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Podcast: New Books in Human Rights
Episode: Rajan Menon, "The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention" (Oxford UP, 2016)
Description: In The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2020), Rajan Menon shows that this belief, while noble, is naïve. He considers it ancient artifact belonging to the brief period right after the end of the cold war- the ‘Unipolar Moment’With the end of the Cold War has come an upsurge in humanitarian interventions-military campaigns aimed at ending mass atrocities. These wars of rescue, waged in the name of ostensibly universal norms of human rights and legal principles, rest on the premise that a genuine "international community" has begun to emerge and has reached consensus on a proce...