Authorizing Humanitarian Intervention

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the debate over who can authorize humanitarian intervention in contemporary international society. The first section examines the Security Council’s role in authorizing the use of force and how in the post—Cold War period it has expanded its definition of threats to international peace and security to encompass humanitarian crises. In the next section, I analyze the legal and philosophical positions on “proper authority” and make two central claims: (1) that international law on the use of force suggests that interventions for humanitarian purposes currently require Security Council authorization; and (2) that the Council should be considered not as the “proper authority” for international society in matters of peace and security but rather as an entity whose pronouncements are “authoritative.” In the process, I suggest how the authoritativeness of the Council has been weakened by questions about representation and decision making, as well as by problems of capacity and delegation. The third section focuses on the politics of authorization and identifies the actors in contemporary world politics who hold various positions on the value of and need for Council authorization. I conclude with an analysis of the implications of the debate on authorizing humanitarian intervention for our understanding of the role of the United Nations (UN) in global security and the state of global multilateralism, more generally.

Among statesmen, the lovers of naked power are far less typical than those who aspire to clothe themselves in the mantle of legitimate authority; emperors may be nude, but they do not like to be so, to think of themselves so, or to be so regarded.

—This Claude, 1966

I would like to thank David Malone, Nicholas Wheeler, and the editors of this volume for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.