Introduction

There are dozens and dozens of examples used in the literature to develop lessons-learned surveys of the difficulties of external humanitarian interventions. Here the normal concept of ‘interventions’ means external, state-based, usually military interventions into places and events that entail activities generating violent consequences across jurisdictional borders. These interventions usually occur without the explicit agreement of the relevant territorial polity in question. There is a canonical list of key examples upon which everybody draws. And notwithstanding fierce debate about what ‘success’ actually means, there is relative implicit agreement about the consequences of the cases.

The 1992 United Nations intervention in Somalia worked initially, but failed in the end because early successes were undermined by a misconceived military campaign against local militia culminating in the Black Hawk Down fiasco (Evans 2008). The 1994 responses to the Rwandan crisis – withdrawal, delayed deployment or refusal to intervene based on learning from Somalia – allowed a furious genocide to unfold, leading to approximately 800,000 deaths (Adelman 2003: 357–74). The 1995 military intervention in Bosnia came too late, worked in the immediate sense of stopping the war, and left the country tense, partitioned into ethnic enclaves, managed by an external power and unreconciled (Belloni 2007). The 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia learned the ‘lessons’ of Bosnia, won the war, but then struggled politically and economically because it left behind a wasteland of corruption, ethnic tension, poverty and collapsed infrastructure (Zolo 2002). The 2007 UN intervention into the Ituri region of the Congo succeeded in producing a fragile peace, but also instituted a damaging politics of indirect rule characteristic of its colonial and post-colonial predecessors, including the use of arbitrary state violence (Veit 2010). The 2011 intervention in Libya won the military invasion but left behind an inoperable state and a reverberating backlash across the region, including Syria (Kuperman 2015: 66–77). The 2015 intervention in Syria learned the ‘lessons’ of effecting unplanned regime change in Libya, but despite supplying the Free Syrian Army and Syrian Kurdish forces with arms, using drones and conducting thousands of air strikes, the situation remains chaotic and dangerous – worse, if that is possible.