Before the “new” book came out last year, the German version was already acknowledged as having made some, well, at least one, valid point. This is from a volume edited by Norbert Frei, Daniel Stahl and Annette Weinke, “Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention” (Göttingen: Wallstein 2017). While none of them are lawyers, the quote here is from Claus Kreß, who is one. Though the question of course remains, how much law there really is in “humanitarian intervention”. It’s a question that’s worth coming back to. While I believe that the relative importance of the legal concept for international law is a result of its factual irrelevance (the writings on “humanitarian intervention” can fill libraries, the number of people saved by “humanitarian” interventions is zero), it seems that such a damning assessment (or even indictment) is a lot easier to accept for lawyers, international lawyers in particular, than it is for historians, where the narrative that “humanitarian emergencies and grave human rights violations” lead to the “renegotiation” of the principle of sovereignty and the prohibition of the use of force (as the back cover of the aforementioned volume claims) is only emerging more recently.
