Alex J. Bellamy responds to Robert A. Pape's Spring 2013 International Security correspondence, "Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect."

Gareth Evans and Ramesh Thakur respond to Robert A. Pape's summer 2012 International Security article, "When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention."

The need to intervene to stop genocide is not controversial, but the international community has made little progress in this regard since the term was coined during World War II. This is partly because the current standard for intervention—genocide—sets the bar too high, while the main alternative—the responsibility to protect—sets the bar too low. A new standard—the pragmatic standard of humanitarian intervention—recommends intervention only when it is possible to disrupt a government-sponsored homicide campaign and create lasting security for the threatened population with minimal risk to the intervening forces. Adherence to such a standard would significantly increase the number of humanitarian interventions without creating unacceptable costs for the intervening states.

The George W. Bush administration’s national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has wrongly promoted the view that the United States, as the leader of a unipolar system, can pursue such a policy without fear of serious opposition.

David Baldwin of Columbia University takes issue with Robert Pape’s findings in his Fall 1997 article that economic sanctions “do not work.” Pape replies.

The author responds with a vigorous defense of his original findings from “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” a highly regarded and influential study that offered qualified optimism about the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool, which was published in the fall 1997 issue of International Security.