Before there was “A History of Humanitarian Intervention”, there was “Geschichte der “Humanitären Intervention””, my dissertation at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, 2008. The book was well received in Germany, with a review by Alexandra Kemmerer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and another one by Peter Hilpold in the renowned Archiv des Völkerrechts. It lead to an invitation to write an article for the Jahrbuch Öffentliche Sicherheit 2010/2011, and also gave me the confidence to try and attend some academic conferences, despite having no experience of presenting anything on any other level than my student papers at the university and working full-time in my profession as a lawyer at the same time. At one of those conferences, the Conference on ‘Responsibility to Protect: From Principle to Practice’, organised and supported by the European Science Foundation and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands, in cooperation with the Amsterdam Center for International Law of the University of Amsterdam, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and Linköping University in May 2010, a short conversation with Professor Jennifer M. Welsh sparked the process that eventually lead to the book finally published in 2020.
