The man who hates humanitarian intervention
Writing in the Boston Globe, academic Alan Kuperman is doubling down on his claim that there never was a real threat of mass atrocities in Libya, and he’s marshaling new numbers from Human Rights Watch to make the case: Human Rights Watch has released data on Misurata, the next-biggest city in Libya and scene of ...
Writing in the Boston Globe, academic Alan Kuperman is doubling down on his claim that there never was a real threat of mass atrocities in Libya, and he's marshaling new numbers from Human Rights Watch to make the case:
Writing in the Boston Globe, academic Alan Kuperman is doubling down on his claim that there never was a real threat of mass atrocities in Libya, and he’s marshaling new numbers from Human Rights Watch to make the case:
Human Rights Watch has released data on Misurata, the next-biggest city in Libya and scene of protracted fighting, revealing that Moammar Khadafy is not deliberately massacring civilians but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government.
Misurata’s population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people — including combatants — have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22 — less than 3 percent — are women. If Khadafy were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties.
Kuperman comes awfully close to charging the administration with duplicity:
It is hard to know whether the White House was duped by the rebels or conspired with them to pursue regime-change on bogus humanitarian grounds. In either case, intervention quickly exceeded the UN mandate of civilian protection by bombing Libyan forces in retreat or based in bastions of Khadafy support, such as Sirte, where they threatened no civilians.
To put these charges in context, Kuperman is an established skeptic of humanitarian intervention and argued in a 2000 Foreign Affairs essay that intervention to stop the Rwandan genocide was not nearly as feasible as presented. In the course of that attempted debunking of interventionist arguments, he concluded that intervening for humanitarian purposes creates bad incentives:
[N]o policy of humanitarian military intervention should be implemented without a sober consideration of its unintended consequences. Recent interventions, whether in Bosnia, Kosovo, or East Timor, have been motivated by the impulse to provide humanitarian aid to a party visibly suffering in an internal conflict. But intervention in those cases also resulted in the weaker sides being bolstered militarily. This pattern creates perverse incentives for weaker parties in such conflicts to reject compromise and escalate fighting because they expect foreign intervention or hope to attract it. The result is often tragedy, as intervention arrives too little or too late to protect civilians. Thus a policy of intervening to relieve humanitarian emergencies that stem from internal conflicts may actually increase the number and extent of such emergencies a classic instance of moral hazard.
Most people who study humanitarian intervention propose ways of ensuring that the practice works better and more efficiently. Kuperman appears to believe that the world would be a better place if beleagured rebels and victims of atrocities simply understood that no help was on the way.
Kuperman responds:
Much of what you write is a fair characterization of my academic and policy writing on this topic. But your last point is not accurate: "Kuperman appears to believe that the world would be a better place if . . . victims of atrocities simply understood that no help was on the way." I actually call for intervention to help the innocent victims of atrocities, but advocate doing so in ways that generally avoid helping rebels. I’m quite explicit about that here and here. It’s also worth noting that I’ve written that we should have intervened in Rwanda in 1994 and Darfur in 2003, even though we could not have saved as many lives as claimed by intervention advocates.
I don’t hate humanitarian intervention. I just hate intervention that does more harm than good. So I’m not a fan of those who overstate the benefits and understate the costs of such intervention. There are usually better ways — i.e., enlightened diplomacy — to save lives.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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