Slaughter advocates intervention to protect citizens

A large group of students and faculty poured into the tiny confines of the Crane Room on Monday night to listen to a talk by Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, this year's first recipient of the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award.

The talk, entitled "Humanitarian Intervention: Too Little, Too Late?", centered on Slaughter's proposal for the United States to accept a doctrine of preventive war. A doctrine of prevention would mean allowing the use of force when a violation of human rights is apparent.

The basis for her doctrine of prevention lies in the devastating human rights abuses in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. "Had we deployed the kind of force in Rwanda as in the Middle East, would we have had genocide in Rwanda?," she asked.

Prevention differs sharply from the Bush administration's current policy of preemption, Slaughter clarified. The idea of preemption, she explained, is not to wait for the attack but "to strike before we are struck." Instead, Slaughter believes that the United States should adopt a policy whereby it would intervene in international situations at the first sign of human rights violations.

In the context of Iraq, a doctrine of prevention would have meant intervening and authorizing the use of force after the gassing of the Kurds in 1988, rather than waiting for the current situation to take place, in which Iraq is in possession of numerous weapons of mass destruction.

During recent meetings with international lawyers and human rights activists, Slaughter said she was surprised by those who suggested that only going to war for preemptive means would not be enough. She had originally theorized these liberal thinkers would be opposed to all non-defensive wars, but instead they said that "we need to go further; we need a doctrine of prevention."

As Slaughter stated, "we seem to be going to war not as an example of humanitarian intervention, but rather as an example of the current administration's new doctrine of preemption."

While advocating the merits of humanitarian intervention, Slaughter also gave a cautionary note. "A doctrine of prevention is a very dangerous power," she said.

Problems arise when deciding when and where to use force. For example, it would not be feasible for the United Nations (UN) to intervene in Chechnya, since it falls under the control of Russia, a nuclear superpower. According to Slaughter, "if individual governments can exercise that power, it may be a recipe for a far more bloody world than the one we are currently facing."

Because of this, Slaughter insists upon multilateral power, exercised through the Security Council of the UN.

Acknowledging a preventive doctrine would violate the UN's traditional role of staying out of domestic policy, Slaughter proposed expanding the definition of security to include individual citizen rights and protections.

Slaughter, the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, received the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award for her commitment to international law and education.

Fletcher School International Law Professor Michael Glennon introduced Slaughter, describing her as one of few international lawyers to possess "big picture awareness" while having technical mastery of her field.

In addition to her job at Princeton, Slaughter is currently the president of the American Society of International Law. She is the author of a forthcoming book based on her article "The Real New World Order," in which she describes increasingly complex relations between different nations' bureaucracies.

In front of an audience that included "many old friends," Slaughter thanked her colleagues for the award as well as her family, which she called "her greatest achievement."

She also praised former Tufts University President Jean Mayer, a supporter of the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) program, who sponsored the speech. The lecture was part of EPIIC's continuing program on Sovereignty and Intervention.