ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is concerned with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) actions in Kosovo which were legally dubious and politically controversial and laments the growing gap between legitimacy and lawfulness in intervention practices. It challenges the common understanding of sovereignty as nonintervention, which necessarily condemns humanitarian intervention as illegal. The book advances a more historically fluid concept of "relative sovereignty" that takes into account a state's evolving relations with other states and with societal actors. It argues that a philosophy that seeks the foundational premises of global responsibility and human rights should be engaged in this debate, rejecting antifoundational debates in the human rights discourse. The book addresses "soft" or economic intervention in the form of conditionality and structural adjustments. Using the case of Africa, it examines the issue of economic development and institutional responses to it.
