International Security and Peacebuilding: Africa, the Middle East, and Europe ed. by Abu Bakarr Bah (review)

This text critically engages with international humanitarian interventions in post-Cold War conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. What binds this volume’s case studies together, and gives the book a coherence that is not immediately evident from the geographic specificity of the title, is their focus on conflicts that prompted large-scale humanitarian interventions and international state-building projects by (mostly Western) powers under the banners of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and War on Terror doctrines. These two doctrines justify international intervention—military and non-military, coercive and non-coercive—on humanitarian grounds and uses a “security-democracy-development” matrix as “the key means for maintaining security in the poor and unstable countries” that are both embroiled in wars and hold strategic value for Western powers. This matrix is embodied in “global liberal governance,” an “ideological and policy mechanism” (p. 3) that uses strong international intervention to promote and implement democratic state-building, free market economic restructuring, and conditional distribution of development aid. Framed within Kaldor’s “new war” thesis, the chapters interrogate African, Middle Eastern, and European conflicts in the post-Cold War era—a time that “was supposed to usher in a new era of real peace” but that has been characterized in reality by “new forms of insecurity” (p. 2). This book argues for “extend[ing] the notion of new wars to include the terrorism warfare that erupted in response to the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 terrorist attack” (p. 2). This extension of new wars not only allows for a more comprehensive framework within which to analyze contemporary conflicts, but also offers the opportunity for comparative analysis of the global liberal governance responses to these post-Cold War era conflicts.

What results is a book that provides a rich empirical analysis of the moral ambiguities, practical challenges, and legitimacy issues that have arisen from the application of global liberal governance under the umbrellas of R2P or the War on Terror. The range of chapters brought together in this volume is indicative of the wide scope of challenges presented by global liberal governance in practice. The case studies demonstrate the importance of interrogating international humanitarian intervention in a wide variety of contexts, at multiple scales, and through many different lenses to create a more complete and nuanced picture of the reactions to and realities of military humanitarianism and international state-building in the contemporary era. Chapters by Gulowski and Abubakar take a macro-level approach, analyzing major powers’ discursive manipulation of the R2P doctrine and inconsistent application of military humanitarianism to situations in which they are geostrategically and economically interested.

Using the conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone as examples, Gulowski demonstrates the ways Western powers coopt conflict narratives as part of legitimization, that process that involves providing particular facts to the public so as to generate legitimacy for the use of military force in international interventions. She concludes that rather than operating as an unambiguous part of international law, R2P essentially functions as a “guiding principle” that states can use to justify their use of violence in particular conflicts (p. 40). Abubakar’s chapter further critiques the inconsistencies in the application of R2P by comparing the international interventions in Libya, which were robust, and Darfur, which were weak and ineffectual. The international community’s divergent responses to the Libyan and Darfurian conflicts belies the altruistic claims of R2P, instead revealing that the doctrine is beset by internal tensions (such as self-interested moves by major powers) and raises serious questions about the nature of state sovereignty in conflict resolution efforts.

Chapters by Schut and van Baarle, Sigri, Varoglu, and Basar, and Niang attend to the interpersonal interactions “on the ground” in conflict situations that fundamentally affect the outcomes of international interventions. Schut and van Baarle’s work with...