An institutional approach to humanitiarian intervention

Abstract

Faced with abuses and deprivations, we tend to focus too much on the question whether humanitarian intervention in some concrete situation is permissible (or even obligatory), and too little on the question how we might intervene at the level of institutional design. This makes us slide far too easily from the claim that in many cases military interventions will produce more harm than good (true enough)to the conclusion that, sadly, there is nothing we can do about the deplorable global state of human-rights fulfillment. A (global and) institutional conception of human rights, centering around the negative duty not to cooperate in the imposition of unjust practices, remedies this deficiency. It appropriately points us toward global institutional reforms which we can and ought to initiate and support.