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Rescuing Thousands, Abandoning a Million: What Might an Emancipatory Intervention Have Looked Like in Rwanda?

The conceptual analysis of an ‘emancipatory intervention’, one that frees the people from repressive or genocidal political forces, has attracted scant attention in the debate on international relations. This has been partly due to the fact that the term has been hijacked by the pervasive liberal moral hubris which advocates greater missions1 under the guise of humanitarian intervention. This article aims to revive and reformulate the idea of emancipatory intervention by deriving lessons from Rwanda as an empirical case and by invoking humanitarian realism, which has the potential to move the vision of emancipatory intervention away from liberal interventionism. The ‘new yardstick’ of assessing emancipatory intervention is less ambitious, but more realistic: it is understood as the extent to which the intervening side might free itself from structural constraints in order to conduct a humanitarian intervention. In the Rwandan case, such possibilities specifically refer to structural cohesiveness, namely the capacity of the UN system to work efficiently when its powers are combined. They include not only the material powers of individual member states, as the mainstream literature has argued, but also rational-legal powers possessed by the UN Secretariat as well as control mechanisms. On this basis, the article constructs a vision of a ‘hammer and anvil’peacekeeping operation in Rwanda.