Humanitarian intervention seemed to promise a world in which human rights would be privileged over national interests or imperial ambitions during the 1990s. This book argues that humanitarian intervention had far more exploitative effects and draws on feminist, postcolonial, legal and psychoanalytic theory to provide an innovative reading of the narratives accompanying humanitarian intervention, a field which has received very little critical analysis. It concludes by considering what has been lost in the transference of concerns from humanitarian intervention to the war on terror.