As a result of the decision by NATO to use force in response to the Kosovo crisis, issues about the legality and morality of humanitarian intervention have again begun to dominate the international legal agenda. This article explores the ways in which international legal texts about intervention operate at the ideological or representational level. It draws on feminist and post-colonial theories of subjectivity and identification to suggest that the desire to intervene militarily in cases of crisis is a product of the deeper narratives and flows of meaning within which texts about intervention are inserted. The narratives of the new interventionism create a powerful sense of self for those who identify with the hero of the story, be that the international community, the Security Council, NATO or the United States. As a result, these narratives operate not only in the realm of state systems, rationality and facts, but also in the realm of identification, imagination, subjectivity and emotion. The article explores some of the implications for international lawyers of the recognition that their arguments about intervention have effects at this personal and subjective level.

The idea that states and the international community have a responsibility to protect populations at risk has framed internationalist debates about conflict prevention, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping and territorial administration since 2001. This book situates the responsibility to protect concept in a broad historical and jurisprudential context, demonstrating that the appeal to protection as the basis for de facto authority has emerged at times of civil war or revolution - the Protestant revolutions of early modern Europe, the bourgeois and communist revolutions of the following centuries and the revolution that is decolonisation. This analysis, from Hobbes to the UN, of the resulting attempts to ground authority on the capacity to guarantee security and protection is essential reading for all those seeking to understand, engage with, limit or critique the expansive practices of international executive action authorised by the responsibility to protect concept.

During the 1990s, humanitarian intervention seemed to promise a world in which democracy, self-determination and human rights would be privileged over national interests or imperial ambitions. Orford provides critical readings of the narratives that accompanied such interventions and shaped legal justifications for the use of force by the international community. Through a close reading of legal texts and institutional practice, she argues that a far more circumscribed, exploitative and conservative interpretation of the ends of intervention was adopted during this period. The book draws on a wide range of sources, including critical legal theory, feminist and postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic theory and critical geography, to develop ways of reading directed at thinking through the cultural and economic effects of militarized humanitarianism. The book concludes by asking what, if anything, has been lost in the move from the era of humanitarian intervention to an international relations dominated by wars on terror.

In hisPhilosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein declared: ‘We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.’ Michel Foucault in turn repeatedly referred to his method of study as description, arguing that the role of philosophy is not to reveal what is hidden, but rather to make us see what is seen. This essay suggests why the turn to description as a mode of legal writing might be a productive move at this time.

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