After the fiasco of the Iraq War of 2003, the West pushed for a new mandate through the UN called the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2005. This new mandate revived ideas of humanitarian intervention that had been called into question from the detritus of Iraq. No lessons were learned. After R2P came Libya, a society now in ruins, and then came Syria, a country whose civil war had been fanned along even as no good outcome seemed on the horizon. This talk by Vijay Prashad will explore the landscape of intervention and its perils.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. He writes regular columns and reports for Frontline (India), The Hindu (India), Alternet (USA) and BirGün (Turkey). He is the author of twenty books, including most recently The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016).