Abstract

Everyone agrees that the international community must develop better mechanisms for responding to humanitarian crises. The best mechanism for responding is simply to intervene to prevent a crisis from developing in the first place. However, because the principle of sovereignty imposes strict constraints on action across state borders, international actors are often unwilling or unable to interpose themselves until after conditions have escalated into a full-blown crisis, by which time it has usually become a matter of managing human misery rather than ending or averting it. Respect for sovereignty is an organizing principle of the existing international legal system, and so abandoning it would fundamentally change how the units of international politics are constituted and relate to one another. The strongest argument against abandoning sovereignty is the potential for unintended consequences with respect to peace, political stability, and the effective protection and promotion of human rights. One way to defuse this worry is to frame interventions across borders as principle-based exceptions to a general rule of state sovereignty. If we assume that protecting and promoting individual human rights is the primary goal of the international system, and that both state sovereignty and peace and security are important to us primarily as vehicles for achieving this, then (it is argued) we may use the standards of international human rights to identify, and limit, cases in which the presumption of sovereignty may legitimately be set aside. However, the relationship between sovereignty and humanitarian crises is more complex than this picture allows. Theorizing about humanitarian crises inevitably includes recommendations about states and this makes it a species of non-ideal theory. All actual states are rife with injustice, both in their internal structures and in the relationships these structures establish with those outside a state’s borders. This fact must be reflected in our reasoning about humanitarian responses.