The project on humanitarian military intervention is an empirical investigation of interventions in Iraqi Kurdistan, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor.
Research is driven by two questions.
The record indicates that different military operations within the same country have had differing level of success in this regard. The six critical factors are the intervenor's strategy on the ground motives for acting immediate objectives degree of coordination with humanitarian organizations material capabilities, and reaction time. In contrast to normative, legal and institutional studies, this project takes a consequentialist approach that focuses on the material effect of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. It offers three advances in the study of humanitarian intervention. First, it operationalizes the nebulous standard that a humanitarian intervention ought to do more good than harm by arguing that the number of lives saved is a clear, though minimalist, criterion for judging effectiveness.