To arms!. Women's rights and humanitarian intervention

Over the past twenty years, women's rights have become largely accepted as human rights, and military humanitarian intervention has become increasingly advocated by both conservatives and liberals as a response to certain human rights violations. Conservatives have begun to use human rights, even women's rights, discourse to justify their calls for intervention, and liberals have begun to use military discourse and rhetoric to show their commitment to such rights. This article explores these changes in human right law and discourse, and objects to the ways that calls for military intervention feed into a crisis mentality. The crisis focus distorts the nature of the violation or harm and displaces an awareness of the ways that both military and nonmilitary interventions have participated in the production of the crises. In the feminist context, the proliferation of calls to intervention based on arguments that genocides are occurring or impending has suggested a new motivation for claiming that rape is genocide. Such calls have both responded to and helped fuel the mounting enthusiasm of human rights advocates for military humanitarian intervention.