Alex Chung (University of Sydney) has posted Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention: A Liberal Defence on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper examines the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention on the basis of liberal conceptions of international society. Discourses and constructs of legitimacy in the context of interstate and domestic democratic governance will be discussed. International Human Rights Law (HRL) and International Humanitarian Law (IHL) will be examined in relation to the state and the obligations of international society. Primarily, the exercise of human agency and achievement of human security as expressed by Ignatieff, Arbour, Foot, Bellamy, Evans, and Glanville will be used to premise the paper on the basis of human equality. In doing so, this paper will assert that states have an inherent duty to uphold the human rights of its population and similarly apply humanitarian standards of conduct during times of armed conflict. As such, international human rights and humanitarian law will be closely examined to present discourses of legitimacy based on international norms and standards of state conduct. In asserting the sovereign state’s obligation to its population, this paper will applyhuman rights and humanitarian standards to analyse the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm and determine whether it can sustain claims of the legitimacy of military intervention. Punctuated by various examples of intra-state conflict, legal pronouncements, international institutional declarations, and state practice, this paper answers the question of whether the liberal conception of international society can facilitate claims to legitimate military intervention on humanitarian grounds in the international system?