Those looking to understand humanitarian intervention in historical perspective, to consider the relationship between humanitarian intervention and international law and to explore past and present episodes of interventions that purportedly had a humanitarian character are well advised to employ Simon Chesterman's book as a guide ... Chesterman's sobering argument should be read by those on both sides of the debate ... Read moreabout the efficacy and legitimacy of humanitarian intervention.
Michael Barnett, University of Wisconsin, USA
Dr Chesterman's new work is a useful corrective to those who would cheerily dissolve the distinction between legality and power, or between legal analysis and agitprop. ... [The] book provides legal and analytical tools that, hopefully, will help us differentiate between an excusable illegality, and yet another cynical usurpation of international law in the service of raison d'état.
Melbourne University Law Review
Review from previous edition In this lucid and insightful volume, Chesterman provides a sophisticated but accessible account of the historical and contemporary relationship between humanitarian intervention and international law. Just War or Just Peace? provides both an excellent teaching resource for advanced undergraduates and beyond, and a wealth of information for researchers and professionals working in this area.
African Affairs
a tightly argued and complex presentation, with numbered, easily referenced topics in the style of a doctoral thesis (which it is). A more textured work [than Christine Gray's International Law and the Use of Force], it is arguably a more interesting read for an audience that does not already have at ready access the historical background or international law perspective to this difficult subject. It is also a more accessible work for students, and decidedly less dry and fragmented than many standard international law texts ... Dr Chesterman gives us a fairly riveting review of the history behind the modern rise of humanitarian intervention.
Books-on-Law
Chesterman has written a tour de force that exposes the weaknesses of the arguments supporting a doctrine of unilateral humanitarian intervention in international society ... Chesterman rejects the claim that states have a legal right to act as vigilantes in support of Council resolutions, even if they believe that this is the only means to stop a genocide. The powerfully argued thesis of this scholarly work is that accepting this proposition in law is 'a recipe for bad policy, bad law, and a bad international order'.
International Affairs
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