Humanitarian Hypocrisy

Abstract:

Although peace operations are the main policy instrument for directly protecting civilians from severe violence, only a few are designed to reflect threatened civilians’ security needs. In a forthcoming book, Humanitarian Hypocrisy: Civilian Protection and the Design of Peace Operations, I examine how four major democracies – the US, UK, France, and Australia – contribute to this situation by facilitating gaps between a force’s ambitions to protect civilians and its resources for doing so. Although missions affected by these gaps gesture toward protecting civilians, they can actually worsen their suffering. I describe these gaps as a form of organized hypocrisy and argue that their attraction lies in their ability to help leaders balance competing normative and material pressures to protect civilians while also limiting associated costs. The argument has implications both for when these gaps are most likely and for how leaders can benefit from them politically. I support it with diverse evidence based on quantitative analysis of original data and four in-depth case studies.

 

 

Speaker Bio:

Andrea Everett is a Visiting Scholar at CDDRL. Her research focuses on humanitarian politics and policy. Her first book, Humanitarian Hypocrisy, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in December 2017, and her work has also been published in Security Studies and Conflict Management and Peace Science. She received her PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University in 2012 and has previously worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at UC, Santa Cruz and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. She also holds a B.A. from Stanford and studied in Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar.