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.

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...

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 and material costs remains underexplored. In this paper, I argue that the most plausible answer to this question is found in a pluralist approach. First, we should look to the Contribution to Problem Principle, according to which the costs are shared based on the historical responsibility of states (...) for the occurrence of atrocities. For the many cases where this principle does not apply or needs to be supplemented, I suggest a novel alternative in the Entitlement-adjusted Ability Principle, according to which costs should be distributed based on states' levels of resources that have been tainted by historical rights violations. (shrink)

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)