The Humanity Behind Intervention (pol318)
This photo shows the line for food at a Syrian refugee camp. These people cannot simply ‘go back to where they came from’
Yara is twenty three years old, just a few years older than I am at the time of writing. She has four children, the youngest of which has a medical condition which requires urgent treatment. Yara and her children had to flee their home – and their country – in the middle of the night in order to escape with their lives. They left behind their possessions, most of their money, and Yara’s husband, who had gone missing some time ago. Months later she saw his body being carried out of a prison in a Youtube video; this is how she found out that he was dead.
Yara and her children are currently living in Lebanon, along with 1.2 million other Syrian refugees. While Yara is unique, her story is not.
Debates around the Syrian crisis to date have largely revolved around the debate between the principles of non intervention and the responsibility to protect. Some argue that in a conflict where indiscriminate and chemical weapons are used, children make up some 10% of the people killed, and over a hundred cases of children being tortured have been reported, the international community is obligated to intervene. Those on the other side of the debate argue that rather than placing concerns of justice above concerns of global order, maintaining order is in the first place the best way to achieve global justice. This blog will explore both schools of thought, and argue that they have a shared interest in preserving justice despite the different methods each employs to achieve this. Following this shared goal, I outline some key steps that can be taken that will address the Syrian conflict, without challenging foundational principles of sovereignty and stability.
Pluralists like Hedley Bull argue that the primary concern in global politics is to maintain international order and stability. They argue that achieving such stability is the best way to ensure justice in global politics, and that political communities should be very cautious in assuming a universally held sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and intervening in one another based on such judgements. The one value that pluralists hold to be truly universal is international stability. These scholars might point for example to the massive instability of Libyan political, economic and social affairs that remain following the international intervention in 2010, and argue that such intervention fundamentally undermines the structures of governance of the target country and thus undermines the pursuit for justice. In contrast, solidarists like Nicholas Wheeler argue that in cases of extreme human rights violations, concerns of justice must be placed above concerns of order and stability. This school argues that despite the plurality of opinion, there are certain basic human rights that are universally shared and should transcend concerns of justice. Such scholars point to crises like Rwanda, where it is overwhelmingly accepted that the international community should have interfered earlier than they did.
Despite this fundamental divide, there is a general recognition that the crisis in Syria cannot be allowed to continue, and a general desire to do something to end the suffering. One school argues that creating a well-ordered world is the best way to give rise to justice, and the other argues that attempts to create justice must take priority over attempts to establish order. Thus, both would wish to save Yara and her family, and to prevent other Syrians from facing similar crises, although they would disagree about the best way to achieve this. Are there not steps that can be taken between the two extremes? I argue that there are many steps that the global community could be taking in response to the Syrian crisis, and that our failure to do so on the scale demanded makes us culpable in one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time.
These steps could include a significant increase in humanitarian aid budgets, increasing (or beginning) non-military intervention in Syria, and of course formulating an adequate response to the refugee crisis. Although humanitarian aid was at an all time high in 2014, it is still not enough, and the current UN humanitarian appeal has only a quarter of the funding it needs. Whilst of course debates about humanitarian intervention are worth having, it seems counterintuitive to argue for military (or other) intervention in Syria to end the conflict when the international community continues to fail so spectacularly to take these simpler steps. This is particularly true in regard to the current refugee crisis. Though of course refugee resettlement does little to end the conflict in Syria, it does fulfil the fundamental goals of humanitarian intervention – protecting the lives and rights of individual people, and achieving justice. It would be almost hypocritical of the international community to engage in more serious humanitarian intervention in Syria whilst continuing to ignore the refugee crisis; as if the lives of those who had fled Syria as refugees already were lost, yet it would be a worthwhile endeavor to save those who remained.
According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, as of 2014 New Zealand was placed 116th (out of the 130 countries considered) in our intake of refugees when wealth and population were accounted for. Trying to find New Zealand on the infographic below (hint, we’re left of Egypt) gives a sense of just how pitiful this contribution truly is, especially when compared to Ethiopia, Pakistan, Uganda, and Chad, which all are far less wealthy and stable than NZ, and yet take in far more refugees.
Increasing our refugee intake is something that must happen before we can truly engage in discussions around humanitarian intervention. If our goal is, as it should be, to protect the lives and rights of innocent individuals, then increasing the number of refugees we take in each year is a simple and immediate action we should take.