Since the end of the Cold War, a new dynamic has arisen within the international system, one that does not conform to established notions of the state’s monopoly on war. In this changing environment, the global community must decide how to respond to the challenges posed to the state by military threats, political and economic decline, and social fragmentation. This insightful work considers the phenomenon of state failure and asks how the international community might better detect signs of state decay at an early stage and devise legally and politically legitimate responses.

This collection of essays brings military and social historians into conversation with political and social scientists and former military officers. In case studies from the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq, and Colombia, the distinguished contributors argue that early intervention to stabilize social, economic, and political systems offers the greatest promise, whereas military intervention at a later stage is both costlier and less likely to succeed.

Contributors: David Carment, Yiagadeesen Samy, David Curp, Jonathan House, James Carter, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Robert Rotberg, and Ken Menkhaus.

In Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War—interdisciplinary in approach and intended for nonspecialists—Elizabeth Schmidt provides a new framework for thinking about foreign political and military intervention in Africa, its purposes, and its consequences. She focuses on the quarter century following the Cold War (1991–2017), when neighboring states and subregional, regional, and global organizations and networks joined extracontinental powers in support of diverse forces in the war-making and peace-building processes. During this period, two rationales were used to justify intervention: a response to instability, with the corollary of responsibility to protect, and the war on terror.

Often overlooked in discussions of poverty and violence in Africa is the fact that many of the challenges facing the continent today are rooted in colonial political and economic practices, in Cold War alliances, and in attempts by outsiders to influence African political and economic systems during the decolonization and postindependence periods. Although conflicts in Africa emerged from local issues, external political and military interventions altered their dynamics and rendered them more lethal. Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War counters oversimplification and distortions and offers a new continentwide perspective, illuminated by trenchant case studies.

'That the human rights rationale for interventionism is a genuine menace to human rights and to democracy is convincingly demonstrated in this fine book.'
Edward S. Herman

'Chandler deftly unpicks the hypocrisy and double standards behind our "ethical" bombing in the balkans and Asia.'
Independent

'Chandler's book is thorough and relentless in its critique of human rights consensus.'
Spiked

'David Chandler has emerged in recent years as one of Britain's foremost critics of the hypocrisy of human rights.'
The Spectator

This new and updated edition of David Chandler's acclaimed book takes a critical look at the way in which human rights issues have been brought to the fore in international affairs. The UN and Nato's new policy of interventionism--as shown in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor--has been hailed as part of a new 'ethical' approach to foreign policy. David Chandler offers a rigorous critique of this apparently benign shift in international relations to reveal the worrying political implications of a new human rights discourse. He asks why the West can now prioritise the rights of individuals over the traditional rights of state sovereignty, and why this shift has happened so quickly. Charting the development of a human rights-based foreign policy, he considers the theoretical problems of defining human rights and sets this within the changing framework of international law. Meticulous and compelling, From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond offers a disturbing insight into the political implications of a human rights-led foreign policy, and the covert agenda that it conceals.

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. He has written widely on democracy, human rights and international relations and is also the author of Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton (Pluto Press, 1999/ 2000) and Constructing Global Civil Society: (2004), editor of Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (2002) and Peace without Politics: Ten Years of State-Building in Bosnia (2005), and co-editor of Global Civil Society: Contested Futures (2005).