This book examines responsibility in grave humanitarian crises, focusing on the international community's collective responsibility to take action in such cases as genocide or ethnic cleansing.

The idea of collective responsibility highlights how we would like to see the global level primarily as something more akin to a community of peoples, rather than as a society of states in which other international and transnational actors operate. Since the acceptance of human rights, and in view of the atrocities of the Holocaust and other genocides, we have realized that some things...