And then there was the conflicting norm that a state could invade another to interdict atrocities being committed there. Although “humanitarian intervention” was an idea and practice that stretched back to the 19th century, in 1948, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the U.N. established a convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide: of “never again.” Its inspirer, Raphael Lemkin, viewed the convention in the tradition of humanitarian intervention to prevent atrocities in other countries.
For the first few decades after 1948, it was unclear how the “never again” convention was supposed to be enforced. And in fact, state-sponsored atrocities continued in some places with impunity. The mass killing of suspected communists in Indonesia in 1965, the civil war in Nigeria two years later, civilian slaughters in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Uganda, Rhodesia, Burundi and the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s — all took place under the nose of the international community. None provoked an external intervention to stop or prevent the atrocities. When India tried to claim it was engaging in a humanitarian intervention in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in late 1971, other states rejected that label.
With the end of the Cold War, this passivity began to change. Mass killings in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia in 1995 marked an important turning point for the operationalization of the anti-genocide norm. Though international military forces failed to stop the atrocities in both countries, the U.N. would later establish criminal tribunals to prosecute those responsible for the bloodshed, and an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty developed the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) concept in 2001.
Those in Washington who like to present U.S. foreign policy in moral terms found the concept particularly delightful. The Bush administration invoked humanitarian aims in its Iraq invasion in 2003, and the U.S. and other actors invoked “never again” in relation to the conflict in Darfur in 2004. R2P was adopted by the heads of state and governments gathered at the World Summit in 2005 and is now endorsed by the U.N. Soon after, in 2008, Western states tried to extend its remit to natural disasters as a way to intervene in Myanmar when its military regime was accused of failing to respond to a cyclone, only to be resisted by China, Russia and South Africa, among other states.
A political norm rather than a new law, R2P conceives of sovereignty as conferring an obligation on states to safeguard their populations from the four atrocity crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Failure to do so (or the prospect of such a failure) can provide grounds for the Security Council to authorize a “humanitarian intervention,” as it did in Libya in 2011.