Humanitarian intervention? : responding ethically to globalising violence in the age of mediated violence

In order to begin the task of establishing an alternative framework for intervention – not necessarily to argue against or replace the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), but to reframe it – this chapter will firstly set out some definitional claims. It will begin with an argument for returning to encompassing definitions based on the idea of humanity as historically constituted and made up of persons-in-relation. Second, the chapter will argue that the nature of contemporary conditions makes conventional interventions unviable. Intervention requires a different grounding process. For example, part of the problem of learning lessons is that each act of intervening is judged as a separate act in a modernist timeline of separate events and separable spatial zones. Third, the chapter will argue for a more synthetic ethics of intervention, suggesting that the different forms of ethics need to be brought into interrelation: a code-based ethics, including an ethics of rights; a consequentialist ethics based on assessing outcomes, and a virtue-based ethics based on arguing for a grounded sense of human values about what is good. My overall argument is that intervention is currently framed by increasingly material and ideational abstraction in such a way as to inevitably undermine humanitarian intervention efforts, however well intentioned (see Damian Grenfell’s chapter in this volume). Materially, for example, we now live in the age of drones and guided missiles, commanded by communications technologies that abstract time and space, that disembody the war machine, and which blur the boundaries between combat and assassination (Dunn 2013). Ideationally, we now pick selectively through the enumerated sections of abstract codes of conduct (such as R2P) while emptying out virtue-based ethics through passionate speeches in parliament or congress about the need to act in the name of ‘humanity’. This does not mean intervention should not occur, but it does suggest that the terms of intervention have to be fundamentally changed.