Finally, the book’s epilogue turns its attention to the further developments undergone by the concept of humanitarian intervention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is striking is the degree to which the examples of the nineteenth century remained in people’s minds and took on the function of a discursive frame of reference in subsequent debates in international law. Their function was that of a surface onto which further developments of the idea towards current concepts and debates were projected and in which they could be reflected. All the while, however, there was a tendency to ignore their colonial and imperial aspects.