The topic of humanitarian intervention has become increasingly significant since the end of the Cold War. Despite a substantial body of literature on the subject in the past, recent developments in the late 1990s should justify this contemporary study of the subject.
The book is not only timely, given the crises which have occasioned United Nations interventions over the past several years, but should also be enduring, as international political structures undergo stress and reform, and as international law and international relations theorists grapple with the sovereignty/interventionl problem.
It defends the emergence of a right of humanitarian intervention and argues that state sovereignty is not incompatible with humanitarian intervention. After a thorough review of historical precedents, the book concludes by assessing contemporary developments in terms of sources of support for intervention on humanitarian grounds.
