Debating Humanitarian Intervention
Should We Try to Save Strangers?
Fernando R. Tesón and Bas van der Vossen
Reviews and Awards
"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." -- Abhishek Choudhary, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Human Rights Review
"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." -- Garrett Wallace Brown and Samuel Jarvis, E-International Relations
"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." --Jeff McMahan, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford
"Fernando Tesón 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." --James Pattison, Professor of Politics, University of Manchester