REVIEW Reconciling Approaches to Enquiry in the Humanitarian Intervention Debate ERIC A. HEINZE Department of Political Science, Programme on Human Rights and Human Diversity, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA Alexander Moseley and Richard Norman (eds), Human Rights and Military Intervention (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (eds), Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). J. Peter Burgess (ed.), Special Section on the Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention, Secur- ity Dialogue, Vol.33, No.3 (2002). The question of what should be done in response to gross violations of human rights has remained a fixture of the human rights discourse since well before the inception of the United Nations Charter. However, only recently – and largely as a result of the legal con- troversy surrounding NATO’s intervention in Kosovo – has the contentious topic of humanitarian intervention been the subject of extensive moral, legal and political delibera- tion. An important aspect of these investigations – including the volumes presently under review – has been the treatment of humanitarian intervention as a subject that requires interdisciplinary study by moral philosophers, lawyers and political scientists alike. 1 Similarly, while moral, legal and political factors are all relevant to the evaluation of humanitarian intervention, the 28 essays that comprise the three volumes under review make unmistakably clear that there is considerable divergence between what morality requires, what the law allows, and the actions that states take based on their political decision-making. 2 Columbia Law Professor Lori Fisler Damrosch once suggested that the term ‘humani- tarian intervention’ has been used to refer to various activities, including all-out war aimed at halting or averting genocide, and the delivery of food and medicine to deprived popu- lations. 3 What is satisfying about these volumes, however, is that they each operate under International Journal of Human Rights Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 367–376, Autumn 2004 Correspondence Address: Eric A. Heinze, Department of Political Science, 511 Oldfather Hall, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588-0328, USA. Email: eheinze@bigred.unl.edu ISSN 1364-2987 print; ISSN 1744-053X online # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1364298042000255207