This article considers the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention. It first examines the arguments for the duty to intervene and questions the possibility of supererogatory humanitarian intervention. It then considers the leading objections to this duty which, it is argued, are largely unpersuasive. In the final section, the article considers the duty to intervene in the context of the responsibility to protect doctrine, which provides the framework within which debates about humanitarian intervention now in large part occur.

The objective of this paper is to develop a novel account of how the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention should be assigned to states. It takes as its point of departure two worries about the best existing answer to this question, namely: that it is insensitive to historical considerations, and that its distribution is unfair. Against this background I propose that the duty to intervene should be assigned to states based on the strength of their claim to reject the burden (...) of intervention. Specifically, I argue that the strength of such claims should be determined by ability to intervene effectively, adjusted for historical responsibility for the rights-violations taking place, and the extent to which their capacity for intervention derives from resources tainted by historical rights-violations. This approach, I will argue, can better accommodate the centrality of protecting the victims while also taking into account both historical and distributive concerns. (shrink)

While some suggestions have been made as to how the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention should be assigned to specific states, the question of how to assign the duty to carry the economic a...

ABSTRACTSome suggest that the duty of humanitarian intervention should be discharged by states that are historically responsible for the occurrence of violence. A fundamental problem with this suggestion is that historically responsible states might be ill-suited to intervene because they are unlikely to enjoy support from the local population. Cécile Fabre has suggested a way around that problem, arguing that responsible states ought to pay for humanitarian interventions even though they ought not to take part in the military operations. We (...) claim that Fabre’s idea is subject to two concerns. First, the duty to perform might not be appropriately transferrable from the historically responsible state to another state because it would allow the primary duty bearer to escape the worst costs of intervention. Second, an intervention might be as unlikely to generate local support when a historically responsible state pays for an intervention as when it performs it. These problems are enough to cast doubt on Fabr... (shrink)