Moral Hazard and Conflict Intervention

Abstract

Today, international organizations and individual states experience a great deal of pressure to respond to complex emergencies and humanitarian disasters. This perceived responsibility for action to preserve human rights and maintain the internal political stability of other states is unlikely to go away. These issues are not easily understood from a conventional security perspective focused on the high politics of interstate crises, superpower rivalry, arms races and the prevention of war. In recent years, however, struggles within states involving civil wars, local insurrections or ethnic violence far outnumber those stemming from external aggression or conflict between states (Wallensteen and Sollenberg 1995). Most recent interventions by the United Nations are motivated less by direct threats to international peace and security than by disturbing images of violence that compel affective reactions. By definition, assuaging humanitarian concerns of this nature requires intervention into conflicts while the conflict is raging, not after belligerents have accepted a cease-fire. Traditional peacekeeping rules of engagement and measures of success no longer seem applicable in situations where civilians are at risk of violence and militias operate outside the purview of existing authority structures.