Conclusion of Mark Mazower's must-read essay on humanitarian interventionism and its decline::
(...) the ending of the era of humanitarian interventionism may come to be seen as a sign of the waning of Western power, and mourned as consigning more of the world’s peoples to the mercies of the tyrants who rule them. But it is possible to view it more positively, as the belated emergence of a new maturity in international relations.
I would like to see that the fact that humanitarian interventionism is less popular than it used to be as a sign of maturity. However, I'm convinced that it is the consequence of the slow and painful realization the people who have to be saved/reed, more often than not, have a strong dislike for any kind of lasting intervention (which is required in most cases to be successful), within their own affairs. They resent it and end up resisting it violently or in others ways because they perceived it as a form of imperialism and of recolonization, which are still the most evil of ills in most parts of the world. To say differently, Le devoir d’ingérence, the duty to intervene to help has become stop to be viewed as humanitarian to be viewed as both paternalistic and symptomatic of a complex of superiority of the interventionists. Salvation doesn't work when the ones supposed to be saved are suspicious of their purported saviors.


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