitarian intervention from the narrow perspective of looking at the proximate considerations attendant to the inter…
Read more"Humanitarian intervention" as used below means action by international actors across national boundaries including the use of military force taken with the objective of relieving severe and widespread human suffering and violation of human rights within states where local authorities are unwilling or unable to do so. This essay will attempt better to understand decisions about humanitarian intervention from the narrow perspective of looking at the proximate considerations attendant to the intervention itself, particularly focusing on the priority of ground_level implementation and the recognition of the integral relationship between military action and reconstruction. Since what is confronted on the ground will be determinative, it is important to see if the decisions above can be better connected to the realities below. The inherent complexity of the subject will be confirmed here using selected cases with which the author has experience in the field; concepts and constructs identified which have been developed in attempts to frame the problem; constraints faced by the policy_makers indicated; and moral aspects of the enterprise considered.
