Intervention: Shaping the Global Order

(Hardback)

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Intervention is a key concept for understanding global dynamics because of its presumed connection to international security. As the lone superpower, the United States, through military, economics, political, or diplomatic means, is largely responsible for structuring intervention choicesissues, debates, actions, and meansin the world community. Feste explores the implications of U.S. intervention in the unipolar framework by examining intervention policies, success, and failure in recent cases (the Gulf War, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan), and learning experience outlined in alternative foreign policy doctrines. The U.S. intervention record during this period shows great variety in outcomes, not a patterned design nor a grand strategy. Most recent crises, she asserts, did not threaten world peace. Post-Cold War U.S. intervention experience is compared with historical American involvement to understand when, where, why, and how often military contingents were sent abroad throughout the 20th century, alongside a timeline of intervention opportunitiesdefined as domestic and civil uprising in countries throughout the worldsince the end of World War II. Among her conclusions: The United States has intervened for a variety of reasonsoil, terrorism, humanitarian assistancebut one factor, bad leadership in the target state, stands out. The United States increasingly, though not always, has turned to a multilateral strategy for interventionseeking UN support, participating in multinational peacekeeping operations. The variety of intrastate crises and intervention responses coupled with superpower global obligations and the unipolar world structure means intervention will continue as a signficant, defining feature of international politics in the future.

Reviews

[T]he timing of this book hardly could have been better....[T]his is a useful study for those wanting to place recent events within a broader historical and theoretical context....[C]an be used best as a primer on reference for those seeking information on the scholary contribution of certain writers to the debate over intervention, and it also is a valuable source for research on the details of specific examples of American intervention.-Perspectives on Political Science
"The timing of this book hardly could have been better....This is a useful study for those wanting to place recent events within a broader historical and theoretical context....Can be used best as a primer on reference for those seeking information on the scholary contribution of certain writers to the debate over intervention, and it also is a valuable source for research on the details of specific examples of American intervention."-Perspectives on Political Science
"[T]he timing of this book hardly could have been better....[T]his is a useful study for those wanting to place recent events within a broader historical and theoretical context....[C]an be used best as a primer on reference for those seeking information on the scholary contribution of certain writers to the debate over intervention, and it also is a valuable source for research on the details of specific examples of American intervention."-Perspectives on Political Science

Author Bio

KAREN A. FESTE is Associate Professor, Graduate School of International Studies and Director, Conflict Resolution Program, University of Denver. Among her earlier publications are Plans for Peace: Negotiation and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Greenwood Press, 1991) and Expanding the Frontiers: Superpower Intervention in the Cold War (Praeger, 1992).