Edited by Terry Nardin and Melissa S. Williams
Photo Credit: Amazon.com
American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (Dec. 2005)
http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?products_id=3585
About the book: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. All are examples where humanitarian intervention has been called into action. This timely and important volume explores the legal and moral issues which emerge when a state uses military force in order to protect innocent people from violence perpetrated or permitted by the government of that state. Humanitarian intervention can be seen as a moral duty to protect but it is also subject to misuse as a front for imperialism without regard to international law.
In Humanitarian Intervention, the contributors explore the many questions surrounding the issue. Is humanitarian intervention permitted by international law? If not, is it nevertheless morally permissible or morally required? Realistically, might not the main consequence of the humanitarian intervention principle be that powerful states will coerce weak ones for purposes of their own? The current debate is updated by two innovations in particular, the first being the shift of emphasis from the permissibility of intervening to the responsibility to intervene, and the second an emerging conviction that the response to humanitarian crises needs to be collective, coordinated, and preemptive. The authors shed light on the timely debate of when and how to intervene and when, if ever, not to.
Contributors: Carla Bagnoli, Joseph Boyle, Anthony Coates, Thomas Franck, Brian D. Lepard, Catherine Lu, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Terry Nardin, Thomas Pogge, Melissa S. Williams, and Kok-Chor Tan.
About the author: Terry Nardin joined the Political Science Department at the National University of Singapore as Head in 2006 and also serves as Academic Convener of the International Studies Programme. Before going to NUS he was UWM Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He studied at the University of Chicago and New York University and has a PhD from Northwestern University. He has been a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellow, a Visitor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a Visiting Canterbury Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Prof Nardin's research and teaching focuses on questions at the intersection of the fields of political theory and international relations, including questions about international law, international ethics, the morality of war, and the history of international thought. His current research is on theories of international and global justice and on democratic theory in an East Asian context, but he remains interested in many other topics in political and legal philosophy and the philosophy of the humanities and social sciences.
Contact: tnardin@nus.edu.sg
