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Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention
A Fresh Legal Approach Based on Fundamental Ethical Principles in International Law and World Religions
520 pages | 6 illustrations | 6 x 9 | 2002
ISBN 978-0-271-02145-4 | cloth: $64.00 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-02313-7 | paper: $35.00 sh
"Brian Lepard brings a massive research effort to bear in support of his fresh approach to humanitarian intervention. By relying on a blend of ethics, religion, and law, this study challenges the validity of both realism and liberalism as the basis for policy and interpretation in international relations. An excellent book that deserves a wide readership and much discussion."—Richard Falk, Princeton University
"Lepard provides a fresh exploration of legal and moral justifications for humanitarian intervention. . . . He opens new analytic vistas and provides a foundation for resolving conflicts over the content of the law. He applies the framework in masterly examinations of intervention in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Kosovo. Rarely do we see an author sustain as much sensitivity to opposing arguments while constructing a strong ethical basis for shaping diplomacy, ethics, and international law. This is a ground-breaking and, in its moral sweep, even a breath-taking book."—Robert C. Johansen, Notre Dame University
Few foreign policy issues in the past decade have elicited as much controversy as the use of military force for humanitarian purposes. In this book Brian Lepard offers a new method for analyzing humanitarian intervention that seeks to resolve conflicts among legal norms by identifying ethical principles embedded in the UN Charter and international law and relating them to a pivotal principle of "unity in diversity."
A special feature of the book, which avoids the charge of ethnocentricity brought against other approaches, is that Lepard shows how passages from the revered texts of seven world religions may be interpreted as supporting these ethical principles. In connecting law with ethics and religion in this way, he takes a major step forward in the effort to formulate a normative basis for international law in our multicultural world.
Brian D. Lepard is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska.