Under What Conditions Do Western States Intervene?

Human suffering is a necessary condition for a military operation to be called humanitarian, yet it is not sufficient one for third states to initiate an intervention. This paper asks under what conditions do Western states intervene into complex man-made humanitarian crises and under what conditions they do not. The question is answered by using csQCA and the population of interest are complex man-made humanitarian crises that were candidates for intervention for their severity during the 1990s, the so-called "decade of humanitarian intervention". The outcome of interest is a dyad of intervention/non-intervention in a crisis and each of 13 Western NATO member states. These are most likely to intervene because of their liberal heritage and support for human rights and the concept of humanitarian intervention. The research shows that combination of prior strong military engagement of the intervener in a conflict on the territory of crisis country and political/military feasibility is sufficient for intervention. A second combination leading to intervention is the presence of strategic/security interest (fear of spill-over, the prestige of the alliance on the periphery) and political/military feasibility. These two paths explain 83 % of the cases of intervention regardless of other conditions, like military strength or alliance value, or economic interest. Most of the interventions are interest-driven (Somalia intervention remains an exception and is not explained by the model) but those interests are not expansionistic, nor vital for the survival of the intervening states. States do not behave here as power-maximisers, they are only attempting to keep what they already had – behaving remarkably according to predictions of defensive realism. They do not seek to gain economically or territorially but to pacify the periphery and the balance-of-risk theory explains how a prior engagement in the conflict enters calculations of decision-makers as sunk costs that further intervention policies. When running the analysis for non-intervention, an absence of prior strong military engagement and absence of strategic interests are individually but also jointly necessary conditions for non-intervention and overwhelmingly a sufficient combination for non-intervention as well. These findings reflect the realist understanding of the world, military non-intervention remains the standard situation. The results are also a strong counter-argument to the moral hazard theory of humanitarian intervention. Since interventions happen only under pre-existing conditions of Western security interests or prior strong military engagement into the ongoing conflict, so long as a country is peripheral enough, there is very little chance of Western humanitarian intervention.