Proposed book contributors: Pavel Baev, Cedric de Coning, Espen Barth Eide, Jeremy Ginifer, Tonya Langford (Peacemaintenance International, Providence, RI), Anthony McDermott, Carsten F. Rønnfeldt, Anne Julie Semb (NUPI), Dan Smith & Henrik Thune (see previous project for further affiliations)
In the autumn of 1999, the Norwegian Research Council provided further funds towards the publication of a book, to be edited by Anthony McDermott, with the working title of Humanitarian Intervention and the New Security Agenda. The aim of the book is to discuss and analyse, in the context of today’s mainly civil wars, the interaction between intervention, in all its forms, and sovereignty, which has become less of a sacred, inviolable concept in recent times, partly because of the nature of today’s wars and partly because of global, cross-frontier issues such as human rights and politically induced and natural disasters.
The eleven chapters are drawn from the above-mentioned PRIO reports, in addition to contributions from Tonya Langford and Anne Julie Semb. Together, they take an approach which aims to combine theory and insightful illustration through country and regional case-studies, including examinations of intervention in Kosovo and East Timor. One of the major themes is that humanitarian reasons for sovereignty-infringing intervention are put forward almost on an equal footing with political and economic justifications, and have almost become accepted as such, even though the demands of rebuilding civil societies after a war are overwhelming and demanding.
It is planned that a 200-page manuscript (c. 80,000 words) will be submitted to international publishers in June 2000.