'We Can't Just Do Nothing'

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror

By Mahmood Mamdani

(Pantheon, 398 pp., $26.95)

The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All

By Gareth Evans

(Brookings, 349 pp., $24.95)

I.

In the summer of 2007 , Mahmood Mamdani found himself at a meeting of activists and politicians, listening to sentiments that had by then become quite common among a certain class of politically active Americans. The speakers were calling on the United Nations to send peacekeepers to Darfur. Fed up with the inability of African Union troops--who were already on the ground in western Sudan--to stop the ongoing bloodshed, they insisted that U.N. forces could do better. The United Nations, explained one politician, echoing a view you could have heard on any number of college campuses at the time, would grant "mercy" to the people of Darfur.

Mamdani was appalled at what he was hearing. "The naivete of these assumptions was breathtaking," he fumes in his new book, as he recalls the meeting. And it was not just this gathering that irked him. Other activists of his acquaintance were going even further. One friend was hoping that Americans would "impose a no-fly zone and ... hit selected targets." Meanwhile a "highly respected activist" had even raised the possibility of the United States sending its own ground troops to Sudan, or mustering troops from other countries for the humanitarian mission. Could Americans solve the problems of Darfur? an incredulous Mamdani asked. "Not really," the activist replied. "But what can we do? There is no other solution. We can't just do nothing."

What Mamdani was hearing was basically the position of most Save Darfur types from 2004 on, as it gradually dawned on the world that a genocide was taking place in western Sudan. Most favored sending United Nations troops to Darfur to replace an ineffective African Union force. Others thought that NATO or even American soldiers would be needed to stop the Sudanese government from murdering its own people and to establish the security that would allow millions of displaced Darfuris to begin returning home. Still others believed that the United States should take military measures short of an outright invasion of Darfur, such as establishing a no-fly zone. The particulars of these prescriptions varied, but what was common to all of them was a basic belief that the United States and its allies had a moral obligation to stop genocide and to relieve the suffering of the Darfuri people.

For Mamdani, all this was simply imperialism by another name. Now he has written a book outlining his demurral about Darfur, and attacking the movement in the West that argued for intervention in Sudan. Mamdani contends that Darfur was never a genocide. What took place in western Sudan beginning in 2003, according to him, was exaggerated and mangled by human rights activists in the West in order to gin up an excuse to invade Sudan.

Mamdani's book--which The New York Times called "learned" and "important"--is only ostensibly about Darfur. He has bigger and more ambitious themes. He wishes to show that Save Darfur activists--and, more broadly, "human rights fundamentalists," as he scornfully calls them--are the intellectual descendants of European colonialists, and also the ideological cousins of Dick Cheney. They have, he writes, issued "a clarion call for the recolonization of 'failed' states in Africa." For Mamdani, the Save Darfur movement is more or less indistinguishable from the great imperialist enterprise of our time, which is the war on terror. "The harsh truth," he argues, "is that the War on Terror has provided the coordinates, the language, the images, and the sentiment for interpreting Darfur."

Mamdani's book nicely exemplifies one pole in the old and ongoing struggle between two sometimes contradictory impulses of liberal foreign policy: the opposition to imperialism and the devotion to human rights. If liberals view anti-imperialism as their primary philosophical commitment, then they will be reluctant to meddle in the affairs of other countries, even when they are ruled by authoritarian governments--as in Sudan--that abuse their own people. But if liberalism's primary commitment is to human rights, then liberals will be willing to judge, to oppose, and even to undermine such governments.

The differences between these two strains in left-wing thinking are stark, but they are not always obvious. That is because history has often conspired to paper them over--particularly during the Cold War, when the United States backed a number of awful dictators. Criticizing American support for Pinochet or Mobutu was consistent with both anti-imperialism and a healthy interest in human rights. Such situations temporarily exempted liberals from the trouble of disaggregating their philosophical commitments and establishing how well, or not well, they went together. But history does not always present such convenient circumstances; and since the end of the Cold War, every time the United States has undertaken a humanitarian intervention--or, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, interventions with humanitarian implications--this fundamental split has, in one form or another, returned to the center of the liberal debate.

While this question tends to come to the fore most dramatically in arguments over war, it is not fundamentally a question about war. The military is simply one among many means that can be used to interfere in other countries (though it is certainly the bluntest). The more basic question--is it right to interfere?--is the one that needs to be asked before we talk about invasions or air strikes or sanctions or International Criminal Court indictments or any other means of impeding abusive leaders and promoting human rights. And when you put the question to people on the left--when you ask them whether it is morally and historically correct for liberals to be in the business of promoting liberalism by undermining illiberal governments--you get a wide range of responses, which suggest that the old contest between the anti-imperialist impulse and the human rights impulse is alive and well.

If Mamdani's book demarcates the anti-imperialist pole of this debate, another recent book speaks for the opposite side. It is called The Responsibility to Protect, which is also the name of a new international doctrine formulated by liberals who fall squarely in the human rights camp. Back in 2000, the Canadian government assembled a group called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to take up the question of how governments should respond to genocide and other mass crimes. Out of this group's deliberations emerged the concept of "the responsibility to protect"--or R2P, as it has come to be known in the policy community. The commission's co-chair was a former Australian diplomat named Gareth Evans, who, until recently, headed the International Crisis Group. Evans has written a book attempting to explain the doctrine, and to defend it.

The term "humanitarian intervention"--which, Evans takes pains to note, is only military in nature and therefore does not capture the full meaning of "the responsibility to protect"--has been in circulation since at least the nineteenth century; but during the 1990s, as the Cold War drew to a close and national interests briefly faded to the background of foreign policy, the question of when and whether interventions could be justified on purely moral grounds moved for the first time to the center of the international discussion. Out of the debates surrounding Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo came a number of similar ideas about how the international community ought to conduct itself in humanitarian emergencies. Evans credits Bernard Kouchner with helping to start the discussion by proposing, in the 1980s, a "right to intervene"--a phrase that earned widespread usage when the United States entered Somalia in 1992. It soon became clear, Evans writes, that other actors--from the U.N. Development Program, which in 1994 proposed the concept of "human security," to the Sudanese scholar Francis Deng, who in 1996 co-wrote a book titled Sovereignty as Responsibility, to Tony Blair, who in 1999 defended Kosovo as "a just war, based not on any territorial ambition but on values," to Kofi Annan, who coined the term "individual sovereignty"--were thinking along similar lines. The aim behind all these ideas was more or less the same: to complicate the traditional notion of state sovereignty by codifying the principle that governments could not be permitted to commit mass crimes against their own people.

But these efforts often ran afoul of politicians in the developing world, who thought that they sounded too much like imperialism. Evans's commission--which included Michael Ignatieff, Lee Hamilton, and several developing-world politicians, such as former Filipino president Fidel Ramos and Cyril Ramaphosa of the African National Congress--wanted to find a way around this problem. Its answer was the phrase "the responsibility to protect," which identified three obligations of the international community in the event of mass crimes: "the responsibility to prevent," "the responsibility to react," and "the responsibility to rebuild." The commission emphasized that prevention was "the single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect." In other words, this new doctrine was not chiefly about barreling into a country with troops to save a vulnerable population. It was more about using soft power to prevent awful situations from developing in the first place. (Military force could be used, but only as a last resort.) Four years after Evans and his commission issued their report, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution endorsing the responsibility to protect.