Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law. By Anne Orford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 243. $75.00, cloth.

The memory of Rwanda, Bosnia, and East Timor serve, for most, as a call to arms—a justification for a strengthened international community able and willing to intervene militarily to protect victims of human rights abuses. For law professor Anne Orford, these same events tell a different story; they suggest the need to eschew humanitarian intervention’s flawed logic and to re-imagine the dialogue between international institutions and human rights victims. Employing critical race studies, post-colonial critiques, and feminist readings, Orford argues both that the way in which intervention is narrated confines the revolutionary potential within human rights discourse, and that the meaning attached to intervention in legal texts preserves an unjust and exploitative status quo. As such, intervention promotes paternalism, dependence, colonial fantasies, and traditional gender stereotypes.

Orford is unflinching in her criticism of the motivations that inspire the post–Cold War era’s penchant for militarism in response to human rights crises. She interprets intervention as another form of imperial domination rather than a means to self-determination and democracy. Like the less subtle but no less insidious colonialism before it, intervention is constitutive to the identity of the West as “benevolent civilizers” intent on recreating the other into its own image.

The imperial narrative of intervention appropriates the moral imperative inherent in images of suffering peoples to reinforce colonial and gendered stereotypes—the international community is the male hero, empowered to save the helpless female local victims. Likewise, post-crisis reconstruction entails the fatherly West parenting the child-like victim peoples, schooling them in Western democracy, often governing for them until they have proven their ability to handle self-determination responsibly.

This heroic narrative is especially pernicious because it obscures the causes of local violence and the full purpose of the international community’s intervention. For Orford, Rwanda stands not for the West’s failure to intervene quickly but for the violent results of the West’s previous economic intervention. Orford argues persuasively that Rwanda’s centralized, well-organized government was enabled by the international community’s economic investments and supported by foreign aid despite its horrific human rights abuses; this in turn created the preconditions that made genocide possible. For the international community to then embrace the role of savior in the wake of local violence, assigning guilt to local populations and implying its own innocence, is the height of hypocrisy.

Similarly, while reconstruction efforts operate ostensibly to confer self-determination, Orford suggests that the post-crisis experience of East Timor demonstrates that such rhetoric veils the true intent of the international community—to make the region secure for foreign investment. Consequently, where self-determination conflicts with the World Bank’s economic reform, the will of international institutions preempts the will of the people, furthering economic exploitation and colonial paternalism.

The heroic narrative thus does violence to the reality that the international community is complicit in local crises, and that its aims in intervention and reconstruction are deeply ambivalent. The simple schema of vicious local tyrants, helpless local victims, and noble foreign heroes is, for Orford, a Western narrative designed to create a sense of self for the “civilized” world by locating the self outside of the space of violence to which the other is relegated. Inasmuch as intervention is viewed as essentially humanitarian, it forecloses the possibility of dissent, of exploring alternative modes of responding to human rights abuse. This pleasant glaze in which international intervention is bathed precludes criticism of the international community’s complicity, thereby allowing violence to repeat itself. In other words, “the ‘solution’ to the Rwandan genocide flows from the definition of the problem.” If the genocide resulted from the failure of the international community to apply international law to a rogue state, then stronger, more interventionist international institutions are needed; if, as Orford contends, the genocide was partly a natural consequence of foreign economic investment, then the solution is less intervention, not more.

Throughout her incisive prose, Orford essentially claims that humanitarian intervention has little to do with the victims of human rights abuse and much more to do with the identity and prosperity of the international community. Orford’s critique holds weight. Her arguments are laced with disturbing factual evidence of the international community’s pre-crisis complicity in human rights abuses, hesitation to confer self-determination to the objects of its intervention, and economic opportunism at the expense of victim peoples. She effectively illumines some of the theoretical deficiencies that plague the foundation of modern interventionist literature and action and documents how they play out, to destructive effect, in humanitarian intervention.

Yet while Orford’s deconstructionist project finds resonance, her brief constructive plan rings hollow. At the close of the book, Orford takes eight pages (of two hundred nineteen) to sketch a way of thinking about human rights that would not suffer from the ailments of the heroic interventionist narratives. Here, her suggestions leave the reader crestfallen. Perhaps because of the efficacy of her devastating critique, one expects, indeed needs, a sounder solution than vague notions of an “attempt to build a body politic based on the recognition of difference and the desire to grant rights to the other” and an “internationalism that is not founded upon fear of the other, but rather on an attempt to imagine new forms of universalism.”

To be fair to Orford, Reading Human Rights may not be intended to offer a programmatic alternative. Such is the luxury of academia, but the strength of her critical insight begs a stronger solution. Orford as theoretical critic excels; Orford as human rights practitioner stumbles. While it is right to chastise the international community for the manner of its intervention, it is inadequate to disregard suffering peoples’ pleas for help. As Orford says herself, a third way must be found between unreflective militaristic intervention and inaction. While the theoretical foundation for that third way may be found in this book, its practical formation is absent. Nonetheless, Orford’s important work asks questions too often obscured, the answers to which have the potential to create a more just, less violent means of protecting human rights.

—Stephen George

HLSHRJ@law.harvard.edu
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