Rights-Protecting Interventionism

Many theorists hold the view that a state’s right to non-interference depends on it meeting certain behavioural standards with regard to its own population, particularly regarding human rights. However, many also take a restrictive view of when outside enforcement of human rights is permissible. In this paper, I start to develop a novel theory of the ethics of intervention that challenges the restrictive view. To that end, I will investigate, conceptually and normatively, a view that I call Rights-Protecting Interventionism (RPI). The basic message of this view is that whenever a state violates the human rights of its people, there is a just cause for external intervention, at least prima facie. Although a radical idea, given the requirements of global justice the position seems to have at least prima facie plausibility. RPI builds on the assumption that intervention to protect human rights may cover many different forms of interference short of military force, such as economic and diplomatic sanctions, cyber warfare, and support for opposition groups, and leads to a different way of thinking about outside enforcement. In light of this, a first step towards developing a theory of RPI is to flesh out the variations and scale of interventions and violations. The objective here is to examine the variations of interventions and how different types of intervention can be matched with forms of rights violations. A generic feature of intervention is coercion. Coercion is acting against the will of the coercee in order to make it more probable that she acts in line with the coercers wishes, but there is a great deal of controversy as to what kind of actions can count as coercive, and why. The paper consults the literature on coercion in order to systematically flesh out variations of intervention by focusing in particular on the lower end of the coercion scale. Then a scale of human rights violations, ranging from least to most grave is added. The idea is to pair items on the two scales in order to ensure that the means of intervention is proportionate to the situation it is meant to resolve.