Leveraging the idea of ‘Humanitarian War’

Abstract

In attempting to bring the frame of war more directly into the discussion over humanitarian intervention in the early 1990s, Adam Roberts quipped that ‘“humanitarian war” is an oxymoron that may yet become a reality’. No longer was humanitarianism only meant to restrain the means of warfare, but the violent and political logic of war was now supposed to serve the caring and universal dictates of humanitarianism. This essay takes the chance to theorize the idea of humanitarian war further to help improve our understanding of the reality that has become of it, where not only humanitarian interventions or coercive enactments of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ feature humanitarian casus belli, but even more geopolitically motivated wars often do as well. It notes how scholarship on such phenomena often rests on overly restrictive and sometimes only implicit notions of how a humanitarian justification can and does influence the practice of war. It then offers a deeper and more plausible theorization of humanitarian war, laying out a range of possible forms and a central tendency that ties them together. This essay closes by discussing some of the benefits of grounding future analyses of humanitarian war in the theorization on offer.