"It's not that I'm advocating war, but there are cases where military force might be necessary, and we'd better have a rational or ethical way to decide whether it's just or not." 

Military intervention may not seem an intuitive area of study for the seminary, but for 2006 GTU doctoral graduate, lawyer, and mother Eileen Chamberlain of Portola Valley, California, there is no incongruity. "My concern, which flows out of the moral concern, is that our current norms on using force can't be squared necessarily within an ethical framework, and I'm trying to bring them into that framework."

In her dissertation, Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Moral Imperative Versus the Rule of Law, Chamberlain examines both the ethical and legal justifications for using peacekeeping forces.  She points out an egregious disconnect between theory and reality that undermines the rule of law and makes humanitarian policy less effective.

Focusing her work ended up being "as simple as reading the newspaper. I just followed what seemed to matter to me," she said. "I've always been interested in international law, and have done human rights work. When I first came to the Graduate Theological Union I had no idea that I would write about this, but the topic really brought together my passions."

A lawyer who had taken a hiatus when her third of four children was born, Chamberlain chose the GTU to follow a deeper calling. "I was grappling with a lot of my own personal philosophical questions, religious questions, and feminist questions. I started taking classes and exploring. In that process I ended up coming back to the topic that had always been meaningful to me." 

This progression was not new for Chamberlain. "Before I completed my law degree, I earned a master's in theology at Harvard, and the same thing happened when I was there: I started with the big philosophical questions and in the end I was doing policy work."

Her research goes right to the heart of that policy work. Chamberlain uses several cases to provide a framework for looking at the problems of humanitarian military intervention. In Kosovo, the world powers sent peacekeeping units, but the action was deemed illegal because the United Nations Security Council had not authorized it. When the genocide began in Rwanda, the Security Council did not take action to call for force. Countries heeded international law and did not send any troops, and the massacres went unchecked.

Currently the U.N.'s decision-making process gives blanket power to the Security Council to vote yes or no without a mandated basis for a ruling. Chamberlain proposes a reform of the process so that ethical and pragmatic standards are used as the basis for determining military intervention.

"Security Council members can base their vote for or against the use of force on any number of interests—from trade relations, to energy supply, to a complete lack of interest in the country where humanitarian intervention is needed. There is no standard," she said. "I'm suggesting that an ethical standard be brought into it."

A Catholic who was versed in just-war theory and the writing of Aquinas, Chamberlain selected the doctoral area of ethics and social theory—and found the GTU's critical and creative scholarship fertile ground for her study. "There is such a wide range of classes, and for me, that's attractive on a lot of different levels," she said. "They were satisfying when I needed to do personal searching, and also when I needed to do ethical theory and its relevance to policy. Having that whole spectrum was invaluable to me."

Graduation brings Eileen Chamberlain to new studies and policy work: she will be a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, looking further into United Nations reform and norms on use of force. "I want to get a more real-world sense of what kind of reform at the U.N. is likely, to get a better sense of where progress is being made and what kind of changes are possible in the real world now." As the Graduate Theological Union builds bridges between faiths, cultures, and traditions, we look to people like Eileen Chamberlain to set the pace.

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