“Calling in the Troops”:
The Uneasy Relationship Among
Women’s Rights, Human Rights, and
Humanitarian Intervention
Karen Engle*
In the spring of 1988, the Harvard Human Rights Yearbook (as it was then
called) was about to publish its first volume. I was a second-year law stu-
dent, and decided to write my third-year paper on women’s human rights. I
recall my advisor, Duncan Kennedy, asking me whether I believed that the
concerns about women I hoped to see addressed internationally warranted
“calling in the troops.” He was not, of course, proposing that we call in the
troops for anything, but I gather he was pushing me to articulate the extent
to which I considered violations against women to be serious, and to be
precise about how I believed they should be addressed. The question chal-
lenged me on a number of levels. The cultural feminist in me at the time
wondered whether it would be a “victory” for feminism if troops were
called in on women’s behalf. The recovering pacifist in me was curious
whether, if I resisted the desire to send in soldiers, I would be suggesting
that women’s rights were not human rights. The human rights student in
me knew that there were many ways to respond to human rights violations
without military intervention. Indeed, few human rights activists seemed to
be talking about using military force to respond to human rights violations
against anyone, male or female.
International human rights law and discourse have changed markedly
since I wrote my third-year paper. As the Harvard Human Rights Journal
celebrates its twentieth anniversary, women’s rights have become largely
accepted as human rights, and military humanitarian intervention1 has be-
* W. H. Francis, Jr. Professor in Law; Director, Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human
Rights and Justice, University of Texas School of Law.
I am grateful to the many people who have given me comments on the presentations of various stages
of this draft at the American Society of International Law, American University in Cairo, University o