Justified Intervention

Generally, international law--treaties, declarations, and the accepted norms relating to international conduct--requires nation-states to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other nations. War is rarely justified. However, there are a few provisions, which permit war and the violation of another state's territorial integrity: war of self-defense and a humanitarian intervention to prevent or rectify gross violations of human rights. The United States, for example, has engaged in war for both of these reasons (and a few others as well, but I do not want to explore that here). Should powerful, developed nations engage and practice military intervention or violate the territorial integrity of other states for the purpose of ensuring and protecting human rights?

The quick answer (perhaps for many in the west) would be "yes". I do not think the answer is "no", but a yes certainly needs qualified and analyzed with respect to the consideration of several questions.

An obvious point of departure for this inquiry: What are human rights? Does a definition of the concept need to be universally embraced before it can be used as a legitimate reference? I'm not trying to turn the issue into an epistemological conundrum--where a failure of understanding or agreement would certainly lead to avoidable suffering. But a more a less common apprehension of human rights needs understood, especially between the intervening country and those suffering in the targeted country. Differences exist in the expectations of government behavior and between what various peoples demand in regards to individual respect. Many reference the U.N. declaration of rights (1948) as an agreement that settles the definitions of human rights, yet the U.N. declaration of rights is largely based on the western construction of liberalism, with several inherent contradictions between procedural and substantive guarantees. Liberalism with its foundational approach to protect the individual before the group presents problems. For example, liberalism differs from Confucian ideology, which perceives the individual as part of a family, and the family as part of a group. Focusing on an individual's rights before the consideration of the family and the larger group seems nonsensical in regards to an idea of justice.

I'm not suggesting that this kind of problem inevitably boils down to a brand of moral relativism (I take human rights and concepts of justice to be moral), but these problems need a cosmopolitan approach. Military invasion and occupation, (even occupation predicated on humanitarian grounds), invariably leads to human rights abuses in its own right. It does not take much for the noble intentions' good will to be frustrated; a paternalistic approach to cross-cultural problems quickly engenders resentment. Thoughts?