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Abstract

Hope is enjoying a scholarly renaissance. Building on the “standard account” of hope as a desire for an outcome believed to be possible, recent work by Luc Bovens, Victoria McGeer, Adrienne Martin, Darrel Moellendorf, Michael Milona, and Katie Stockdale has refined the concept, distinguishing it from optimism and expectation, and asking when hoping is rational and what it requires. Yet this literature has remained largely within moral psychology; sustained tests against concrete political history are rare. Conversely, the enormous literature on humanitarian intervention and state-building has had much to say about power, legitimacy, and paternalism, and almost nothing about hope. Aidan Hehir’s book stands at this junction. An international relations scholar with a quarter-century’s engagement with Kosovo, Hehir puts the analytic philosophy of hope to explanatory work on a hard case, and the result deserves the attention of scholars of peace and conflict as much as of area specialists.

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