Help versus Harm: The Impact of NGO Interventions

many during the twentieth century in which genocide occurred and the interna-tional community failed to intervene. By contrast, the world’s powers were moved to action in 1999 when NATO forces intervened in the former Yugoslavia to prevent the kind of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that had been seen previously in Bosnia. These two cases, in particular, set the stage for the International Com-mission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which was established in 2000 to forge a consensus on when and how humanitarian intervention should occur. The Commission’s report, The Responsibility to Protect, lays out a perspective that has received growing international support. It argues ‘‘that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe—from mass murder and rape, from starvation—but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states’ ’ (International Commission 2001:VIII). However, this perspective is only one side of an ongoing debate that Jonathan Goodhand analyzes in Aiding Peace? The Role of NGOs in Armed Conflict. It is the maximalist approach, which argue