The Politics of Humanitarian Intervention and Human Wrongs Journalism: The Case of Kosovo versus Sierra Leone

Abstract

While political theorists such as Walzer (1992) have in the recent past been exploring why states intervene militarily to protect and promote human rights in countries where the state apparatus fails to do so, or even violates them, little has been done to explore why countries intervene or support humanitarian intervention in some countries but not in others in the context of the politics of humanitarian intervention. Simon Caney, Chris Brown and Martin Shaw are among the very few who have explored the political realism and cosmopolitan binary context of the humanitarian intervention debate. Even more limited, if present at all, is the role of the media in the equation, as I stressed in the introductory chapter. This chapter seeks to address this gap by exploring the role of human wrongs journalism in ensuring humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, but not in Sierra Leone, when the crises in the two countries peaked at the same time in 1999. While in the case of Kosovo the media usefully placed a great deal of emphasis on empathy/critical frames over empathy/distance frames to call for a sustained military intervention by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces and to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Albanian Muslims by the Orthodox Serbian Christians and, by extension, the genocide, they failed to do the same in the case of Somalia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone — to name just a few cases.