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Can Might Make Rights?: Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions.

Article Excerpt
Jane Stromseth, David Wippman, and Rosa Brooks

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006

424 pages, cloth, $84.00

This is a timely and thought-provoking handbook of current wisdom about a complex and perhaps irresolvable problem: Can rule of law be built under conditions of military occupation, or, more generally, by foreigners? More questions, and tentative answers, are offered by the three authors, who published the book as a project of the American Society of International Law. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the U.S. Institute of Peace, Stromseth and Brooks (of Georgetown University Law Center) and Wippman (of Cornell Law School) traveled to Iraq, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Bosnia, Geneva, Brussels and The Hague to interview practitioners of conflict resolution about their experiences.

They begin by asking the broadest political question: Is the problem posed part of a new period of imperialism? Since the 1990s, they note, "many of the same powerful western states that contritely rejected imperialism a few short decades ago today are increasingly resorting to military force to intervene in the territories of others states, and in many cases, they are remaining on as de facto governments years after the fighting ends" (p. 2). Whether motivated by humanitarian concerns, as in Kosovo or East Timor, or by security worrity worries, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, military interventions are likely to remain a fact of...

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