To your first point: First. I was being too brief with Caney’s view; there is more to it (of course). In addition to that, it may be that he thinks of coercion as necessarily bad whereas I don’t. That conceptual point may affect this one. More importantly, for my purposes (and I guess your’s) I very much like your point about making room for humanitarian “aid” to a recipient state. I imagine most people would not say “aid” is a form of “intervention” so if we say H.I. is not coercive, thus allowing it can be aid, we have a problem. I’ll have to think about this more as I actually do want to say aid is a form of intervention!

To your second point: I largely agree, but sometimes find myself having to (or feeling as though I have to) do the conceptual analysis, complete with necessary and sufficient conditions. This may be a case where that is inappropriate.

Cheers,

Andrew

I would agree that there is something inconsistent with Caney’s view as you describe it. Yet I do not think it speaks against seeing normal respect for sovereignty as a foundational condition. An aiding state may be invited by a target state to engage in coercive actions within its borders against agents under its jurisdiction. You chose to call this a non-coercive form of humanitarian intervention because it is non-coercive in relation to the state, in particular in relation to its sovereignty. Thus contra Caney you are focusing on the relevant form of coercion for describing what is going on between states in the international context. But why not choose to simply say it is not a case of humanitarian intervention at all but rather humanitarian military aid by virtue of the fact that this assistance was invited by the target state, i.e. by virtue of the fact the normal levels of respect for sovereignty are being minimally met?

In general I do not think one is going to get very far by trying to promote a certain interpretation of the word intervention because it implies, ‘non-normal involvement in the affairs of another state,’ ‘coercion of a state,’ ‘coercive acts more generally,’ ‘non-normal disregard for the norms of sovereignty in international praxis/law,’ and surely more. As such debators will be prone to sliding from one connotation to another in different contexts in order to maintain the plausibility of some preferred definition of HI that excludes some other popular definition. All one can do is the boring job of identifying the most salient elements of what is at issue in competing definitions of HI and then identifying the range of plausible combinations of these elements to identify different categories.

Thanks for that. Helpful.

My question came up because Simon Caney claims that coercion is necessary but also claims that H.I. can be invited and I would think if its invited, its not coercive (at least of the inviting party). Since I do think there can be invited H.I. and that it would thus not be coercive, I don’t think H.I. has to be coercive. For the same reason, though, I doubt its a necessary condition that the intervening agent (usually, but not always a state) fails to respect the sovereignty of the target agent (usually, but not always a state). So, how seriously do you mean failure of respect to be a requirement?

(In your example, by the way, if the target agent opposes the intervention, I think I can see calling it coercive.)

–Andrew

Still it seems that the current international norms of sovereignty make it usually the case that an act of humanitarian intervention counts as coercion of the target state simply in virtue of violating normal levels of respect for the target state’s sovereignty. As such I suspect some would want to describe my example above as coercive, but this seems to me to be a stretch. It makes the act coercive simply in virtue of legal definition with no genuine normative content.