The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda Alan J. Kuperman In 1994 genocide in Rwanda claimed the lives of at least 500,000 Tutsi. At the time, United Nations peacekeepers were withdrawn and the rest of the world stood aside. In the years since that unspeakable nightmare, it has been argued in many quarters that a military intervention of only 5,000 troops could have prevented most of those deaths. In The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention, Alan J. Kuperman exposes such conventional wisdom as myth. Combining unprecedented analyses of the genocide's progression and the logistical limitations of humanitarian military intervention, Kuperman reaches a startling conclusion: even if intervention forces had been dispatched to Rwanda upon the first reports of widespread killing, they would have arrived too late to save more than a quarter of the Tutsi ultimately killed. While a significant figure that must not be trivialized, it falls far short of what previous analysis have claimed could have been achieved by earlier and more forceful involvement. Kuperman details many of the complicating factors that can hamper intervention efforts, even with the best of intentions. These can include faulty or incomplete intelligence, the considerable logistical difficulties of long-range military deployments, and the rapid pace of ethnic violence. For example, the daunting requirements of airlifting military forces, along with sufficient supplies, into a distant war zone quickly and effectively have rarely been recognized even by intervention experts. The author clearly explicates those difficulties for the first time. […] Alan J. Kuperman is a resident fellow at the University of Southern California's Center for International Studies.[…] He has written numerous articles on ethnic conflict and humanitarian intervention in publications such as Foreign Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.