Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer

Ten Myths About the 2011 Intervention in Libya

Five years after the 2011 international military intervention, Libya is still undergoing a violent post-Muammar Gaddafi transition. Between August 2014 and December 2015, the country has been divid...

Humanitarian Intervention and Disinterestedness

One should notice that humanitarian intervention is defined according to its goal. It is humanitarian because it has a humanitarian goal; this aspect is common to all definitions. Humanitarian intervention is always conducted in order to, aiming to prevent or stop certain actions. It seems to be nothing but an intervention in which the intention is humanitarian. Therefore, the contemporary conception of humanitarian intervention is entirely based on what is usually called the “right intention” or the “good intention” criterion that is one of the classic requirements of the medieval just war doctrine. For Aquinas, the right intention (recta intentio) was the advancement of good or the avoidance of evil. Modern day scholars have conserved these two aspects. Right intention, in its positive definition, is the aim to create or restore peace, to provide assistance, help, justice, to prevent or stop human suffering. In its negative definition, it is the absence of self-interest motives. From that point of view, the right intention criterion expresses itself by the requirement of disinterestedness of the intervening state. This essay aims to show that requiring the disinterestedness of the intervening state is very problematic and should therefore be abandoned. The goal is to reconstruct an ethics of humanitarian intervention without an a priori right intention criterion, which I submit here to a realist criticism. My conceptual framework is a qualified version of realism that, contrary to a widespread prejudice, is not an amoral conception of foreign policy, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 19:207–216 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online DOI: 10.1080/10402650701353828