ABSTRACT
This chapter explores about the nature of law in the exceptional context of humanitarian intervention and human rights fieldwork. From a perspective grounded in the texts and expertise of power, law's multi-dimensionality appears in the violence of military intervention, the bureaucracy of international administration, and the governing projects of nation building. At the intersection of law's bureaucracy and governance in the field, it emerges as pragmatism, technical expertise, and practical solutions. Humanitarian intervention and field governance is a political project as well as a legal undertaking. It traces these multi-dimensions of law into and through the field complicates this understanding, surfacing new coordinating practices and pathways of rule. With its separation from home and headquarters, the field appears exceptional to those who enter from outside and this exceptionality frames and is framed by law. International law as the formal law of treaty and mandate is abstracted to universal standard or principle.
