Description
The endeavour to protect vulnerable populations from mass atrocities via military means continues to suffer from a “duty-specification” question, whereby it is unclear who has the primary responsibility to step in when a state is manifestly failing to protect its populations. One possible solution to this is to prioritise blame-based allocation, by arguing that states which are in some way culpable for the occurrence of mass atrocity crimes beyond their borders have a reparative obligation to prevent, mitigate, or end them. Yet, this gives rise to another problem: the so-called “paradox of intervention”. In other words, though a culpable actor might have a responsibility to its victims, an intervention it conducts is unlikely to be welcomed and is ethically suspect. At the same time, however, displacing a responsibility to intervene elsewhere runs the risk of letting culpable actors off the hook. The author makes efforts to explore this paradox specifically in the context of the UK intervening in its former colonies by asking, centrally, can military approaches to atrocity prevention ever be reparative?
