Debating Humanitarian Intervention

Abhishek Choudhary, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Human Rights Review the book is an excellent contribution in terms of bringing together different arguments on intervention, the moral dilemma involved and the implicit political logic...the book...presents a much more condensed and balanced overview. It would be of great help to students and researchers working on issues pertaining to sovereignty, international justice, intervention and non-intervention to find multiple sources in a single book.

Garrett Wallace Brown and Samuel Jarvis, E-International Relations this book provides an important overview of the humanitarian intervention debate and forces the reader to rethink both the conditions under which humanitarian intervention can be justified, as well as the limitations of military responses in addressing humanitarian need. As a result, this book will be of interest to both academics and students wishing to challenge their own underlying assumptions about humanitarian intervention, on either side of this long-running debate.

Jeff McMahan, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford The authors of this superb book have carefully identified the central moral questions raised by humanitarian intervention, such as whether respect for state sovereignty has priority over the defense of individual human rights, whether intervention is more difficult to justify than revolution, whether justification depends on the evidence at the time of action or on the actual outcome, and so on. On these and other issues, they argue for opposing views. The result is a lively, accessible, and comprehensive discussion of both the morality of humanitarian intervention and what the law that governs intervention ought to be.

James Pattison, Professor of Politics, University of Manchester Fernando Tesn and Bas van der Vossen provide thoughtful and perceptive reflections on the ethics of intervention. Their disagreements are illuminating and strike at the heart of the philosophical debates over the permissibility of humanitarian intervention and, more broadly, the ethics of war. I highly recommend this book for both scholars and students of the ethics of intervention.

Fernando R. Teson is the Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University College of Law. He is the author, inter alia, of Justice at a Distance: Extending Freedom Globally (Cambridge University Press, 2015) [with Loren Lomasky] and Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality, 3rd ed. (Transnational Publishers 2005), and dozens of articles in specialized journals. Bas van der Vossen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. He specializes in political philosophy. Previously, his work has appeared in The Journal of Political Philosophy, Law and Philosophy, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, among other places. He is currently also an associate editor of the journal Social Philosophy and Policy.

Introduction Fernando Teson and Bas van der Vossen Part I: A defense of humanitarian intervention Fernando Teson 1. Humanitarian intervention as defense of persons 2. Just cause in humanitarian intervention 3. Intervention and revolution: the equivalence thesis 4. Proportionality in humanitarian intervention 5. Further issues in humanitarian intervention APPENDIX: The Iraq war Part II: Humanitarian non-intervention Bas van der Vossen 6. A presumption against intervention 7. Between internal and external threats 8. Why sovereignty (still) matters 9. The success condition 10. Justice ex post or ex ante? 11. Three structural problems 12. Looking for exceptions 13. Humanitarian non-intervention