Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private [Hardcover]

Taking insights and controversies from feminist political theory, Lu looks to illuminate alternative images of 'sovereignty as privacy' and 'sovereignty as responsibility', and to identify new challenges arising from the increased agency of private global civil society, and their relationship with the world of states.Acknowledgements Introduction Public and Private: Towards Conceptual Clarification Realism and the Tyranny of the Private Sovereignty as Privacy The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism, Liberalism and Intervention Cosmopolitan Humanitarianism and the Use of Force Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Shortlisted for the 2008 Macpherson Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association

'Considering the plight and the miseries suffered in recent years by millions of people in places such as Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Darfur, Catherine Lu boldly attempts in this book to develop a coherent and resolutely cosmopolitan normative global theory. Much of her originality stems from a reconsideration and reformulation of the public-private distinction. The bulk of the book consists in a thorough examination of three ethical perspectives in international affairs: realism, communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. Lu writes intelligently about the premises and problems at work in the approaches of such authors as Rawls, Beitz and Walzer. She clearly endorses a liberal cosmopolitan perspective, placing what she calls duties of humanity at the very basis of international and domestic orders. Her analysis is supplemented with an insightful consideration of the contemporary ethical challenges faced by state and civil society agents. The book ends with a lucid assessment of the limits of an approach that focuses on humanitarian intervention rather than on the duties of cosmopolitan justice.' - Jury for the 2008 C.B. Macpherson Prize

'In this elegantly written, carefully argued and sophisticated bols(