Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society. By Nicholas J. Wheeler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 352p. $39.95 cloth, $21.95 paper

Extract

We do not lack for publications on the topic of humanitarian intervention. Given the nature of international relations after the Cold War, from developments centered on northern Iraq in 1991 to those centered on Kosovo in 1999, we now have a multitude of sources dealing with the use of military force presumably in response to gross violations of human rights. In fact, the number of publications on this topic is in inverse proportion to the actual number of possible humanitarian interventions. Most atrocities do not result in outside intervention, as events in the 1990s in Rwanda and the Democratic Congo and Nigeria should remind us. Perhaps we have so many of these studies because appearances of humanitarian intervention so clearly flout the principle of state sovereignty and noninterference in the domestic affairs of states, which constitute fundamental notions of the Westphalian state system of world order. Among the best of these publications is Nicholas Wheeler's Saving Strangers.