The war in Iraq has reignited the passionate humanitarian intervention debate. President George W. Bush surprised many observers in his second inaugural address when he promised to oppose tyranny and oppression, and this in a world not always willing or ready to join in that fight. Humanitarian intervention is again on the forefront of world politics.

This book is vigorous in its arguments, displays an impressive historical sweep, and on several occasions gets in the perfect skewering criticism.

The traditional conception construes human rights as moral rights all people have due to some basic feature or interests deemed intrinsically valuable. This comported well with the revival of the discourse of human rights in the wake of atrocities committed during WWII. It served as a useful referent for local struggles against foreign rule and domestic dictatorship in the 1980s. Since 1989, human rights discourse acquired a new function: the justification of sanctions, military invasions, and transformative occupation administrations by outsiders, (...) framed as enforcement of international law against violators. The traditional conception doesn't fit this new function, hence the efforts to counter-pose a "political" to the "traditional" approach. This essay analyzes two recent versions of the political conception, and argues for a third. The thesis is that sovereign equality and human rights are normative principles of our dualist international system and both are needed to construct a more just version of that system. (shrink)