{"id":3211,"date":"2024-04-16T10:51:47","date_gmt":"2024-04-16T10:51:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/?p=3211"},"modified":"2026-02-10T21:13:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T21:13:55","slug":"a-morte-do-humanitarismo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/artigo\/a-morte-do-humanitarismo\/","title":{"rendered":"A morte do humanitarismo"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-post-date has-small-font-size\"><time datetime=\"2024-04-16T10:51:47+00:00\">abril 16, 2024<\/time><\/div>\n\n\n<div style=\"height:20px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>They called it \u201cthe 21st century arriving early\u201d. In April 1999, the&nbsp;<em>New York Times<\/em>&nbsp;declared Kosovo a template for the new millennium. Nato\u2019s humanitarian intervention in the Kosovo War that spring would augur a new era in which human rights would trump national sovereignty. No head of state, irrespective of their democratic legitimacy, would have the right to slaughter their own citizens. In the future, \u201cthe Western democracies\u201d, led by the United States, would be tasked with protecting people from violations of their human rights \u2013 anywhere they were under threat. An uncharacteristically optimistic Human Rights Watch report from that year christened it \u201cthe beginning of a new era for the human rights movement\u201d. V\u00e1clav Havel, the Czech playwright and darling of democratic transition, concurred. \u201cHuman beings are more important than the state,\u201d he said. \u201cThe idol of state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bernard Kouchner, the first UN mission chief in Kosovo, was similarly hopeful. The former communist student activist from France, who had protested the Vietnam War and French colonialism in Algeria in 1968, wrote of the incipient world in a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/archive.is\/v8bRA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1999 op-ed<\/a>&nbsp;for the&nbsp;<em>LA Times<\/em>. \u201cCan we dream of a 21st century where the horrors of the 20th will not be repeated?\u2019\u201d Kouchner asked. \u201cThe answer is a hopeful yes \u2013 if, as part of the emergent world order, a new morality can be codified in the \u2018right to intervention\u2019 against abuses of national sovereignty.\u201d This era would marry the Kouchner generation\u2019s 1960s activist sensibilities and internationalist affectations with unprecedented military, economic and political power. At the end of the 20th century, wars of nationalism naturally shocked the Western conscience, but war waged in defence of human rights would imbue it with a new moral force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This was a different internationalism than the kind that Kouchner and others of his ilk had embraced as insurgent students. As Kristin Ross writes in&nbsp;<em>May \u201968 and Its Afterlives<\/em>&nbsp;(2002), \u201cThe colonial or third-world other of the 1960s [was] refigured and transformed from militant and articulate fighter and thinker to \u2018victim\u2019 by a defence of human rights strictly identified as the rights of the victim, the rights of those who do not have the means to argue their rights, or create a political solution to their own problems.\u201d Solidarity with the subaltern now meant Western aid and rescue, but always with political conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet that new, utopian world envisaged at the height of the unipolar moment never quite arrived. It now feels more distant than ever: the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/joe-biden\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Joe Biden<\/a>&nbsp;administration was supposed to represent a return to \u201cnormalcy\u201d following four years of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/donald-trump\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Donald Trump<\/a>, a steady hand guiding the US-led liberal order predicated on human rights and democracy. But all of that has fallen apart in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/gaza\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gaza<\/a>, rendering Western invocations of \u201chuman rights\u201d hollow. Further, international human rights law and the Genocide Convention are being deployed against&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/israel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Israel<\/a>, the closest ally of the US. The West is facing the consequences of its own creation: the principles and institutions of which it once envisioned itself as the sole arbiter turned back on itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But South Africa\u2019s genocide case against Israel, which the latter denies, before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is also emblematic of a broader global shift: a country of the so-called Global South, unwilling to play the role of passive supplicant in the face of so much horror, is effectively using the master\u2019s tools to dismantle the master\u2019s house. Whatever the outcome of South Africa\u2019s argument, it seems clear that in the emergent multipolar world, the West\u2019s liberal norms will have to co-exist alongside a more assertive, political&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/global-south\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Global South<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The West is also facing challenges to the liberal internationalist order from competitors like&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/world\/asia\/china\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">China<\/a>, which is rapidly expanding its diplomatic and economic influence across the so-called developing world. In contrast with the West, humanitarian and development aid from China is based on the \u201cSouth-South cooperation\u201d and is not conditioned on compliance with liberal norms like human rights. China is thus building an alternative order, supposedly based on respect for sovereignty. As Dawn C Murphy writes in&nbsp;<em>China\u2019s Rise in the Global South&nbsp;<\/em>(2022), \u201cAlthough China does not yet seek to replace the existing international order, if the current liberal order unravels or excludes China, this alternative order could serve as the foundation of China\u2019s\u2026 relations with\u2026 much of the developing world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rather than leading the world into a more humane future, the US now appears isolated from it: in successive UN resolutions on humanitarian obligations in Gaza since 7 October, the US has voted in opposition, and it has often been alone. The more than 24,000 deaths there have been enabled by ample American military aid and its Security Council activism meant to ensure Israel\u2019s war continues \u2013 to borrow the Biden administration\u2019s line on the conflict in Ukraine \u2013 \u201cfor as long as it takes\u201d. Today, the zealous rhetoric that accompanied 1990s US-led humanitarian interventions has been replaced by weak American appeals for \u201chumanitarian pauses\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It can be difficult to understand why there was ever so much faith in such an order. And yet as 2000 approached, there was hope that the withering of state sovereignty would create a better, more interconnected world. The thinking went that television and the nascent internet would deliver news and pictures of distant suffering to Western audiences, who would then exert pressure on their governments to intervene in foreign conflicts. Meanwhile, in the Balkans, the presence of television cameras gave rise to dark jokes. \u201cMay your house be seen on CNN,\u201d went one characteristically Bosnian curse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/culture\/social-media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">social media<\/a>&nbsp;has ended network TV\u2019s monopoly on the dissemination of pictures of distant horrors. CNN faithfully transmitted curated news and images of mass atrocities perpetrated by the West\u2019s enemies; social media has revealed the brutalities in which the West is complicit. The recent moral panic over TikTok, which has been blamed for fomenting \u201canti-Israel\u201d sentiment in Western zoomers, reveals the degree to which social media has upset traditional information warfare. Significantly, it has also permitted victims to fight in that war themselves. The Irish lawyer Blinne N\u00ed Ghr\u00e1laigh, representing South Africa at the ICJ, put it starkly: \u201c[This is] the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time, in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Social media has thus lifted the curtain on what much of the world has always known: that invocations of human rights and humanitarian intervention are selective. The invasion of Iraq made it clear that there would be no redress for victims of war crimes perpetrated by the West: the US and its&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/nato\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Nato<\/a>&nbsp;allies have long appeared almost structurally shielded from accountability. For the West, the \u201cidol of sovereignty\u201d has remained very much intact. As Carl Schmitt said, \u201csovereign is he who decides the exception\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>During the 1990s, a new international criminal justice system was established to prosecute abuses of human rights. The ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established at the height of the Bosnian War in 1993; a court for the Rwandan genocide followed in 1994. The Rome Statute was adopted in 1998, establishing the permanent International Criminal Court, or ICC. Predictably, the ICC struggled with legitimacy outside of the West. The US\u2019s notorious American Service Members\u2019 Protection Act, also known as the Hague Invasion Act, provided gratuitous evidence that the \u201cinternational\u201d criminal court would not be so international at all: the 2002 law \u201cauthorises the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a US-allied country being held by the court\u201d. African indictees have frequently denounced the ICC as a \u201cwhite man\u2019s court\u201d. While these criticisms are clearly self-interested, the charge is not without merit. Today, several countries involved in major conflicts, including the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/world\/americas\/north-america\/us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">US<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/russia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Russia<\/a>&nbsp;and Israel, do not recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC. Further, the court has proved vulnerable to lobbying efforts. In 2015, Israel&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-icc-palestinians-israel\/israel-lobbies-foreign-powers-to-cut-icc-funding-idUSKBN0KR06720150118\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lobbied<\/a>&nbsp;ICC member states to slash funding for the tribunal after it launched an inquiry into Israeli war crimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One relic of the 1990s that seems curiously absent from recent wars has been \u201cresponsibility to protect\u201d, or R2P. Responsibility to protect was supposed to ensure that there would never be another Bosnia or Rwanda on the international community\u2019s watch: in 2005, UN member states&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.un.org\/en\/genocideprevention\/about-responsibility-to-protect.shtml#:~:text=2005%20World%20Summit%20Outcome%20Document,-Paragraphs%20on%20the&amp;text=138.,through%20appropriate%20and%20necessary%20means.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">adopted<\/a>&nbsp;the doctrine of R2P as a non-binding norm that established states\u2019 \u201cresponsibility\u201d to protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes. If a state failed to do so, then the international community was responsible \u201cto take collective action\u201d, including military intervention, to stop it. And yet, no Western government has invoked R2P in response to ethnic cleansing campaigns in Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh or Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The death of R2P seems to have begun in 2011 in Libya, when the Security Council passed a series of resolutions that cited the principle for the first time. Resolution 1,973 would partially sanction the coming Nato military intervention intended to end the country\u2019s civil war: the US, UK and France voted in favour of the resolution, while China and Russia abstained. In the seven months that followed, Nato forces \u2013 primarily Britain, France and the US \u2013 dropped more than 7,700 precision-guided bombs on the country, exacerbating a brutal civil war. Muammar al-Gaddafi met his end that October. In the words of the then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, \u201cwe came, we saw, he died\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For Russia, it was a lesson learned. When the US attempted to gain Security Council authorisation for humanitarian intervention in Syria, Russia made sure to exercise its veto power this time. And yet, as the British political scientist Richard Sakwa has stressed, Russia\u2019s aversion to R2P was not because Vladimir Putin is \u201cthe crude defender of sovereignty as so often presented\u201d, but rather the West\u2019s selective deployment of it. In August 2008, Russia invoked R2P to avert \u201cgenocide\u201d in South Ossetia as justification for its war on Georgia. And in February 2022, Putin invoked the 1999 Nato intervention in Yugoslavia in an effort to legitimise the full-scale&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/world\/europe\/ukraine\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">invasion of Ukraine<\/a>, claiming that Moscow was undertaking military action to prevent a \u201cgenocide\u201d. The Houthi spokesman Yahya Sare\u2019e more&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.pettimatthew.com\/p\/yemen-borrows-the-humanitarian-sanctions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recently echoed<\/a>&nbsp;the language of humanitarian interventions past when he declared all Israeli-linked ships \u201clegitimate targets\u2026 until the horrific massacres, genocide and siege against Palestinians\u201d stop. The principle of R2P thus lives on mostly with the West\u2019s enemies, as a sort of ideological blowback of 1990s humanitarianism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In his new book&nbsp;<em>The Lost Peace<\/em>&nbsp;(2023), Richard Sakwa argues that the US-led liberal order was intended to supersede the postwar international system predicated on the UN Charter and \u201csovereign internationalism\u201d established in 1945. Sakwa defines the Charter international system as combining \u201crespect for sovereignty while fostering the habits of multilateralism through sovereign internationalism\u201d. At the end of the Cold War, many in Washington believed that this system should be replaced by a triumphant US-led order. In it, \u201cthere appeared to be no limits to the Atlantic power system\u201d. At the very moment when Nato seemed destined for obsolescence \u2013 the Atlantic pact was deprived of its antagonist with the dissolution of the Soviet Union \u2013 US-led humanitarian intervention gave it new life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Recently, \u201cWestern credibility\u201d has been diminished by the wildly disparate reactions to war crimes in Ukraine and Gaza. In one notorious example, Russia\u2019s clear violation of article 54 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions against destroying, attacking, or removing \u201cobjects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population\u201d, such as drinking water, was treated as an unambiguous war crime by Western leaders. Yet the same crime, perpetrated by Israel against the people of Gaza, was met with comparative silence. And this silence will come with a cost: Western liberal norms are likely to have even less weight in the Global South now, and competitors like China will appear a more honest partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But there is a greater moral offence at play in Gaza than mere Western hypocrisy. The US is currently furnishing Israel with bombs while supposedly giving the people of Gaza \u201chumanitarian aid\u201d \u2013 effectively dispensing a bandage for a wound that it helped to inflict itself. In concentrated form, this represents a truth at the heart of all humanitarian efforts. As the journalist Joshua Craze&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/salvos\/the-angels-dilemma-craze\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">puts it<\/a>&nbsp;in the&nbsp;<em>Baffler<\/em>, wealthy donors in the West \u201cdespair over the plight of the poor, as if they had nothing to do with it. The plight of the poor, however, is inextricably linked to the behaviour of the Global North.\u201d If Israel is \u201csuccessful\u201d in forcing the population of Gaza into the Sinai desert, the presence of Western-funded humanitarian aid organisations sent to receive them there might even be used to set a grim precedent: ethnic cleansing enabled by humanitarianism, justified on the grounds that the population is kept alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The demise of the dream of a 21st-century, America-led humanitarian order raises unsettling questions about what comes next. Will the future be worse \u2013 a world shorn of any pretense to concern for universal principles at all? Or will the death of the liberal order clear the way for a more democratic, accountable and egalitarian world? South Africa\u2019s genocide case against Israel offers hope. Symbolically, it has already transformed the role of the Global South from mere victim to active agent of history. But as many have noted, international law itself is on trial before the ICJ. As the New Year University law professor Rob Howse has said, the outcome of the case will determine whether international law and its courts really are just a \u201cwhite man\u2019s world\u201d \u2013 a conclusion that would leave those outside of the West with few peaceful tools at its disposal, wholly reliant upon \u201cresistance, struggle and disruption\u201d to advance their calls for justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The merits of South Africa\u2019s suit won\u2019t be decided for years, but within a few short weeks, the court will likely decide on whether the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2024\/1\/11\/a-quick-guide-to-south-africas-icj-case-against-israel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">provisional measures<\/a>\u201d it has requested will be awarded. These would bring an emergency halt to Israel\u2019s relentless assault on Gaza \u201cto protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention, which continue to be violated with impunity\u201d \u2013 a humanitarian intervention that the West seems determined to prevent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>___<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>This article was originally published in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/ideas\/2024\/01\/death-humanitarianism\">The New Statesman<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They called it \u201cthe 21st century arriving early\u201d. In April 1999, the&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;declared Kosovo a template for the new millennium. Nato\u2019s humanitarian intervention in the Kosovo War that spring would augur a new era in which human rights would trump national sovereignty. No head of state, irrespective of their democratic legitimacy, would have the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3212,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"author-name":"Lily Lynch","choose-language":"EN","wds_primary_category":36,"wds_primary_alameda-themes":0,"wds_primary_projects":0,"wds_primary_dynamic-publications-cat":0,"wds_primary_type-tax":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[22,37,26,140,71],"alameda-themes":[],"projects":[],"dynamic-publications-cat":[],"type-tax":[57,60,58],"class_list":["post-3211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","tag-en","tag-global","tag-humanitarianism","tag-lily-lynch","tag-publishing","type-tax-civil-society","type-tax-humanitarian-paradox","type-tax-polycrisis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"alameda-themes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/alameda-themes?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"projects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"dynamic-publications-cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dynamic-publications-cat?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"type-tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type-tax?post=3211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}