This is a summary guide to 51 books of Richmond Robin Readers, which seem to be targeted at teenage learners of English, judging from the ages of the protagonists: 12 or 13 to 19 years old in accordance with the levels from 1 (300 headwords) to 6 (1800 headwords). The characteristics of this series are as follows: 1) A fifth of the stories are set in Australia whose indigenous animals such as crocodiles and kangaroos are effectively used in Jane Bowring's Cousins and Crocodiles and James Roy's Broken Wing. 2) Half of the books are about the teen protagonists fighting against adult criminals, mainly robbers. Although some of them are quite humorous like Denise Kirby's Black Night, others are unexpectedly serious like Pauline O'Carolan's Ride for Your Life and Deadly Holiday. A unique writer, Ms. O'Carolan prefers describing evil doings of abnormal people like an arsonist, a stalker and even a serial killer. 3) Many of the stories are based on the protagonists' newly found leisure activities such as skiing, scuba diving, horse riding, orienteering, ballooning, yachting, and rafting, out of which powerful stories like Ms. Kirby's Hot Air and Sue Murray's Wild Water were born. Since those recreational experiences are not so hard to be accessible to teenagers, they will probably enjoy reading such rather approachable adventures.
Other recommended books you cannot miss in this series are Sue Murray's CHOIR Boy (a good-looking boy robot causes a lot of trouble at school), Sam Bowring's In Sarah's Dreams (a girl fights back the bully in her dreams), Philip Voysey's The Rainbow Girl (an outcast, hunchback girl kills a monster for her village), and Denise Kirby's What Happened at Seacliffe (through the visit to her rich cousins in England, an Australian female student gets to know that her ancestor was robbed of his inheritance and forcibly sent to the faraway land as a criminal most probably by his own brother).

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The end of the Cold War, taken as the “victory of liberal values and the United States,” led to the revival of scholarly and practical interest in Woodrow Wilson, who symbolized the liberal tradition of American foreign policy based on democracy, free trade, multilateralism. This article focuses on the liberal interventionism–policies and ideas of protecting or promoting human rights and democracy in other countries by military interventions—that (re-)emerged, along with Wilsonianism, after the Cold War ended.

It is common to call the post-Cold War liberal interventions “humanitarian intervention (HI)” or “responsibility to protect (R2P),” because they seem to have the protection of human rights, rather than democratization, as their mission. This is the reason why very few contemporary scholars and proponents of HI and R2P have paid attention to Wilsonianism or Wilson’s liberal interventionism. On the other hand, one of the components of Wilsonianism is the spread of democracy or liberal democratic internationalization by intervention, rather than the protection of human rights by intervention. However, Wilsonianism was often alluded to, especially in the debates on American foreign policy, when the United States, having become the sole superpower in the world after winning the cold war, began to engage in liberal interventions (mainly called HI or R2P). The characterization of these interventions as Wilsonian was not necessarily misguided, because it was very rare that these interventions pursued only human rights or civilian protection, and overlooked democratization in the target country. Above all, the Iraq war, which was started in 2003 by George W. Bush and justified in terms of promoting democracy and human rights, as well as addressing threats emanating from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its support of terrorism, represented the complex nature of contemporary liberal interventionism; thus, its justification generated much controversy among not only HI/R2P supporters, but also Wilsonian scholars.

The purpose of this article is to reexamine Wilson’s (original) liberal interventionism—his interventionist policies in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in the 1910s—by considering its association with HI/R2P in the post-Cold War era, and its significance and implications for contemporary liberal interventionism. First, I will highlight the similarities and differences between Wilson’s liberal interventionism and HI/R2P in terms of the forms of intervention (unilateral or multilateral) and their main purpose. Second, I will demonstrate how proponents of HI/R2P and Wilsonian scholars, who believed that Bush’s wrong justification for the Iraq war tainted HI/R2P and Wilsonianism and wanted to revive their liberal interventionist projects, respectively, attempted to decouple their genuine and legitimate liberal interventionism from Bush’s illegitimate intervention. Finally, I will indicate what we should really have learned from Wilson’s liberal interventionism by considering the aftermath of the Libyan intervention—so eagerly promoted by supporters of HI/R2P and Wilsonianism—in 2011.

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