A valuable collection of essays from a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that examined "emerging norms of justified intervention" in the western hemisphere, originally presented at a conference held at the Carter Center in Atlanta on September 20-21, 1993. Conference participants included Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and Pastor, all of whom played roles in the dramatic denouement to the Haitian crisis almost exactly one year later. A common thread connecting the essays in the volume, as Carl Kaysen and Robert Pastor point out in their introduction, is the "growing legitimacy of international involvement in politically related activities within states in the region." Latin Americans, however, remain deeply ambivalent about this phenomenon, which confronts sensitive and divisive issues concerning sovereignty, democracy, past experience, and great power credibility. The outcome of the Haitian "justified intervention" over the coming months will clearly have a major influence on how this contentious debate evolves in the future. But this excellent collection is as good a place to begin as any, and because of recent developments in the Caribbean, it is of more than passing historical interest.
