Last week I had the opportunity to partake in a workshop on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) at The Hague Institute of Global Justice (the Institute). The Institute is preparing to launch a project on R2P, seeking to bring academics, civil society and...
In the New York Times yesterday, Northwestern University political scientist Ian Hurd lays down the law on Syria and intervention: As a legal matter, the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons...
The US and UK are apparently preparing for air strikes against the Syrian Assad regime, claiming there is little doubt that it is responsible for horrific chemical weapons attacks. Syria has...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tim Dunne. He is Research Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Queensland and the past editor of the...
The catastrophes of Rwanda and Bosnia led to a debate in the 1990s about the warning-response gap. Conflict prevention and early warning systems did not seem up to scratch. Third parties intervened too late, if at all. Spending was skewed towards mitigating the effects of conflicts, not on stopping them happen in the first place. The spread of satellite television brought conflicts into more immediate public vision. It was feared this created a CNN effect whereby policymakers were forced into military intervention for humanitarian causes to satisfy a more globally-aware public opinion. But...
The House of Representatives recently just voted on a bill that would require the U.S. to remove its forces from Libya on the basis of the War Powers Act, arguing that the President had not received the Congressional go-ahead to keep the military in hostilities past a certain time threshhold. It earned the votes of 148 Congressmen of 435, 87 Republicans and 61 Democrats. The media presented it as demonstrating the muscles of the Tea Party libertarians defending congressional prerogatives against executive encroachment in true Jeffersonian tradition. I call bullshit and I have the crude data...
She's cool, but she's wrong.I have a short piece on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the October 2010 Review of International Studies Special Supplement on "Evaluating Global Orders" (that came out last week? I don’t get journals). It’s basically a reply to Louise Arbour, former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) who argued in 2008 that R2P was becoming “a duty of care in international law and practice”.For those of you who don’t have access to the journal (or just want a brief description) my argument is that Arbour's line of...
Some questions about Libya.To clear the decks, I'm instinctively uneasy with international interventions in civil wars, given the historical difficulties of keeping such interventions limited and the unintended consequences and moral hazards of such undertakings. Not to mention the burdens that states like the US and UK are now shouldering, with the constraints and pressures on our statecraft after Iraq and with Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, and the need to preserve what Walter Lippmann called a 'surplus' of power in reserve.But the general strategic context aside, this post is...
Why did the Obama administration really intervene in Libya? Andrew Sullivan and Steve Walt both reject the administration's claims (again) that we were on the verge of a mass slaughter in Libya if Qaddafi's forces had been allowed to move into Benghazi. Walt also wants us to read Alan Kuperman’s op-ed “A False Pretense for War?” As usual, Kuperman has an interesting take: First, he argues that there was no credible evidence of an imminent slaughter in Benghazi – and that, in fact, the signs point in the opposite direction – that Qaddafi has shown restraint with respect to attacking...
If I read him correctly, Armed Liberal thinks that I advanced an argument for intervening in Libya and that this makes some people who opposed the Iraq War a bunch of hypocrites.Or that my description of Obama's justifications are accurate and that those justifications don't sufficiently distinguish Libya from Iraq.I'm not entirely sure. Probably because I'm still kind of sick and I'm very tired. Regardless, AL raises some key issues after quoting my post:That kind of thing makes liberal hawks get all starry eyed. But what makes Libya different than most of the other places where tyrannical...
Since Stephanie has quoted me on the subject, I thought I’d share some thoughts on intervention and consistency. 1. Consistency is a virtue – but it isn’t the only virtue. Sometimes good judgement points us in the direction of inconsistency; this is so in personal life as well as domestic and international politics. We (most of us) overlook failings in our friends which would upset us in our enemies. In the realm of sexual politics, we (most of us) cut some slack for Bill Clinton in a way that we wouldn’t, and didn’t, for Clarence Thomas. We (most of us) were prepared to see force used...
-- Sir Thursday, Garth NixI'm tired of demands for an articulated "Obama Doctrine."Don't misunderstand me. I think it would be nice if the Obama Administration had an overarching vision for US foreign policy. It might even be a good thing if it could produce something resembling a coherent document on the subject instead of the stream-of-consciousness bureaucratic filler it tends to publish.What I emphatically reject is the idea that Obama ought to, in effect, retcon Libya by articulating an ex post facto grand strategy that makes sense of his decision to intervene.Why did we intervene in...