Book review: waging humanitarian war: the ethics, law, and politics of humanitarian intervention by Eric A. Heinze

Waging humanitarian war addresses a key tension in international society, exemplified by the widespread view that NATO’s 1999 Kosovo campaign was ‘illegal but legitimate’ (p. 1). Heinze notes that the Kosovo intervention inspired his own engagement with the topic of military humanitarian intervention, and its formative influence over a generation of scholars is felt throughout the book. The task Heinze sets himself, to bridge ‘the gap between the ethical, legal, and political dimensions of humanitarian intervention’ (p. 10), is certainly not one for the faint-hearted. He elaborates his position in response to a tripartite line of enquiry, asking what threshold level of human suffering is necessary to make military humanitarian intervention morally permissible, whether the resulting moral basis for humanitarian intervention is supported by international law, and which actors might then appropriately be called upon to act. These three questions have of course all attracted much attention within the literature on humanitarian intervention. Heinze sees the distinctiveness of his contribution in his formulation of an overarching consequentialist logic.