Human Rights and Military Intervention
- PDF / 83,248 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 442 x 663 pts Page_size
- 91 Downloads / 222 Views
Since being launched after the end of the Cold War, the debate relating to humanitarian intervention, one of the biggest topics of the ‘new world order’, has largely been dominated by two groups of authors: political scientists (especially from the sphere of international relations) and international lawyers. This dominance has brought about a certain limitation of concerns and it is therefore more than welcome that it is currently starting to be challenged by the representatives of other social sciences. The book under review, adopting the perspective of applied philosophy1 offers a good example of such a shift, and shows the large potential that the ‘other’ (non-political science and non-legal) approaches to the topic contain. The book is a collective work by 16 authors, mostly from the United Kingdom. It was published as the extension of the annual conference of the Society for Applied Philosophy held in Manchester in May 2001. With regard to that date, the texts take into consideration primarily the events of the 1990 s (special attention is paid to the Kosovo crisis of 1999) and they only partly reflect the evolution after 11 September 2001. In the framework of the general topic of humanitarian intervention, defined broadly as ‘military intervention across state borders for humanitarian purposes’ (p. 2), six more specific questions are analyzed in six separate chapters. Rather than seeking to find clear answers to these questions, the book tries to present different ideological and methodological points of view that can be adopted when addressing them. The first question, Are there genuinely universal human rights?, introduces the classical but still pertinent and highly interesting debate between universalism, represented mainly by Maria Marzano, and particularism, defended — in its moderated form — by Donal O’Reardon. The two authors seem to be in deep disagreement as far as the source of human rights and the scope of their global validity are concerned, sharing practically only the conviction about the need to ground human rights, as further developed in Gideon Calder’s text. The second question, Is military action a morally acceptable form of intervention?, Journal of International Relations and Development, 2005, 8, (96–99) r 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1408-6980/05 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/jird
Book Review
97
provokes a similarly stimulating discussion about the relationship between humanitarianism and the use of military force. Both contributors, Nigel Dovel and Paul Robinson, refuse on the one hand to consider humanitarian violence as an oxymoron and to a priori condemn military intervention for human rights. On the other hand, for different reasons, they nevertheless cast doubts on the appropriateness of such an approach in the contemporary state of affairs. In this context, Dovel draws attention to the ethical dimension of the problematic (the harmony between the ends and the means), while Robinson follows a more pragmatic, Clausewitzian argument focused on the tendency of war to escalate
Data Loading...
