Humanitarian Intervention and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion and Naivete

This book uses Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of suspicion and naïveté to shift the focus of the ideology of humanitarian intervention from the distorting (Marxism, realism) and legitimizing (social constructivism) to the integrating function of this ideology. In this context, the book examines the ideological functions of the social imaginary pursuant to NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, a turning point in the development of humanitarian intervention. It will be of great interest to those researching in the fields of International Relations, Political Theory, and humanitarian intervention.