Military intervention and humanitarian action: trends and issues

An important trend in military doctrine for so-called 'peace support operations' has been to place them on a spectrum that includes coercion and enforcement. This paper focuses on British writers of doctrine as those responsible for driving the debate forward and forging a consensus among leading military powers. Their discourse is combat oriented, a fact reinforced by a trend towards strategic subcontracting to coalitions of the militarily willing and able. At the same time, there has been a move to institutionalise the involvement of military forces in relief, peace building and development activities. The overall emphasis is on stability and security to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian relief and to establish the conditions for peace-building processes. In the case of Bosnia, this involves conditionality and economic leverage. Although there is a long-established record of peace-keeping forces engaging in goodwill activities (with mixed results), the current trends contain contradictions that seem likely to contribute to the widely perceived erosion of classical humanitarian principles.