Morality And Action

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has witnessed increasing number of the internal conflicts in some countries, posing a major threat to world's peace and stability. Against this background, humanitarian intervention has become the focus of international attention and received endorsement from all the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. However, this has not led to effective international cooperation on humanitarian intervention in practice. Slow reaction to humanitarian crises and political manipulation of this issue poses serious threats to efforts to stop the humanitarian disaster, eliciting strong opposition against humanitarian intervention on the part of some scholars.This thesis represents an attempt to discuss this problem. It begins with a discussion of the concept of humanitarian intervention. Then it compares and analyzes three cases of international intervention (successful, failed and controversial) in order to identify the constraints of successful humanitarian intervention. Finally, it will address the question why effective international humanitarian intervention is hard to get, and to come up with a proposal for the construction of a pragmatic and effective mechanism for conducting humanitarian intervention.