...difficult for theoretical inquiry. Many people think that if, first, some amount of transgressions has been committed (and is likely to continue), and second, intervention is likely to make a sufficiently beneficial difference, it is permissible. Through the Genocide Convention, international law recognizes a version of this view. Difficulties begin when we try to assess what amount (or sort) of violations and what amount (and sort) of likely beneficial difference are sufficient to justify HI. Furthermore, we must ask who would be permitted to intervene, whether there are conditions under which permission turns into obligation, and finally, how HI should be institutionalized. This volume addresses these issues. Much, but not all, of it is illuminating.

Anthony Coates and Joseph Boyle relate HI to the just war tradition. Both address the perception that the tradition is inimical to HI, an idea that spread after Michael Walzer embedded just war theory in a statist framework championing sovereignty and nonintervention. The tradition is richer than Walzer's interpretation suggests. As Coates emphasizes, it applies a criterion of rightful authority that allows for questioning the legitimacy of a state, whereas Walzer's account of "the legalist paradigm" (p. 33) assimilates rightful to factual authority. Simultaneously, the just war tradition also resists possible cosmopolitan tendencies to overdo intervention by denying...

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