Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
10-2020
Abstract
As it has been written, the history of humanitarian intervention is all too Whiggish and all too white. By conceptualising humanitarian intervention in the way that they do, orthodox histories should be seen as entangled in debates about the origins of human rights but also, perhaps more crucially, debates about the various formations and reinventions of human rights. Alternative codifications of rights reveal the historical possibility of a Southern practice of what we would almost certainly call ‘humanitarian intervention’. The record of a radical Third World practice to save strangers from the atrocities of colonialism and extreme racism is also a record of Western states playing staunchly sovereigntist roles, of the West's late devotion to Westphalia. To sketch out such a counterhistory is to argue the following: at a threshold moment in the international-political life of the Responsibility to Protect, it is the terms, range, and domain of the intervention debate that must be re-formulated and re-evaluated.
Keywords
Humanitarian intervention, Responsibility to protect, Global south, International society
Discipline
Political Science | Public Policy
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Review of International Studies
Volume
46
Issue
4
First Page
514
Last Page
533
ISSN
0260-2105
Identifier
10.1017/S0260210520000236
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Citation
Patrick QUINTON-BROWN, .(2020). The south, the west, and the meanings of humanitarian intervention in history. Review of International Studies, 46(4), 514-533.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3900
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210520000236