Humanitarian Intervention? Responding Ethically to Globalising Violence in the Age of Mediated Violence

In Chapter Six: Responding Ethically to Globalising Violence in the Age of Mediated Violence, Paul James argues that interventions are framed by increasingly material and ideational abstraction in such a way as to inevitably undermine humanitarian intervention efforts, however well intentioned. This does not mean intervention should not occur, but that the terms of intervention have to be fundamentally changed. The problem with this mainstream arguments on humanitarian interventions, including R2P, is that the compounding imperial restructurings, colonisations, resentments, humanitarian interventions, uneven globalising pressures, withdrawals, guided reconstructions, reinterventions, neo-traditional backlashes and interventions-from-a-distance have produced a world of such complexity that is now impossible to ‘do the right thing’. There is no adequate end plan other than withdrawal after having restored semi-chaos. In order to begin the task of establishing an alternative framework, this chapter will begin with an argument for returning to encompassing definitions based on the idea of humanity as historically constituted and made up of persons-in-relation. Second, the chapter will argue that the nature of contemporary conditions makes conventional interventions unviable. Third, the chapter will argue for a more synthetic ethics of intervention, suggesting that the different forms of ethics need to be brought into interrelation.