To conclude a book about humanitarian intervention in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States feels a little like taking ‘still the last train after the last train – and yet [being] late to an end of history’. This sense of the end of an epoch was certainly the mood in which human rights warrior Michael Ignatieff wrote his widely circulated article entitled ‘Is the Human Rights Era Ending?’, published in the New York Times in February 2002. For Ignatieff, ‘the question after September 11 is whether the era of human rights has come and gone’. In particular, Ignatieff fears that we are witnessing the end of ‘the era of humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor’. The attacks on the towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the USA are treated by many other international lawyers as marking a turning point, the end of a humane and secure era in world affairs. In the words of Michael Reisman, ‘with the end of the Cold War, many in America and throughout the industrialized world came to take national security for granted’. For Reisman, the acts of September 11 ‘shattered the world view and, quite possibly, the emotional foundation on which that sense of security rested’. They were an attack on ‘all peoples who value freedom and human rights’ and as a result we have all been ‘forced into a war of self-defense’.