UC Irvine

The issue of selectivity remains a highly contested notion in the debate on the legitimacy of military humanitarian intervention (MHI). In short, selectivity can be understood as the practice of global powers intervening in certain humanitarian crises when it benefits them to do so yet refraining from armed intervention in others when it would not seem to advance its strategic interests. Though the scholarship has been largely ubiquitous in accepting a practice of selectivity from global powers, it has debated its ascription as ‘problematic’. Critics have correctly pointed to this practice as a problem of ‘double-standards’ or ‘hypocrisy’ on the part of Global North actors, while defenders of MHI (or of its modern iteration in the responsibility to protect ‘R2P’ doctrine) have argued for the necessity of a selective practice of MHI and have construed it as unproblematic, unavoidable, and even pragmatic. However, an overarching characterization of the debate from both camps has rested on a key premise of selectivity as a problem of global power ‘inaction’ in ‘nonintervened’ crises – what I term as a paradigm of ‘bystander complicity’. In contrast, I argue that the selectivity issue must be reinterpreted as a problem of ‘active complicity’ from Global North actors to better understand its practice as problematic. Under the active complicity paradigm, I provide a much-needed decolonization of the selectivity issue to problematize the existing scholarship’s understanding of its practice as an issue of global powers simply ‘standing by’ as onlookers to disassociated, faraway crises, and instead reinterpret it a problem of Global North actors typically enabling and producing these crises in the first place through their foreign policies and actions. Upon an application of this reinterpretive paradigm towards previous cases of humanitarian crises, I find that the historical experiences of both ‘intervened’ and ‘nonintervened’ crises, as the existing selectivity paradigm would frame it, largely support this contention. As a prescription to remedy the existing literature’s flawed understanding of MHI-selectivity as a problem of bystander complicity, I develop the responsibility for justice (R4J) conceptualization as an alternative framework to R2P to account for the problem of Global North active complicity and help us better understand and deal with past, current, and future cases of humanitarian crises.