Tag Archives: Review

03Oct/16

‘Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos’ – Crissie Delvy, Indian American Times

New York – “Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos” (Harper Colins, 2016), a book providing a sharp analysis of the recent history of the UN and non-UN military interventions, by Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, was recently released at an Asia Society event in New York titled “The UN Security Council and Military Interventions.”

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03Oct/16

‘Intervening in haste’ – Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, The Hindu

An insider’s take on the ineffectiveness of the United Nations Security Council

The United Nations was never intended to be a world government. In a world radically altered by the worst slaughter humanity had yet perpetrated, it was founded mainly as a forum to ensure that the then dominant hatred would not end with the obliteration of most of humanity.

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30Sep/16

‘The Perils of Humanitarian Wars’ – Vijay Prashad, The Wire

In Perilous Interventions, Hardeep Singh Puri, an astute observer of the limits of the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine, explores the failure of the UNSC on several accounts, especially its decision to intervene in Libya militarily.
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17Sep/16

‘The United Nations (In)security Council’ – Indian Express.com

How the crisis in Libya broke the fragile consensus among the permanent members of the UNSC

This slim, highly substantive, handsomely-produced book draws on the experience of Hardeep Singh Puri as India’s representative at the UN Security Council (UNSC) in 2011-2012. It details the unravelling of mutual accommodation among the five permanent members of the Council (P5: France, Russia, China, the UK and the USA), each with veto power, on issues of forcible intervention in the Middle East, in the wake of regime change in Libya in 2011. With a bird’s eye view on this significant geo-strategic train-wreck, and a role in the action, albeit, a frustrating one, as the little-heeded representative of a major emerging power, Puri pulls the reader into the plot from the very outset of this fast-moving drama.
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10Sep/16

‘This book is an insider’s view of the games the UN’s Security Council plays’ – The Scroll

A former Indian diplomat blows the cover off the politics of intervention in other countries’ affairs.

There are interventions and then there are perilous interventions. As the world tackles growing fundamentalism and non-state actors, nations are increasingly debating deploying their militaries to take on the new threats. But each intervention comes with a baggage of unpredictable consequences that have led to the creation of new wars and conflicts.
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05Sep/16

‘Into the UN’s lopsided world’ – Simran Sodhi, The Tribune

The need to reform the United Nations and especially the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where the veto power of the five permanent members holds the key to crucial global decisions, is imperative. This is an opinion that has been expressed on numerous occasions in recent times and Hardeep Singh Puri’s book is another important voice in this direction.

The book makes a powerful case of why reform of the UNSC is so crucial and to illustrate this argument, Puri uses the examples of Syria, Libya and Yemen, among others. Closer home, the author Continue reading

02Sep/16

‘Significant interventions’ – K.P. Nayar, Telegraph India

India is on the threshold of a re-engagement with the Levant

For the prime minister, Narendra Modi, Balochistan is not a flash in the pan. The articulation of Indian concerns, stakes and interests in Balochistan is part of a pattern in his government’s evolving foreign policy after two and a quarter years in office. Balochistan is not the only conflict zone that the National Democratic Alliance government is wading into. Ending a hands-off Continue reading

30Aug/16

‘Blunders of intervention: Policies the world is paying for’ -Tarun Basu, Business Standard

Book: Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos; Author: Hardeep Singh Puri; Publisher: HarperCollins; Pages: 263; Price: Rs 599

As modern civilisation continues to reel under a battery of murderous attacks from Islamic extremists, many of who now claim to owe allegiance to the contemporary quasi-state terror entity called the Islamic State (IS), the world looks increasingly vulnerable to ordinary citizens, who wonder at the impunity with which militarised attackers are able to operate freely and spread mayhem, Continue reading