Could you begin by stating your position on humanitarian intervention?

I believe that the increasing tendency of states to intervene in others’ affairs, and the idea that it is right and legitimate for them to do so is a very dangerous trend.

The books that you chose and the one you co-edited are not books of the majority – they are quite challenging and radical. I was wondering whether you consider your own politics to be radical?

Yes I think so. I would certainly say radical and progressive. Often the case is made by the defenders of humanitarian intervention that theirs is the progressive case, by alleviating the plight of the oppressed and downtrodden. It’s a claim that can be made in good faith but I don’t think it’s right.

You obviously enjoyed David Chandler’s book, From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond, but I was wondering whether you wholly agree with his criticisms of interventions in places such as Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, East Timor and Kosovo?

I think David Chandler is one of the most insightful and consistent critics, and he has managed to make a blow-by-blow criticism of humanitarian intervention. There is a trend among some to cynically dismiss humanitarian intervention, to reduce it to imperialism, but I think what that misses, importantly, is the politics of it. The strength of Chandler’s work is that he never reduces it to old-style imperialism. He is able to meet the challenge of intervention by advancing a very specific set of criticisms.

Chandler discusses the covert agenda behind human rights-led foreign policy. What exactly is that agenda?

The cynical or old leftist attack on human rights – that it’s actually a war for resources, or for some ulterior strategic motive. But Chandler shows that it is not that kind of agenda that makes human rights problematic, but human rights themselves.

That’s quite provocative.

I don’t mean the case against human rights as an idea, or the idea that we have no rights. What I understand to be the problem, and I take this from David Chandler, is that the use of human rights in foreign policy is always predicated on there being victims and oppressors. Defending the human rights of others can be a way of masquerading in the language of altruism to advance a particular agenda, or to question the legitimacy of other governments. It can give a ready means to attack other states and to promote the moral authority of your own government.

It also undermines the people who are meant to benefit from human rights because it casts them as powerless, downtrodden victims who are incapable of changing their situation and are completely dependent on the benevolence of outsiders.

That sounds a similar argument to that made by Costas Douzinas in his book Human Rights and Empire. He argues that human rights can be an ideology that glosses over an emerging empire. Considering that human rights are designed to apply to all people equally, who precisely would be leading this empire?

It’s interesting because Costas is not particularly specific about whose empire it is – it has more to do with the general rise and rise of human rights. He argues that the rise can achieve the political objectives of the powerful – particularly the Western states. The flexibility that Western states apply regarding interventions works for them very well.

Costas Douzinas supports the idea of cosmopolitanism as a principle in international politics. Could you elaborate on this?

One of the things I like about his book is that he makes a case for universalism – what he calls cosmopolitanism in the old philosophical tradition. I don’t know that it can be realised in any immediate sense but I think it is a worthwhile aspiration, though I do consider 'universalism' a stronger and better term. It means progressing to a world that is more integrated, with greater solidarity between different peoples. Even if it’s abstract and utopian in this day and age, it gives a sense of something we should move towards.

But do you mean a solidarity that recognises the ultimate sovereignty of the state rather than a single global body?

No, I think a world state would be a good thing. Though there seems no way to realise it in the near future. But the best way of achieving it would be through the sovereign state. The UN and the institutions of global governance that exist today are often offered up as a compromise to the state while avoiding the dangers of world government. I think we should reject this option.

Instead of muddling through with all these confusing and overlapping jurisdictions and authorities in international politics, it would be better to use the principles of self-determination and sovereignty as a springboard towards moving towards a more universal world politics.