Suchergebnisse

Forty million civilians were killed during wars between states and approximately 240 million civilians were murdered by their own governments during the 1900s. More than ever before, civilians are being illegally targeted by governments and rebel groups during armed conflict [6]. So, humanitarian intervention is created and is justified because the international community has a moral duty to protect common humanity and because there is a legal obligation, codified in international law, for states to intervene against large scale human rights abuses.

The need for interventions like UN-peacekeeping, development aid and humanitarian aid in the DR Congo seems self-evident. The 'West' engages too little most pundits lament. This article attempts to resist this self-evidence and asks how analysis itself can be resistant. Building on field research in the DR Congo, the article argues that it matters how one describes and criticizes the practice of intervention if one aims to resist it. Against the backdrop of a structuralist and an empiricist conception of critique, I discuss two important strands of current intervention debate in order to highlight what they render visible and what escapes from their view. Interview reflections by a former UN Under-Secretary-General and a conflict between Western interveners and the Ministry of Planning in the Congolese province of North Kivu serve to illustrate my main argument: Interventions are complex and auto-critical and dependent on a neo-colonial discursive structure. For resistant analysis, it might thus be promising to bring together the complexity of empiricism and structuralist stability. Adapted from the source document.