Abstract
When Resolution 1973 was passed by the United Nations Security Council a strange contradiction quickly emerged regarding the justifications for this approval. On one side of the debate were pro-interventionists, who argued the mission was absolutely essential for humanitarian reasons, and that this mission could be a quasi-experiment of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. On the other side were those who didn’t see the reasoning of the Security Council through human security eyes, but instead saw the mission as a necessary means to steady a region that, throughout 2011, had been extremely unstable. In the wake of the Libyan intervention by the UN, and then by NATO, observers are left to wonder exactly why international forces chose to intervene in Libya, and what the future of interventionism will be as a result of the multistate mission.
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© 2013 Robert W. Murray
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Murray, R.W. (2013). Humanitarianism, Responsibility or Rationality? Evaluating Intervention as State Strategy. In: Hehir, A., Murray, R. (eds) Libya, the Responsibility to Protect and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273956_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273956_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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