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The aim of this article is to provide an analysis of the features that have shaped the state's decision‐making process in the United Nations, with regard to the humanitarian intervention in Darfur from 2003 onwards.

The methodological approach to the study is a review of political statement papers grounded in the concept of “humanitarian imperialism” and a “responsibility to protect”.

It was found out that the decision‐making process, leading to humanitarian interventions in Darfur was shaped by a larger extent by the states' own national interests and to a smaller extent by humanitarian considerations.

The main implications of this paper are that the United Nations are not the right platform when it comes to humanitarian interventions that should be placed on humanitarian grounds. Therefore, nation states are strongly advised to accept their leading role in international politics and to realise their responsibility to protect foreign citizens in humanitarian catastrophes.

This paper will have an effect on the way humanitarian interventions and “humanitarian motives” can be seen in society and will suggest that in some situations it is advised to take a more realist approach towards humanitarian interventions.

This paper is valuable for further analysis of political decision‐making processes and learning processes within politics.

The political economy of the humanitarian is a new or a very old concept. On the one hand, if we have the main reference of the “humanitarian interventions” such as they were applied these last decades, there is no specific analysis of political economy on the question. On the other hand, if we introduce the concept of “humanitarian missions,” this one is already more ancient, but not older of two centuries. However, “humanitarian interventions” must not be mixed up with “humanitarian missions.” The first are military actions against a State to protect people within its borders from suffering grave harms. The second are peaceful actions and economic decisions to protect the life of victims of war, internal violence, natural or technologic disasters….¹ Thus, there are two “political economies of the humanitarian,” expressed both in the civil and military fields.

This chapter reviews the literature to contextualize the intervention in the post–cold war era characterized by the momentum of globalization dominated by informal actors beside the legal authority of the state. It indicates how these actors deviate the primary purpose of the humanitarian intervention and create an ungovernable environment of the state particularly when interventions are operated in countries endowed with natural resources. The case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) serves as a model to ascertain such phenomenon in which actors such as states involved in intervention come in collusion with shadow elites, lobbyists and multinational companies to establish clandestine networks of illegal exploitation and smuggling of natural resources. The chapter winds up by suggesting the redefinition of policies of interventions to keep humanitarian intervention in its primary mission while holding actors involved in illegal and smuggling of natural resources accountable.

Against the backdrop of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) policy – an instrument with which the UN seeks to protect vulnerable civilians from gross violations of human rights – this study examines the application of R2P in the Libyan intervention and the various efforts to replicate similar claim to intervene in Syria. While proposing that the roles of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) is increasingly influential to the success of an intervention, this study asks the question: what are the general conditions for success of R2P application in Libya and Syria during the period 2011-2014?

In its examination of the policy and scholarly works that have informed, justified and evaluated the processes and outcomes of the principles of R2P policy, this paper used relevant search terms for conditions for success of humanitarian military intervention (COSI). Specific keywords such as R2P, BRICS and humanitarian intervention are scrutinised for relevance to the research question. Documents that failed to satisfy the criteria of research quality were excluded, whereas the key problems and findings identified in each studied document were tabulated into inclusion and exclusion.

Despite the role of BRICS in the Libyan and Syrian interventions, existing literature failed to explicitly make this connection, although much of the literature agreed on a number of general conditions for success. This paper problematise the relationship between success and BRICS role. One of the reasons for this is the emerging nature of the literature that is beginning to appreciate the plausibility that the BRICS influences the success of an intervention.

This piece synthesises studies that focus on COSI with preference for works that engaged this study’s case countries. Much rich data which even until now are always in need of close examination emerged during data collection, making it useful to craft a third part for BRICS-focused literature that has informed the R2P debate.

Over the last decade, temporary supply chains (TSCs) have become a well-recognized logistics model. In TSCs, supply chain members are organized for an ad hoc project; they pool resources in order to make the project successful. Although it might be perceived that TSCs are unstable due to their temporary nature, this paper aims to discuss how TSCs can be managed so as to be both stable and agile, while achieving the stated objectives; since the stability-agility context could be really challenging in humanitarian and peacekeeping supply chains, this is the one that has been selected.

The authors reviewed the literature, research reports and electronic documents on humanitarian and peacekeeping supply chains, to understand the main challenges in terms of managerial and social impacts of logistical operations in a disaster context.

The disaster context is very peculiar, since it requires tremendous agility when a natural or man-made catastrophe hits, so that as many lives as possible can be saved and that the situation could get back rapidly to a relatively normal level. The paper shows that TSCs require an advanced level of time and organizational stability of the human and material resources involved in order to be highly flexible. In other words, an efficient TSC relies on “anticipated responsiveness”, a major managerial challenge in the years to come.

The paper clarifies the management of humanitarian and peacekeeping supply chains and identifies the importance of anticipation capability to improve logistical responsiveness.

The aim of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review to understand the state of the art of partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations in managing humanitarian logistics.

A systematic literature review is conducted based on the steps proposed by Denyer and Tranfield (2009). The context-intervention-mechanism-outcome (CIMO) logic is applied to identify the state of the art of partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations in humanitarian logistics. Thirty-six papers related to the topic are extracted from recognized journal databases and then classified into four categories based on the CIMO logic: situational context, intervention factors, mechanisms and outcomes.

The study shows that while the context and mechanisms for developing cross-sector partnerships between the humanitarian and the business sector have been examined and illuminated by many researchers, additional research (in particular, empirical studies) is needed to measure outcomes as well as the contributions of partnerships to the performance of humanitarian logistics. In addition to synthesizing the literature in this area, this study also presents challenges of such partnerships.

The study improves the understanding of the state of cross-sector partnerships in humanitarian logistics as well as identifies opportunities for future research in this area. The study provides reasons and motives of initiating humanitarian–business partnerships in humanitarian logistics as well as their mechanisms and potential outcomes. This may help in developing successful logistics partnerships with each other.

This is the first systematic literature review to examine the nature of partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations in humanitarian logistics using CIMO logic.

This chapter falls into line with the study about the possible incentives of interventions and their impact on democratic institutions to emphasize the need to differentiate between different military interventions and their effects on democratic institutions in the target states. The chapter theoretically builds on the Selectorate Theory (Mesquita et al. 2003) and also dialogues with liberal (Hoffmann 1997) and realist perspectives (Choi 2016) on foreign policy related to the liberal world order, human rights, economic and security interests.

An influential strand of human rights theory explains human rights through appeal to their function. Such ‘function’ theories highlight the role human rights play in international practice and discourse as standards for appropriate state treatment of individuals. But standards in what sense? Standards to be promoted and encouraged through public critique, bilateral pressure, institutional censure or legal culpability? Or standards to be protected and defended through all necessary means? I argue that function theorists conflate (what states themselves recognize as) the important distinctions between these standards. Worse still, many function theorists argue that a major – even definitive – role of human rights involves demarcating permissibility conditions for humanitarian intervention. I argue that this claim gravely mischaracterizes international practice and discourse – in particular it fails to recognize the independent significance of other functional norms operating within the global context. The theorists correctly perceive that we have powerful reasons for wanting this role (of threshold conditions for military intervention) fulfilled, but by mistaking the norms that in fact fulfil it, they distort the actual function of human rights.

The fatal conceit is the assumption that the world can be shaped according to human desires. This chapter argues that the logic of the fatal conceit can be applied to foreign interventions which go beyond the limits of what can be rationally constructed by reason alone. In suffering from the fatal conceit, these interventions are characterized by: (1) the realization that intentions do not equal results, (2) a reliance on top-down planning, (3) the view of development as a technological issue, (4) a reliance on bureaucracy over markets, and (5) the primacy of collectivism over individualism. These characteristics explain why interventions extending beyond the limits of what can be rationally constructed tend to fail.