Book Review: Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private

Abstract

This is a very timely publication given recent developments in the international arena; the most obvious being the war on terror, the military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continuing atrocities taking place in the Sudan. When we look at what is occurring in today’s world we see ample evidence of inhumanity. The once dominant ethical primacy of sovereignty has come under increasing attack with recent atrocities, and appeals for intervention on behalf of the international community call into question the notion of the ‘privacy’ of states – an analogue for their sovereignty – as a moral good. However, the act of intervention itself has been shrouded in controversy, as have the determinants of human rights. In Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private Catherine Lu sets out to contribute to the normative debate relating to the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. She introduces some key concepts, most notably that of ‘privacy’, and ties them to the ethics of intervention. Her central theoretical construct revolves around the public/private distinction, a worthy line of investigation that remains largely unexplained in International Relations (IR) discourse. Lu examines the construction of certain concepts which we employ to illuminate the normative structure of international society, for example state sovereignty, national interest, human rights, but most im portantly the international/domestic distinction. She offers an examination of the public/private distinction at the international level and how it relates to legitimacy. Put simply, a central theme of the book relates to the construction of a morally coherent account of the distinction that serves to shape the public and private lives of states. Just and Unjust Interventions is divided into eight chapters. It begins with an introduction and subsequent investigation into the debates relating to the public/private distinction, and the structure of agency thus entailed. Following this, in chapter 2, Lu considers the applicability of such a construct to IR,