Since the end of the Cold War, humanitarian interventions have continued to evolve and respond to a wide range of political crises. These insightful essays focus on the challenges associated with interventions when facing conflict and human rights violations, unmitigated systematic violence, state re-building, human mobility and dislocation. Each chapter is linked to the rest through three defining themes that permeate the book: the evolution of humanitarian interventions in a global era; the limits of sovereignty and the ethics of interventions; and the politics of post-intervention: (re)-building and humanitarian engagement.
The authors incorporate a variety of case studies including Kosovo, Timor-Leste, Syria, Libya and Iraq, and examine the complexity of interventions across their different dimensions, including relevant doctrines such as R2P, ‘Use of Force’ and Human Security.
Aiden Warren is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a Fulbright Scholar and author of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Search for Global Security (Rowman Littlefield) and The Obama Administration’s Nuclear Weapon Strategy: The Promises of Prague (Routledge). Dr Warren is also co-editor of Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention in the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press) and Nuclear Modernization in the 21st Century (Routledge). He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy (IISTP), George Washington University, and Asia-Pacific Fellow at James Martin Center for Non-proliferation, Washington DC.
Damian Grenfell is Director of the Centre for Global Research, RMIT, Australia. He is the lead editor of Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence: Beyond Savage Globalization? (Routledge, 2008).