With the limited acceptance of the ‘responsibility to protect’ at the 2005 UN World Summit, it appears that the exercise of humanitarian intervention – and the related peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations that follow – will remain a feature of international politics for the forseeable future. With this in mind, Richard Caplan’s well organised analysis of the successes and failures of recent post-conflict ‘transitional administrations’ – in Eastern Slavonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor – that have been managed by international authorities is a useful text for practitioners and scholars alike.