Review Essay

• Krisch, Nico

Abstract

The essay reviews five recent works on humanitarian intervention which shed new light on central questions of the debate. The authors, mainly international lawyers but also scholars of international relations, philosophy and sociology, mainly agree that in positive international law, even after Kosovo, no right to unilateral humanitarian intervention has emerged. Several, however, regard this situation as morally unsatisfactory and offer important proposals for the future development of international law, although they remain vague on some crucial issues. Their moral argument rests on the assumption that an order based on individual rights, rather than state sovereignty, would endorse humanitarian intervention. But it is doubtful that individuals would favour such a right, given historical experiences, and it also seems more appropriate to locate the conflict between human rights and peace, rather than between human rights and state sovereignty, with strong moral arguments supporting each side. Moreover, most proponents of unilateral humanitarian intervention neglect the value of institutions; they conclude a unilateral legal right directly from the moral argument. However, in domestic liberal theory institutions have long played a crucial role, and they deserve a similar role on the international level, as some of the contributions emphasize. Such institutions would allow for accommodation of diverging conceptions of morality, and Western states should, both for reasons of history and political theory, seek such accommodation rather than use their current power to impose their morality on the rest of the world.