The main problem with intervening in an ethnic war like Rwanda is that, even if your intentions are noble (doubtful, especially for France), what do you do once you’re there? In Kosovo, we won the war for the Kosovars, ostensibly because they were victims of ethnic cleansing. If we’d done the same in Darfur, the entire country and probably several of its neighbors would have collapsed in catastrophic violence. If we’d intervened in Sri Lanka, whose side would we have taken? The government who now holds 250,000 people in concentration camps? The terrorist LTTE?

Ethnic wars end when someone wins, or when both sides realize they can’t and agree to a political solution. Political solutions, like that in Kenya last year (incidentally the only time R2P has actually been employed, according to UN R2P expert Ed Luck), are usually the only hope for ending ethnic violence… or a smashing victory by one side, as in Rwanda in 1994 or Sri Lanka this year. We didn’t intervene in Sri Lanka, even when a thousand people were dying a day. We didn’t even really consider it. Nor should we have. The world’s a cruel place sometimes, and sending in foreign guns to an internal conflict seldom makes it less so.

And this is exactly the problem. If sovereignty is not a shield against military invasions, then you need weapons, preferably nuclear weapons. There are, of course, plenty of other ways to disincentivize bad behavior: political, economic, legal (indictment of leaders of states, for example).

Didn’t thousands and thousands of people die during the American Civil War? Or am I thinking of another, less unambiguously positive war?

The argument assumes that, once a state has sufficient reason internally to authorize military action in a foreign country, it will then be forced to look for reasons justifying that action under international law (IL). This need for an IL justification acts to hamper a state’s ability to use military force. Otherwise, of course, the existence or non-existence of a R2P doctrine wouldn’t make a shred of difference with respect to non-humanitarian uses of military force.

And it’s this assumption that I do not buy. There are certain norms of international behavior that inform the likely international reaction to a state’s use of military action. But these do not, on my view, have much to do with IL. A state may consider likely economic sanctions, or worse, from other countries. Whether these sanctions, or worse, are forthcoming has very little to do with close legal questions of intent (e.g. did they REALLY mean this to be a humanitarian mission?). There is no impartial judge deciding whether sanctions, or worse, are warranted; there is a group of self-interested nations deciding whether sanctions, or worse, are warranted.

So I simply do not see how a state’s ability to plead R2P as justification has much to do with whether the state takes military action, and whether other states support or punish that military action.

The benefit of an R2P doctrine is NOT that it will thereby, by legal force alone, change the behavior of states; nor is the problem that it will thereby, by providing legal justification, change the behavior of states.

Rather the limited benefit is that it contributes to the growth of a new international norm, and is an explicit indication that sovereignty is not a legal shield for crimes against humanity. Will that make much difference in itself? No. Is it a small part of a larger process of bringing order to the conduct of states in the world? Yes.

Renting out its army to various UN peacekeeping forces is a major foreign exchange earner for Bangladesh, IIRC.

I don’t think we’ve yet mentioned what I regard as basically the only unambiguously positive humanitarian intervention so far in history; the American Civil War.