The alternatives to war: from sanctions to nonviolence

The Responsibility to Protect is premised on the assumption that, as James Pattison writes, ‘standing by in the face of mass atrocities is reprehensible’ (p. 1). For this reason, its proponents frequently argue that those states in a position to do so ought to resort to military intervention in cases where innocent people are threatened by crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. But committing to the use of armed force is often deeply problematic. The obstacles standing in the way of any sort of large-scale intervention in Syria illustrate some of the moral, political and strategic difficulties it poses (pp. 3–4). Apart from anything else, wars involve the active and intentional infliction of severe harms and, as Pattison argues, they are comparatively blunt instruments as far as the fair distribution of costs is concerned. Truly discriminate war is, for the most part, something of a myth. The alternatives to war is intended to plug the rather wide gap between the two possibilities that thus dominate both literature and practice: on the one hand, doing nothing, which the international community must avoid; and on the other, resorting to war, which experience—and sensible theoretical reflection—should tell us very seldom works out well. But sceptical as he is about theories that too easily envisage a resort to war, Pattison is not a hard pacifist. The right of self-defence speaks against a wholesale rejection of war. And so, too, does the fact that almost all of the most viable alternative modes of intervention involve some sort of harmful agency, which makes them more or less comparable to war itself. There are, in any case, some instances where war has proved justified in Pattison's view, such as the Kosovo intervention in 1999, the Libyan case in 2011, and recent actions to protect Yazidis from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (p. 220). So war cannot be ruled out tout court.