Abstract
Rajan Menon is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science, City College of New York/City University of New York, and a Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. In his recent publication, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, he presents readers with a critique of the prevailing interventionist view. Menon asserts that there is emergence of an international community providing universal legitimacy to humanitarian intervention but with evident lack of consensus among states. He also evaluates the effectiveness of global institutions to which humanitarian interventionists assign special significance for stopping violence within states and dispensing justice (p.24), the role of great powers, outcomes of interventionist campaigns and manipulation of laws specifically. He critically analyses the strategic gains, power and interests that have contributed to conflict deterioration, mostly through elaborated examples.