CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

(m)ost internal political or civil disagreements, even conflicts, within states do
not require coercive intervention by external powers. The non-interference rule
not only protects states and governments: it also protects peoples and cultures,
enabling societies to maintain the religious, ethnic, and civilizational differences
that they cherish. 125
Nevertheless, it accepted that
there are exceptional circumstances in which the very interest that all states have
in maintaining a stable international order requires them to react when all order
within a state has broken down or when civil conflict and repression are so
violent that civilians are threatened with massacre, genocide or ethnic cleansing
on a large scale. 126
The exceptional circumstances that should justify military intervention were taken, from
the Commission’s consultations, to be those ‘cases of violence which so genuinely
“shock the conscience of mankind,” or which present such a clear and present danger to
international security’ 127 and these were further narrowed to those circumstances in
which military action was necessary to
halt or avert:
large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not,
which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or
inability to act, or a failed state situation; or
large scale “ethnic cleansing,” actual or apprehended, whether carried out
by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape. 128 (Original emphasis)
For the ICISS, these are the conditions required to meet the Just Cause criteria. These
deliberately restrictive conditions reflect earlier discussion of the issue, too. Writing as
early as 1993, Richard B Lillich 129 offers a similar formulation:
UN humanitarian intervention must be based on the actual existence or
impending likelihood of gross or persistent human rights violations that shock
the world’s conscience. (Such violations occur, inter alia, from systematic and
indiscriminate attacks on civilians by a central government, or a system
breakdown in law and order producing the dislocation and starvation of the
civilian population.) (Emphasis added).
An alternative conception for Just Cause is offered by Ian Holliday. 130 Holliday argues,
firstly, that in the context of the post-Westphalian privileging of state sovereignty, ‘just
cause’ in traditional conceptualisations of just war doctrine has become roughly
synonymous with ‘self defence’. That this is inadequate for current circumstances is
clear from the discussion above (see Section 3.3.2 ) about the growing imperative for
intervention. Secondly, Holliday suggests, at least in common usage there is a strong
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