Ethics and Foreign Intervention

Extract

Ethics and Foreign Intervention, Deen K. Chatterjee and Don E. Scheid, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. xiii, 301

The 1990s saw the gradual, but steady, expansion of the doctrine of humanitarian military intervention in places like northern Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. This process culminated in the 1999 Kosovo war which saw NATO bomb Serb targets to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. Ethics and Foreign Intervention uses the Kosovo case as its reference point to dissect the concept of humanitarian military intervention from a moral perspective. Although there are chapters on the legal implications of intervention, most notably the chapters by Tom Farer, Christine Chwaszcza, and Allen Buchanan on intervention and secession, the focus of this edited collection is to apply just war theory to the concept of humanitarian military intervention. George R. Lucas, Jr., even suggests that because the use of force in humanitarian cases is much closer to the use of force in domestic law enforcement than it is to traditional warfare the concepts of jus ad bellum and jus in bello need to be joined by jus ad pacem (or jus ad interventionem).