The Intrinsic Dilemmas of Humanitarian Intervention: Moving Beyond Self-Interest, Power Politics, and Normative Imperatives

Andrea Carati’s Giusto e impossibile: i dilemmi dell’intervento umanitario nella società internazionale (2024) offers a broad and solid foundation for addressing the persistent dilemmas surrounding humanitarian intervention in international society, broadening the perspective beyond the exogenous tensions that have often been regarded as the main sources of this practice’s inherent difficulties. The book explores the evolution of three paradigms – classical humanitarianism, the post–Cold War “new humanitarianism,” and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – to demonstrate their inability to crystallize into a coherent and enduring doctrine. Through a careful combination of normative analysis, historical reconstruction, and case studies, Carati highlights both the normative dilemmas and the operational challenges that make humanitarian intervention intrinsically unstable: the tension between human rights and sovereignty, the moral ambiguity of imperfect political obligations, the narrative simplification of victims and perpetrators, the problem of timing, and the translation of humanitarian aims into effective military operations.