What are the main factors to be weighed by the international community in deciding whether to undertake intervention for humanitarian purposes?

https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/4a8e5b072.pdf

Delivering Humanitarian Aid

http://www.un.org/en/sections/what-we-do/deliver-humanitarian-aid/ This covers a lot of UN emergency and longer-term interventions, where natural disasters have occurred or food resources are insufficient. These programs are usually authorized and welcomed by the local government if it is unable to respond on its own, and are not controversial, except in terms of effectiveness (speed, organization, costs etc.).

https://www.unocha.org/sites/unocha/files/Security%20Council%20Norms_Final%20version%20for%20print%2017%20June%202014.pdf

https://www.unocha.org/our-work/coordination/un-disaster-assessment-and-coordination-undac

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11792/

https://ec.europa.eu/echo/what/humanitarian-aid/disaster_preparedness_en

Where a government is simply reluctant to authorize a foreign presence on its territory, this may present a serious challenge for the international community if that government is unable to deal with the situation, even when we are simply talking about relief in the event of a natural disaster.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/feb/27/regime-blocked-aid-to-burma-cyclone-victims

https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/05/03/lessons-cyclone-nargis

And how should the international community respond if a government is unwilling to respond to a humanitarian crisis on its territory perhaps because there is a civil conflict going on?

Syria: https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/un-aid-northern-syria-which-neutral-absolutely-essential-and-delivered

https://www.unocha.org/story/un-impartial-syria-it-elsewhere

https://www.unocha.org/syria

https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syrian-arab-republic-2020-humanitarian-response-plan-december-2020#:~:text=The%202020%20Humanitarian%20Response%20Plan,undertaken%20across%20and%20within%20sectors.

https://hum-insight.info/plan/1044

https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/syria_2021_humanitarian_needs_overview.pdf

https://hum-insight.info/plan/1088

https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/statement-security-council-briefing-humanitarian-situation-syria-27

Yemen: https://reports.unocha.org/en/country/yemen/

https://www.unocha.org/yemen/about-ocha-yemen

https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disaster/yemen-humanitarian-crisis/#:~:text=UNICEF%20says%20that%20the%20humanitarian,a%20critically%20underfunded%20UN%20system%E2%80%9D.

https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/yemen-crisis

https://www.unicef.org/appeals/yemen

And what should the international community do if that government itself is held to be the cause of, and responsible for, the crisis?

The Responsibility to Protect

https://www.esteri.it/it/sala_stampa/archivionotizie/eventi/2020/09/del-re-all-onu-sforzo-instancabile-italia-a-protezione-civili_0/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect

https://www.globalr2p.org/resources/unga-r2p-debate-2021/

https://www.globalr2p.org/publications/un-general-assembly-adopts-new-resolution-on-the-responsibility-to-protect/

https://www.globalr2p.org/what-is-r2p/#:~:text=The%20Responsibility%20to%20Protect%20%E2%80%93%20known,cleansing%20and%20crimes%20against%20humanity.

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/about-responsibility-to-protect.shtml

https://unric.org/en/unric-library-backgrounder-r2p/

https://www.globalr2p.org/what-is-r2p/

https://archive.unric.org/en/responsibility-to-protect/26981-r2p-a-short-history

https://archive.unric.org/en/responsibility-to-protect/26982-responsibility-to-protect-two-case-studies-with-alex-vines-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect read carefully, in particular

The three Pillars of the Responsibility to Protect

Pillar I: The protection responsibilities of the state. This stresses that states have the primary responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.

Pillar II: International assistance and capacity-building. This addresses the international community's commitment to help states build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, and to help those under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

Pillar III: Timely and decisive response. This focuses on the responsibility of international community to act in a timely and decisive way to prevent and halt genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity when a state manifestly fails to protect its population.

Note that:

The ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) argued that any form of military intervention is "an exceptional and extraordinary measure", and, as such, to be justified it must meet certain criteria, including:

· Just cause: There must be "serious and irreparable harm occurring to human beings, or imminently likely to occur".

· Right intention: The main intention of the military action must be to prevent human suffering.

· Last resort: Every other measure besides military invention has to have already been taken into account. (This does not mean that every measurement has to have been applied and been shown to fail, but that there are reasonable grounds to believe that only military action would work in that situation.)

· Proportional means: The military means must not exceed what is necessary "to secure the defined human protection objective".

· Reasonable prospects: The chance of success must be reasonably high, and it must be unlikely that the consequences of the military intervention would be worse than the consequences without the intervention.

· Right authority: The military action has to have been authorized by the Security Council.

Various experts have highlighted some of the problems that military intervention for humanitarian purposes may involve:

The mixed-motives problem - The legitimacy of R2P rests upon its altruistic aim. However, states will often be wary to engage in humanitarian intervention unless the intervention is partly rooted in self-interest. The appearance that the intervention is not strictly altruistic consequently leads some to question its legitimacy.

· The counterfactual problem - When R2P is successful, there will not be any clear-cut evidence of its success: a mass atrocity that did not occur but would have occurred without intervention. Defenders of R2P consequently have to rely on counterfactual arguments.

· The conspicuous harm problem - While the benefits of the intervention will not be clearly visible, the destructiveness and costs of the intervention will be visible. This makes it more difficult for proponents of the intervention to defend the intervention. The destruction caused by the intervention also makes some question the legitimacy of the intervention due to the stated purpose of preventing harm.

· The end-state problem - Humanitarian intervention is prone to expand the mission beyond simply averting mass atrocities. When successful at averting mass atrocities, the intervenors will often be forced to take upon themselves more expansive mandates to ensure that threatened populations will be safe after the intervenors leave.

· The inconsistency problem - Due to the aforementioned problems, in addition to the belief that a particular military action is likely to cause more harm than good, states may fail to act in situations where mass atrocities loom. The failure to intervene in any and all situations where there is a risk of mass atrocities lead to charges of inconsistency.

See also praise and criticism of R2P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect#Praise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect#Criticism

and very critical: https://fpif.org/the_crisis_of_humanitarian_intervention/

So in any discussion about using military force as part of an attempt at humanitarian intervention in order to prevent genocide and human rights abuses, there are a series of issues to be examined. First, there is the question of legitimacy. Is what is happening sufficient cause to infringe a state's sovereignty under Pillar III? Is there a clear mandate from the UN Security Council? (In Yemen and Syria there is no mandate for military intervention.) If there is not, should countries act without it if there is widespread support in the UN General Assembly? Then there is the bigger question of effectiveness. Do such missions usually achieve their basic goal of bringing peace and stability and ending the violence, or do they lead to more violence? Is the mission welcomed by the local people involved? (Compare for example: Somalia UNOSOM I and II 1992-5, Afghanistan ISAF 2001-present, and military intervention in Libya in 2011) Moreover, would the funds used for such a mission be better spent elsewhere as direct aid on a more concrete problem? (e.g. on providing food, water, medicine and shelter to an area not requiring a military presence). There is another important consideration that is often raised. Many experts argue that since the foundation of the UN humanitarian, intervention has always been 'politicized'. What exactly the international community should do in response to the situation in Syria, for example, cannot be debated 'neutrally', simply as a humanitarian crisis. Each member state on the UNSC and in the UNGA will inevitably bring to the discussion its own economic and strategic interests, and its own cultural or ideological perspective. In international relations this is the normal context in which a diplomatic discussion of a question like that of Syria or Libya takes place.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/03/libya-escalating-drama-case-liberal-intervention

In order to respond to a question like:

What are the main factors to be weighed when the international community is considering military intervention in response to a humanitarian crisis?

You will probably need to look at these sources again and think about the points raised (concerning the idea that for the international community there is a responsibility to protect civilians from massive human rights abuses by their own government which may override the principle of state sovereignty) in relation to past and present humanitarian crises and intervention or non-intervention by the international community:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect

https://www.globalr2p.org/

https://reliefweb.int/report/world/reflection-responsibility-protect-2020

https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/the-responsibility-to-protect-the-people-of-myanmar/

https://theglobalobservatory.org/2022/01/revised-agreement-on-african-union-mission-in-somalia/

You should also consider whether national public opinion is manipulated by a government or the media to support a proposed intervention or whether it drives media reporting and government action or inaction by calling for intervention of responding with indifference to an event.

https://www.cato.org/white-paper/public-opinion-war-terror

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137364401_12

https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/avoiding-avoidable-tragedy-public-opinion-and-r2p/

You should also look at an article in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan called: Drop Your weapons.

https://www.sfcg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Drop-Your-Weapons_Foreign-Affairs_Chenoweth+Stephan.pdf

This argues against armed resistance and for civil resistance on a statistical basis, claiming that the latter is more likely to produce positive change. It is then argued that this means there is a greater responsibility for the international community to ‘assist’ (civil protest and civil resistance against a dictatorship) rather than to embrace the responsibility to protect principle.

For a wider discussion of this and related issues, see:

The True Costs of Humanitarian Intervention by Benjamin A. Valentino

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2011-10-17/true-costs-humanitarian-intervention

Humanitarian Intervention Comes of Age by Jon Western and Joshua S. Goldstein

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265478467_Humanitarian_Intervention_Comes_of_Age_Lessons_From_Somalia_to_Libya