Humanitarian War Is an Oxymoron, So Why Do We Keep Doing It? By Nathan Trimble - Modern War Institute
Semantically, the concept of humanitarian war seems a contradiction in terms—indeed, to some, even ridiculous. The United Nations ostensibly adopted the concept of humanitarian intervention in the early 1990s due to the international expansion of human rights doctrine and an increasing focus on aid to countries with natural disasters through resolutions in the 1980s. This was a natural transition after the UN Security Council had already been involved in the internal affairs of multiple Central American and African countries, as well as Iraq—all by 1991. Humanitarian intervention had become an instrument of the larger international community to maintain peace and stability. However, with the state failure, famine, and disease of Somalia in 1992 the United Nations developed an approach more militaristic in nature. Humanitarian intervention had transitioned to humanitarian war in which the host nation had now become an occupied country and in which the emphasis of the mission was no longer placed just on providing aid, but on human security. Humanitarian war became an outgrowth of these international mediations and is distinguishably an oxymoron as the result of over-militarized international efforts of humanitarian intervention by the United Nations in countries with unstable national governments or in which a centralized system of government was lacking completely. The divergent nature of the term humanitarian war can be seen the UN’s involvement in Somalia (1992), Kosovo (1999), and Libya (2011), three cases that highlight when the United Nations strayed from humanitarian intervention…