Wars have never been the concern only of their combatants. Other states pay close attention to the geo-political implications and opportunities created by armed conflict, and interfere directly or indirectly when their cynical calculations suggest that would advance their interests. For example, various countries - the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Qatar - have been involving themselves in Sudan's ghastly civil war, apparently looking to pick up geopolitical advantages - especially access to Red Sea ports that would allow them to threaten international shipping via the Suez Canal, or to prevent other states from doing so. When extended to material support to favoured factions this increases the resources of the combatants, increasing the ambition of their respective war goals and so extending the war by reducing the scope for a mutually acceptable peace deal.
Such amoral realpolitik in international relations is as old as war itself, together with its unfortunate consequences for human lives. What is somewhat more recent is the rise of international moral concern for the lives of civilians threatened by war, expressed through the increased influence of civil society. At least since the Greeks' 1820's war of independence, states have also been interfering in other people's wars out of humanitarian concerns to reduce civilian suffering.
The problem is that although each individual humanitarian intervention may be sincerely morally motivated - and even sometimes succeed in its goal of reducing suffering - the practise of morally motivated interference would seem actually to increase the amount of civilian suffering due to war. It makes civil wars more likely to start and harder to end, while incentivising crimes against civilians.
I. More Civil Wars
In asymmetric warfare one side is significantly militarily weaker than the other; in civil wars those rebelling against an established government. It follows that this is not generally an enterprise that the weaker party will be enthusiastic to pursue. However, the existence of a deep pool of potential international concern for civilian suffering changes the cost-benefit calculations for those contemplating armed rebellion.
Once a war begins, civilians will obviously suffer, and people around the world will start demanding that their governments take actions to bring it to an end. That will likely generate diplomatic pressure, and the risk of economic sanctions, and possibly even a military intervention (such as in Kosovo and Libya). Global opinion can also impose indirect costs on a warring government by smearing their whole country with the stigma of moral disgrace. The impacts of such social isolation are various, but include reluctance to buy a country's exports, or to cooperate ('collaborate') with its government, corporations, or civil society organisations on shared projects.
These costs will naturally be far more severe for a government than for those rebelling against it. Governments have far more to lose in the first place - that's why they are the stronger party. Also unlike rebels, real governments have many other interests that they want to pursue apart from winning the war, and some of these will be crucial to maintaining their domestic legitimacy (such as maintaining the support of economic elites). This means they have more 'attack surfaces' - especially international corporate, diplomatic, and financial ties - that foreign governments and civil society groups can apply pressure to. The warring government is thus an attractive - because easy to hit - target for international humanitarians who are opposed to the brutalities of war. A further implication is that governments already globally despised as morally despicable won't present such an easy target, and so they will generally receive far less criticism.
By a quirk of human psychology particularly convenient for rebel groups, once these humanitarians have adopted the easy target - such as the US government in the case of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - they tend to rationalise their choice. If they are expending so much effort criticising only this actor, then it must be because that is the one most morally responsible for the terrible civilian suffering - the big bad wolf. Antipathy towards the wolf generates sympathy for all those suffering from its depredations, often even including the rebels who started the whole thing and keep it going.
International humanitarianism thus serves as a force multiplier for would-be rebel groups. It allows them to augment the often rather pitiful military challenge they can present to a full-sized government (such as the KLA presented to Milošević's Serbia in 1998) with huge additional political and economic costs. This makes the war less one-sided, and greatly increases the bargaining position of the rebels when it comes to the eventual peace deal (the KLA's leaders got an independent Kosovo to rule over). Other things being equal, when the potential prize is greater, and more achievable, more potential rebels will become real rebels, and we will see more wars.
But how to ensure that global humanitarian attention is engaged and pointed in the right direction?
II. Incentives for War Crimes
The weaker party in an asymmetric war cannot hope to win toe-to-toe battles with a real army. So rebels generally adopt a less directly confrontational military strategy - such as hit and run guerilla tactics, especially on soft civilian targets (i.e. terrorism). This has the advantage that the government is placed on the defensive, attempting the expensive and impossible task of protecting everything and everyone over whom it claims the right to rule. Once again, the enormously greater size and power of their government opponent is turned into a source of vulnerability.
Unsurprisingly, governments chafe at this situation. In response they often attempt their own version of unconventional warfare that will bring the war to the rebels and lead to the decisive victory they think their greater power deserves. This generally means targeting everyone and everything around the rebels in the hope of annihilating the problem and its source. This was Bashar Al-Assad's strategy in the Syrian civil war, indiscriminately bombing (including with nerve gas) and starving the populations in rebel areas. (For his own cynical realpolitik reasons, Putin contributed the precision bombing of hospitals.) It appears also to be the strategy of Netanyahu's government, at least at some points of the ongoing Gaza war.
Adopting this strategy is very expensive for the governments of countries with significant international standing and relationships to lose - it results straightforwardly in moral disgrace, with the costs already discussed, and the gift of moral superiority to the rebels. Israel, for example, had largely avoided falling into it over all its previous wars (total Palestinian deaths from all Israel's wars put together before 2023 add up to around 30,000, suggesting a capacity for self-restraint).
But rebels have ways to push governments over the edge into the moral abyss, and a clear incentive to do so. They can set out deliberately to provoke such a moral breakdown by escalating their guerilla war tactics to the point where the domestic political pain for the government is so great that it will do almost anything to end it. Thus, after Hamas' performatively brutal assault on Israeli civilians in October 2023, Netanyahu's government threw out Israel's usual restraints on the use of its overwhelming military force - and Hamas had achieved its goal. Positive international attention has flowed to Hamas by the mechanism of sympathy via antipathy, while Israel has lost international standing, connections, and alliances it spent decades building up. The deaths of 5% of Gaza's population, and the maiming, trauma, and desperate misery of many more are merely a means to an end; a price Hamas is willing to pay. The supply of angry young men to recruit from has never been higher.
The strategic provocation and exploitation of government war crimes to capture the world's attention and sympathy seems increasingly common in asymmetric conflicts over the past 200 years. Of course these attempts don't always succeed. Sometimes the government's efforts at annihilation actually succeed (as in Britain's brutal suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya, or Sri Lanka's categorical destruction of Tamil Eelam in 2009). The world's humanitarian attention is also a fickle and unpredictable beast - it seems, for example, presently determined to ignore war atrocities entirely if they take place in Africa. But the significant possibility that they might succeed is enough to make this ghastly strategy attractive to many rebel groups. And that is a direct result of the peculiar incentives created by the modern world's commitment to humanitarianism.
Moreover, even if the rebels' provocations fail to achieve a political victory as great as Hamas achieved against Israel, they may still succeed in creating a painful dilemma for the government they are fighting. Under Obama, for example, US soldiers in Afghanistan were required to operate under very restrictive Rules of Engagement in order to minimise civilian casualties - out of respect for international humanitarian principles and the reputational consequences of breaking them. But this created an opportunity that the Taliban could exploit to terrorise the civilian population into service as human shields (i.e. an incentive to commit more war crimes) and thus increase the costs of America's military involvement (casualties and strategic frustration).
Eventually America's governments got tired of paying those costs and abandoned Afghanistan's population of 40 million to the tender mercies of 60,000 or so terroristic thugs from one of its ethnic groups. Another victory for international humanitarianism: with the war finally over, the Taliban didn't need to blow up school-buses taking girls to school anymore. They could just close the schools down.
III. Longer Wars
As already mentioned, the involvement of external actors for cynical geopolitical reasons often prolongs wars by supplementing the resources available to the combatants to sustain the war beyond what might otherwise have been possible, and at a higher tempo that will cause more destruction and civilian suffering. A similar mechanism applies in the case of external interference motivated by humanitarian concerns. For example, medical and food aid delivered by well-meaning NGOs are easily captured and weaponised by warring parties - both rebels and governments.
NGOs are required to pay 'taxes' for being allowed to operate. This includes paying literal cash pay-offs at checkpoints, but also putting combatants on their payroll and turning a blind eye to the redirection of aid supplies to feed soldiers and resell at a profit. Ethiopia's government made significant use of this technique during the 1983-85 famine created by their own actions during the civil war (De Waal). More recently, Bashar al-Assad extracted tens of millions of dollars from international NGOs during the Syrian civil war, as well as gaining information and influence over their operations.
Humanitarian aid thus helps combatants fund their operations and so sustain or even expand their military campaigns and ambitions. Moreover, this funding stream increases with the amount of civilian suffering created by the war, providing the warring parties with a clear incentive to create and publicise more suffering. A side-effect may be the splintering of rebel groups into multiple self-funding predatory gangs - creating a much harder puzzle for a peace process to resolve than a war between two centrally organised and controlled factions.
In addition, NGOs must give up the right to a moral or political position on the crimes they are witnessing and inadvertently contributing to. They cannot criticise those they are dependent on for continued access. They must also give up substantial control of the distribution of aid - which areas their convoys may travel to, and, at the distribution points, who is favoured to actually receive the aid. This provides warring parties with new ways to subjugate civilian populations, for example, by concentrating them into refugee camps they control and from which they can forcibly conscript young men to their armies (as Hutu militias responsible for the Rwanda genocide did in Oxfam-run refugee camps in 1990s Congo).
Wars end when the warring parties adjust their war aims to the point that there is space for an agreement between them, and some confidence that neither side would see profit in breaking that agreement. Getting to this point often takes some time, as political leaders must come to a realistic view of the relative capabilities of their own and opposing forces via the crucible of war. Only then will they let go of impossible ambitions and adjust their war goals to what their forces might realistically achieve - and hence what their opponent might be willing to concede in a peace deal to save themselves the cost of fighting over it.
Geopolitically motivated external involvement in wars is particularly damaging to prospects for peace because it is a wild card factor that disrupts the development of such mutual knowledge. Even those who recognise that their military position is weak may hold out against what would be a reasonable peace deal in those circumstances, out of hope that a foreign power might still come to their rescue, or that the foreign ally of their enemy might abandon them.
Again, a similar mechanism operates in the case of interference motivated by sincere humanitarian concerns about civilian suffering (whether or not it resulted from rebels’ cynical provocations). Warring parties will adjust their understanding of their relative strength, and hence plausible war goals, according to their interpretation of the global conversation about their war: whether their hash tag is trending; whether the UNGA is voting on a resolution; whether there is talk of economic sanctions or no-fly zones. Moreover, the global conversation is now largely driven by social media and hence more directly accessible to the warring parties. They will often have an information warfare department pumping out graphic images and videos of atrocities that will bring condemnation to their opponents - and thereby also recruit many millions of sincere humanitarians around the world to help spread their message.
Unfortunately social media is an unpredictable battle-field. As the world's fickle moral attention waxes and wanes, so does the relative bargaining position of the warring parties, but in an ambiguous and unreliable way that reduces the scope for both parties to come to a shared understanding of the strategic situation necessary for a successful peace deal.
IV. From interference to punishment?
There seems a clear moral hazard built into the presently rather haphazard, rather emotionally (social media) driven global concern to prevent civilian suffering in war. At least sometimes international humanitarianism provides exactly the wrong incentives to key actors - especially rebels in civil wars - and thus produces additional civilian suffering that would not have occurred without it.
One partial solution would be to properly institutionalise international humanitarianism so that it would not be so driven by the fleeting and unreliable emotional states of ordinary people who are mostly getting their feelings-based knowledge of world events from social media. Instead it would be driven by the systematic and politically disinterested analysis of actual experts. This would also reduce the systematic bias against government actors in civil conflicts, and hence the peculiar incentives for rebels to start wars and commit war crimes with impunity.
Unfortunately this does not seem politically feasible at present. The last great effort towards it was the UNGA's adoption of the Responsibility to Protect norm in 2005, but the project has been all but dead since the interventions in Libya (failed) and Cote D'Ivoire (successful) in 2011. Putin and Xi Jinping do not like the idea that governments might lose power if they try to mass murder their own citizens - and the present UN charter gives them veto rights over anything important.
Nevertheless, the idea of R2P idea is a good one. In particular for redressing the systematic bias against governments fighting insurgencies, and hence the peculiar incentives for rebels to start wars and commit war crimes with impunity. More informed analysis would be more balanced in its criticism of the weaker as well as the stronger side. R2P also begins with the duty of the international community to support governments in their efforts to protect their populations from mass atrocity crimes (military intervention against governments is a last resort in the special case of governments that refuse to stop mass murdering people). That implies materially supporting governments in suppressing terroristic insurgencies (rather than punishing them for doing so), something that would also reduce those governments’ likelihood of resorting to their own ‘unconventional’ methods of warfare.
A second partial solution, though still politically challenging, would be to target the impunity that most war criminals currently enjoy. The idea is that incentives to commit war crimes for strategic advantage should be offset by personal incentives to the decision-makers not to exploit such opportunities.
War leaders stand to gain prestige, power, and often great wealth if they succeed, and this gives them a personal motivation to take whatever actions seem most likely to bring about that success. (Generally rebel leaders have the most to gain, but government leaders often have much to lose.) If war leaders knew that war crimes based strategies would very likely result in significant punishment to them personally, and loss of the prizes of war, they might very well make different choices. The moral hazard problem created by international humanitarianism would be at least partially addressed.
Unfortunately, again, the principle is sound but hard to realise. This is exactly what the ICC was created to do, but has so far abysmally failed at – partly due to its own managerial incompetence, partly due to the excessive evidential requirements built into its legal procedures, and partly due to the unfortunate decision of most great powers to opt out of its jurisdiction. (Perhaps the personal accountability concept could be realised in more creative ways, such as by putting bounties on the heads of suspected war criminals – elsewhere.)
The counter-productivity of the world’s passionate concern for preventing civilian suffering in wars is dispiriting, as are the challenges to building the institutions that could effectively counter the problem. But it seems that the former could aid the latter. Although at present international humanitarianism is rather generic, unreliable, and self-defeating, it is nevertheless an enormous resource of passionate moralism that can be drawn upon. If it could be directed towards the international political project of building and empowering institutions that really could reduce war suffering then those virtuous intentions might finally achieve more good than harm
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An earlier version was published on 3 Quarks Daily
