How Does Nationalist Selfishness Creep into Western humanitarian interventions

What is it about?

The article reveals how military interventions that have a declaratory motive of protecting civilians globally have become selfish, focusing on the protection of Americans, rather than global civilians. This has been possible because of the unilateralization of humanitarian interventions at the end of the 1990s as a result of a perception that UN has not managed to operate effectively in such humanitarian emergencies as the genocide of Rwanda. Selfishness in decisions on humanitarian interventions has become possible due to the unilateral, rather than international decision-making. The trigger, however, that motivated and justified selfishness, was the terrorist incident on the 11th of September 2001. After this event the referent object of protection in US Presidential Papers became very selfish: protection of global military operations was defined as Americans, rather then Iraqi, Afghan or other civilians in the target countries of interventions. This study combines computer-assisted textual analysis and qualitative discourse analysis as a method.

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Why is it important?

This study is important politically because the humanitarian motive has justified all Western military operations during the past decades. These operations have been exceptionally poor at achieving any of its humanitarian goals, and thus there is a need to understand why unilateral military humanitarianism fails, and how humanitarian justification end up as decorations of selfish military interventions. This article contributes to the existing literature by offering evidence that counters some of the optimism of the highly ideological literature on the Responsibility to Protect.