Doctor Who and Humanitarian Interventions – How a Time Lord foreshadows the Responsibility to Protect

If pop culture is the audio-visual result of politics, then Doctor Who, the long-running science fiction series, provides prescient political commentary on evolution of the moral and legal arguments around humanitarian intervention. Premiering in 1963, Doctor Who follows The Doctor, a seemingly immortal Time Lord who travels through time and space. Inevitably, the kind-hearted Doctor becomes entangled in major historical and international events as they attempt to protect the human race. These well-intentioned interventions violate the Time Lords First Law of Time, which prohibits interference in events and acts as a thinly veiled allegory for the principle of non-intervention. How the Doctor justifies their interference, and the response they receive from those around them, serve as an apt illustration of the ever-changing attitudes towards the legality and justifiability of humanitarian interventions.