Responsibility to Protect: Humanitarian Intervention in Ethiopia’s Northern Armed Conflict

Nostrum or Venom?

Abstract

Sates have a duty to protect their own people from harms, lives of citizens and promotions of their welfare. The failure to protect them from chronic insecurities of hunger, disease, inadequate shelter, and crime may necessitate the involvement of humanitarian intervention. The incumbent government, the Prosperity Party, has had a strained relationship with the TPLF since assuming federal power, so it is known that they went to war despite pledging ways to avoid it. As a result, the exigency of great powers to humanitarian assistance came to the fore. While unquenchable to the situation; however, there is a dearth of evidence about the mis/use of power in the name of humanitarian intervention. This research thus looks into the underlying epistemological and ontological explanations for the Northern Armed Conflict in Ethiopia since 2020. Furthermore, it investigates the responsibility to protect and its competing debates both in academic and non-academic circles concerning humanitarian objectives, grounds for intervention, means and results of intervention in the conflict. To achieve the objectives, primary and secondary sources were used. The paper argued that the incumbent government of Ethiopia has failed the internal responsibility to protect thus; exigencies of great powers would be viable for reinvigorating the state capacity to discharge their responsibility; however, the intervention is challenged by impure motives, grounds, means, and results of the intervention. The maneuverability of the element was found to be disproportional to the chance of everyone.  It is thus recommended that humanitarian intervention must be based up on certain discretionary legal bounds. Moreover, the fear of unilateral intervention and subjective regulatory frame work could possibly be resolved by the invitation of more super powers.