The concept of humanitarian intervention can be traced back to medieval theorists like Thomas Aquinas and international legal theorists such as Vitoria and Grotius. According to these thinkers, a prince’s right to rule his people could be breached if human wellbeing was severely compromised due to natural disasters or the prince’s own depravity (Morgenthau 1967). Under these situations, foreign princes had a right or, rather, an obligation, to intervene in order to alleviate human suffering, by force if need be. As the notion of state sovereignty came increasingly to dominate International Law after 1648, humanitarian intervention fell out of favour. But in the post-Cold War order, the concept appears to have emerged once again, so much so that some have declared that ‘sovereignty is no longer sacrosanct’ (Copra and Weiss 1992 cited in Ayoob 2002: 84; Krasner 1995).