Humanitarian Intervention and Legitimacy Wars: Seeking Peace and Justice in the 21st Century
ISBN: 9781315761176
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited



In the aftermath of the Cold War there has been a dramatic shift in thinking about the maintenance of peace and security on a global level. This shift is away from a preoccupation with how to prevent major wars between sovereign states to a preoccupation about non-state transnational warfare and violence and strife within states in a world order that continues to be juridically and politically delimited by spatial ideas of national sovereignty and national independence as signified by international boundaries.

In this book, Richard Falk draws upon these changes to examine the ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention in the 21st Century. As well as analysing the theoretical and conceptual basis of the responsibility to protect, the book also contains a number of case studies looking at Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Syria. The final section explores when humanitarian intervention can succeed and the changing nature of international political legitimacy in countries such as India, Tibet, South Africa and Palestine.

This book will be of interest to students of International Relations theory, Peace Studies and Global Politics.


Richard Falk is Albert G. Professor of International Law and Practice Emeritus at Princeton University, USA where he was a member of the faculty for 40 years. Since 2002 he has been a Research Professor at the Center Global & International Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara USA. He has been Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine for the UN Human Rights Council since 2008, and served on a panel of experts appointed by the President of the UN General Assembly, 2008-2009

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