PROLOGUE

War Without Enemies: "Humanitarian Intervention" in the Media Age

In Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and elsewhere, military forces have embarked on humanitarian interventions under the watchful eye of the world's media. But what is a "humanitarian intervention"?

....French troops in Rwanda, British, French and others in Bosnia, American troops out of Somalia and into Haiti. Heralded by the relief operations in northern Iraq and Bangladesh that followed immediately upon the conclusion of the Gulf War, "humanitarian intervention" has emerged as a major mission and justification for the use of Western military force in the post Cold War era. The movements of these troops, both in and out of the war zones, have been accompanied, and often even provoked by, unprecedented attention from the international news media. But what are the soldiers doing, and what are the cameras covering? Is it "God's work", as President Bush told the Americans in Mogadishu, or "neocolonialism" as the Rwandan Patriotic Front described "Operation Turquoise", or something more ambivalent and difficult, born of the collapse of the East-West opposition and the emergence of global real-time television?

The phenomenon of military humanitarianism has of course been greeted with new debates over peacekeeping and peacemaking, neutrality, a droit d'ingérence, the United Nations as global police force, and the role of the mass media in crisis-driven foreign policy - debates which have fractured the old ideological positions of left and right from within. But the underlying questions about the category itself of the "humanitarian", and about the displacement of the classical ideologico-political justifications for the use of military force by an ethical discourse of human rights, have barely been broached.

This conference aims to go beyond the tired protests against "pictures making policy" to examine the profound transformations effected by global television and real-time news on our notions of the world, the public, rights and responsibilities, as well as war itself.

The conference is free and open to the public. It will take place in both French and English and there will be simultaneous translation.

Updated 11/94