Last week, Sen. Romeo Dallaire spoke at the House about the Will to Intervene, (W2I) the report of a group proposing ways in which politicians, civil society and the media can assist in efforts to prevent mass atrocities. Fellow scholar Mirwais Nazhat also talked about his speech, and one the Senator had given earlier that day.
My concern with the Senator’s speech – and the short conversation I had with him afterward – was the foundation of his thoughts in the idea of ‘intervention.’ The Will to Intervene is, giving it a quick flip through, really about ‘the will to threaten and use military force’ or, to further demystify the unspeak: ‘the will to bomb or shoot (or threaten to bomb or shoot) perpetrators of mass atrocities.’ That is, the report is less broadly about the prevention of mass atrocities than it is about making real the promise of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the legal framework guiding so-called ‘humanitarian intervention.’
The report’s language of ‘intervention’, untied from its coddling, though now widely understood connection to humanitarian war-making, implies that states are free entities before we engage with them. It gives the impression that whatever attempted genocide or terrible war crimes or crimes against humanity might justify ‘our’ ‘intervention’ takes place against pre-existing pretense of disengagement, of absence; other societies fail to really obtain an existence for us until they threaten to repeat the kind of horrors perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews.
I am not a pacifist. There are times when murder – for that is what humanitarian intervention is founded on – may be the best or only way to avoid mass atrocities. The question that the W2I sidesteps is the incredible importance of thinking about how we can not intervene, but engage to promote justice. Preventing a genocide is an undeniable good, but preventing a genocide in a way which avoids the massive loss of life involved in war is a greater good. If efforts were focused not on leveraging the will to deploy force or the threat of force, but on promoting more substantial justice, couldn’t two birds be killed with one stone? Indeed, if we think of justice as its own reward, doesn’t promoting justice to avoid both genocide and humanitarian intervention kill three birds with one stone – or, that is, save three?
I am not saying that its authors purposefully obscured these issues, just that I think consideration of them should be more central. Page 7 of the report talks about the structural factors which can lead to mass atrocities – including poverty and inequality. Yet the policy proposals are focused on R2P, not on structural factors. It becomes clear that the identification of these structural factors is solely instrumental: to identify those locations where there is a high risk of imminent genocide.
The problem here is as epistemological as it is ideological; I’m not sure that the report’s perspective is a result as much of liberal political philosophy as it is a privileging of increasingly-irrelevant understandings of our international relations universe. R2P is conceived of as a sui generis exception to the fundamental legal foundation of a pre-existing international system: the fundamental protection of the sovereignty of individual states. Reading on the modern realities of sovereignty reveals that while some its underlying assumptions are still quite relevant, others have lost their real ability to describe how the world truly functions. Deregulation of global financial markets, the centrality of the international financial institutions, the global arms trade, other trade flows, environmental treaties; all these constitute the world we live in as much as the protection of sovereignty; each in their own way is an exception to an ideal of sovereignty.
To think about how one way of undermining ‘sovereignty’ can promote justice – through violence – while ignoring how sovereignty’s already-existing occlusions, exceptions, derogations or reimaginings might themselves be leveraged to promote justice seems – what? disingenuous? shortsighted? dangerous? Let us say ‘less than ideal.’ Let us argue reductio ad Hitlerum. The Nazis came to power in the fallout of Versailles. What might have happened in Germany if that treaty hadn’t been so bad for Germany? Might we have avoided the series of events that led to the seizing of power by Hitler? That is, might we have avoided both the Holocaust and WWII?
There are two responses to the demand for such a radical realignment of thinking. The first is that promoting substantial justice and not just retributive justice is hard. That’s a fair answer, but I think that it’s insufficient. Those who promote such views are saying that they are willing to pay in someone else’s blood the toll of having their arguments pass muster for the powerful. This is especially troubling in light of the fact, pointed out to me by another fellow scholar, that the entire discourse of the Will to Intervene is founded in a discourse of ‘our’ will to intervene in ‘other’ countries. Think that we’re incapable of massively abusing force on internal enemies? Just watch us. Think that our young people can’t sustain a culture of irrational violence? How about 23 violent crimes per year for every hundred people, two thirds committed by those under 24 – in a city with five universities. Glad that ours is a society innocent of turning economic resentments into xenophobia? If only it were so. Other ‘enlightened’ nations are no shrinking violets on these
If we took seriously the idea that every state has a right to do violence to states whose internal affairs they consider to be ‘atrocious’, do we imagine that this rule will meaningfully apply to the United States, to Canada, to Europe? Do we believe that this rule will meaningfully apply to China?
If not, then R2P allows the powerful to continue to maintain the injustice of the status quo while allowing them to use massive violence when that system breaks down. The Will to Intervene is simply the extension of a project which supports a selective sovereignty which privileges certain countries and populations, without challenging the basic distribution of power in the world, and without questioning the way in which that power distribution might contribute to the problem which the writers are interested in doing something about: mass atrocities.
The ‘too hard’ rebuttal to the argument for a reorientation of anti-genocide efforts is also internally incoherent: the entire basis of the W2I project is in the idea that dominant power interests aren’t already onside, and need to be challenged. If R2P was already a de facto reality then W2I wouldn’t be needed. Senator Dallaire and his colleagues make a claim that their position is founded in challenging a paradigm of sovereignty founded in entrenched interests. I think that they are bona fide in that effort, and sincere in that audaciousness. Seeing Senator Dallaire speak, one is given the sense that he would be as radical as necessary in his worldview if he could reduce the incidence of the kind of horror he saw in Rwanda. But he is a General first; perhaps that’s why he is thinking about military solutions to complex problems.
There’s a second answer, of course, one which I find much more interesting. That’s the answer from Pangloss, often somehow the fallback position of unreconstructed liberals: we are living in the best of all possible worlds. The second answer might go something like this: capitalism is good, there is much less scarcity than there used to be because of it, less scarcity means less violence, and facts speak for themselves: there is, indeed less violence, and fewer people dying from it as a result. The job of the world community shouldn’t be to get in the way of the system that’s got us here, but to clean up the mess of those marginal cases that didn’t get the memo.
For a variety of reasons, that’s an argument that I am interested in engaging with; my work is very much engaged with whether, in thinking about prosperity and justice, we can have our cake and eat it too. Nonetheless, I also have a reply to the answer from ‘liberalism.’ Sovereignty, as we imagine it right now, stands starkly in the way of the idealization of the very capitalism supported by the liberal argument. As put by Unger
Not surprisingly, I am told that I am not alone in these criticisms. I still have to pick up a copy, but apparently Anne Orford has raised similar concerns in her Reading Humanitarian Intervention
