Righteous Violence: The Ethics and Politics of Military Intervention Book

Written by a journalist, this book has a lot of reports and insightful descriptions of the working of UN and its quest to maintain its global roles as the world 'policeman'. Another important aspect the book brought to light was the some time tense relationships between the UN and the US (and a little bit of UK too). You'll learn some understanding about the tension between maintaining the global interest versus national interests. Chapter 3 reads pretty much like a brief history of UN intervention in Cambodia. The problem is that you'll learn about that history from a one-sided perspective. Well, again I'm not sure if there's been a book on that topic written by a local person yet. However, I did find some of the inside stories of UN operation in Cambodia at that time pretty interesting to read. It seems like the author has been closed to Kofi Annan, so parts of the book read almost like Annan's biography. The book lacks some deeper and more critical perspectives on the issues reported, such as the uneasy relationships between the UN and the US.