Humanitarian intervention : ethical, legal, and political dilemmas /

This is a thoughtful, scholarly collection of eight essays by prominent thinkers with diversified backgrounds in law, philosophy, and political science. The authors participated in a conference at the Kennan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and attended a follow-up conference at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University in September 2001. The contributors are concerned with the issue of humanitarian intervention in the instance of state failure to protect minorities. Humanitarian intervention is defined as the "threat or use of force across state borders by a state (or group of states) aimed at preventing or ending widespread and grave violations of the fundamental human rights of individuals other than its own citizens, without the permission of the state within whose territory force is applied." The book looks at the issue from the relevant ethical, legal, and political perspectives. Michael Ignatieff's essay "State Failure and Nation Building" is especially topical in view of the situations in countries such as Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia, and Sri Lanka. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. E. W. Webking University of Lethbridge

This anthology should set a standard because of its comprehensive treatment of the subject-among the most current and most controversial in international law-and because of obstacles to agreeing about legitimate intervention. The contributors clearly explain why intervention remains an "imperfect duty." Responding to genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Cambodia, among other venues, has exposed a gap between the legitimacy of preventing egregious violations of human rights and the norm of nonintervention present in positive law and the United Nations Charter. Thus, Allen Buchanan warns that one "cannot move directly from the commitment to the rule of law as an ideal to strict fidelity to existing law," and it is precisely this concern about "movement" that most of the writers share. Michael Byers and Simon Chesterman ask if an admission of "exceptional illegality" in intervention cannot in fact strengthen international law; Michael Ignatieff ironically notes how the idea of "Westphalian" sovereign nonintervention is accorded to collapsed or failed states; Jane Stromseth warns against the "drawbacks of a premature codification" of a right to intervene. The relevance of the book to the post-Communist international order is hard to understate, yet the level of treatment presumes a familiarity with international law that many undergraduates may not possess. Recommended for larger academic libraries.-Zachary T. Irwin, Sch. of Humanities & Social Science, Pennsylvania State, Erie (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.