Mises Wire

Working Paper on “Humanitarian Intervention”

Working Paper on “Humanitarian Intervention”

Humanitarian Intervention and the State, by Mark R. Crovelli (University of Colorado, Boulder)

The general contention of this paper is that debate over humanitarian intervention has succumbed to what David Luban has called “the romance of the nation-state,” and has thus substantially ignored the serious danger intervening states themselves pose to human rights. I argue that states qua states are by nature coercive organizations that subsist by violating the rights of their subjects, and thus always and necessarily pose a threat to human rights.
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