Humanitarian intervention and the United Nations /

Humanitarian intervention has become a prominent topic of contemporary debate, as conflicts in Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere have placed it on the international agenda. MacQueen (Univ. of Dundee, Scotland) uses the first three chapters to trace the evolution of international intervention, generally under the auspices of international organization, from the 17th century to the present. This is not an original contribution but it is an effective narrative, useful for a reader who needs a short overview of collective security, peacekeeping, and other forms of intervention. Three recent case studies (various conflicts in Africa, Bosnia, and East Timor) take up separate chapters; these are largely descriptive rather than theoretically driven. In what is perhaps the weakest part of the book, the last chapter attempts an evaluation of five humanitarian interventions. The generally pessimistic assessment might be accurate, but the analysis does not make a clear distinction between peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention, and the evaluation standards surprisingly do not include criteria such as relieving or reducing the suffering of threatened populations. Summing Up: Recommended. Research collections. P. F. Diehl University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign