Introduction: Symposium on The Ethics of Indirect Intervention

Abstract

Intervention in foreign conflicts is, undoubtedly, one of the most urgent and controversial issues in modern politics. After NATO interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo during the 1990s, which were widely regarded as reasonably successful, states were comparatively receptive to the idea of using military force abroad for humanitarian ends. There followed a flurry of academic literature on the normative implications of intervention, with two noticeable features. First, the literature is predominantly legal in character, focusing on how international law should respond to widespread human rights abuses. Even now, comparatively little philosophical work has been carried out on the morality of intervention, in contrast to the significant amount of work on just causes for war more generally. [1][2][3][4][5] Second, this literature almost exclusively addresses the permissibility of direct humanitarian interventionthat is, of states' deploying their own armed forces abroad, without the consent of the target state, in order to protect foreign citizens from harm. [6][7][8][9] In more recent years, political debates about how to respond to humanitarian crises abroad have shifted away from direct intervention. In the aftermath of disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, governments are increasingly reluctant to deploy their armed forces to fight in foreign domestic conflicts, and there is little public appetite for largescale interventionist wars. Limited NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 was followed by a lack of direct Western intervention in, for example, Syria and Yemen, despite the undoubted gravity of the harms facing the Syrian and Yemeni populations.Instead, several countries are increasingly advocating and employing indirect forms of intervention, such as funding, arming, or training foreign rebel groups. France, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States have armed and trained rebels in Syria, for example. Of course, there is nothing new about states indirectly intervening in foreign conflicts. But, historically, such intervention has been conducted largely covertly, and primarily or solely as a means of furthering the interveners' own political interests. Now, in contrast, indirect intervention is often carried out overtly and presented as a laudable means of discharging one's duties to aid without incurring either the physical or moral risks of waging war. But indirectly contributing to war is not without moral risks, as a growing body of literature in the ethics of war attests. And, of course, not all indirect contributions to foreign conflicts fall under the description of aiding foreign citizens. On the contrary: governments sell, or facilitate the selling of, weapons and equipment to authoritarian states that use those weapons to harm their citizens. Just as we ought to be concerned about vaunted attempts to influence foreign