Political Economy & Humanitarian Intervention

In academic and non-academic debates the practice of human rights enforcement is usually reduced to the intentions, interests and capabilities of agents - particularly the United States and other Western states. Whether seen as a policy adopted to promote national interest or an imperialist device used by the West, the practice of human rights enforcement is discussed in isolation from the structure of the late-modern Global Political Economy. This book develops a structural approach to post-Cold war military humanitarianism and demonstrates the nature of reciprocal causal relations between the global capitalist economy and the practice of human rights enforcement. It provides an historical analysis of the notion of individual rights and their relationship with capitalism and demonstrates that today the actors engaged in human rights enforcement - whether for selfish or humanitarian reasons - unintentionally provide global capital with a Gramscian quality of moral leadership thereby contributing to its hegemony.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.