Mary Kaldor admits that some of her ideas on international security sound utopian – a word that crops up several times in her latest book - but she insists the world needs utopias.
"After the end of communism we rejected utopias, but not being utopian is equally problematic," she says. "We need a set of beliefs to guide human society."
Human Security distils Kaldor's thinking on global civil society, just war, human rights and humanitarian intervention, subjects that have absorbed her in an academic career stretching back to the 1970s.
Her first job was at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, where she compiled the first statistics on the arms trade, before moving to Sussex University where she worked on the economics of the arms race and the social aspects of military technology.
In the 1980s, Kaldor - who went on her first demonstration against nuclear weapons when she was nine - became involved in the peace movement that opposed the deployment of US cruise missiles by the Reagan administration in western Europe. The movement was deeply influenced by the Marxist historian EP Thompson, who introduced Kaldor to what she describes as "the idea of politics from below and history from below".
Kaldor is now a professor and director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics. Her father, Nicholas Kaldor, was also a distinguished academic, one of the foremost Cambridge economists in the postwar period.
The subjects in Human Security may sound nebulous, but Kaldor is very much an activist academic, keen to see her ideas put into practice. Policymakers take her seriously. Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, asked her to convene a study group on European security that produced a report called A Human Security Doctrine for Europe and a follow-on report, the European Way of Security.
When we meet at her office at the LSE, Kaldor has just returned from Kosovo, which a few weeks earlier declared independence from Serbia. Kosovo, deeply divided along ethnic lines with Serbs effectively partitioning the north and isolating themselves in enclaves in the south, is shaping up to be a major challenge for the EU.
In many ways Kosovo represents a laboratory for Kaldor's thinking on human security, which she defines as the security of individuals and communities rather than the security of states. This security of individuals is a fundamental thread in Kaldor's work - its utopian aspect.
For Kaldor, humanitarian intervention and international peacekeeping involve "a genuine belief in the equality of all human beings; and this entails a readiness to risk lives of peacekeeping troops to save the lives of others where this is necessary".
In Kosovo, the EU is replacing a UN mission that has alienated the majority Albanian population. The thrust of the 1,800-strong EU mission on policing and the rule of law bears the hallmarks of Kaldor's thinking. Making up the mission will be police, judges, lawyers, and administrators.
But there is many a slip twixt cup and lip. What sounds good on paper, such as the creation of a gender and human rights unit in Kosovo, can become just another exercise in box-ticking, Kaldor laments.
"You have a concept like human security and it gets translated into bureaucratic guidelines," she says. Kaldor is worried that the UN and the EU are not working together to prevent de facto partition of this state of 2 million, as ethnic power-sharing was built into the plan drawn up by the UN special envoy on Kosovo, Marti Ahtissari.
More generally, the gap between the ideal of human security and the facts on the ground poses a conundrum of which Kaldor is all too aware.
"The international community makes a terrible mess wherever it goes," Kaldor admits, a sentiment she spells out in stark terms early on in her book.
"It is hard to find a single example of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s that can be unequivocally declared a success. Especially after Kosovo, the debate about whether human rights can be enforced through military means is ever more intense. Moreover, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been justified in humanitarian terms, have further called into question the case for intervention."
A crucial and recurring problem for those who intervene, even those with the best of intentions, says Kaldor, is the psychological distance and the cultural barriers between the so-called internationals and the local population. Kaldor remembers an instance in Iraq where she was appalled by the insensitivity and arrogance of a young, uneducated American talking down to a highly qualified Iraqi with a Phd. While this was an extreme example, she sees the same dynamics in Kosovo and Afghanistan.
"Internationals are a breed apart," Kaldor says. "Wherever they go, they become isolated from the local community. It's as if they are taking part in a movie or are on holiday, recreating a lifestyle they bring with them. The interesting thing about imperialism and why it lasted a very long time was that it had local support. The imperialists were so few in number they had to rely heavily on the local population."
In the final chapter of her book, Kaldor sets out her framework for a new approach to security, encapsulated by the term human security, involving a big shift in military strategy where the primary goal would be to protect civilians rather than defeat an adversary.
"Of course sometimes it is necessary to try to capture or even defeat insurgents but this has to be seen as a means to an end, civilian protection, rather than the other way around," Kaldor writes. "So-called collateral damage is unacceptable."
While some may dismiss this as designer warfare, Kaldor insists some in the military get it, and says this view of warfare does require a big cognitive shift.
Kaldor believes such changes are already taking place in American thinking, and points to General David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Iraq. But in an interview last year with the Democratyia journal, she said it was a tragedy that he was pushing new ideas at a time when the US had been so discredited in Iraq.
Actually, the new thinking is a case of going back to the future. The model for the human security approach to war lies in Northern Ireland, which saw a "new war" without clear battle lines in contrast to "old wars" such as the second world war.
"The British developed a response that reflected the fact that the inhabitants of Northern Ireland were British citizens (and voters) and that therefore their protection had to come first. Bombing Belfast was not an option. In effect, this principle implies that everyone is treated as a citizen."
Kaldor pins a lot of hope on the EU to pursue this notion of human security, with its 1.8 million under arms, and with the capacity - notwithstanding its divisions - to act more effectively than the unwieldy UN. Kaldor acknowledges that the book is a normative project and that the world will not necessarily move in the way she desires.
"But the more we move towards these trends," she says, "the more likely we are to live in a better place."
· Human Security: Reflections on Globalisation and Intervention, by Mary Kaldor, is published by Polity Press.