Not Anything Goes: War as a Norm-Guided Practice

Abstract

Norms of War: Cultural Beliefs and Modern Conflict. By Theo Farrell. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. 225 pp., $49.95 (ISBN: 1-58826-361-4). Norms of War , by Theo Farrell, traces how war and the preparations for war are shaped by normative and cultural factors. The exposition is elaborated through four empirical case studies: the first on military organization and the Irish army, the second on collective memory and conceptions of mass industrial warfare in World War II, the third on the US nonuse and targeting of nuclear weapons, and the fourth on humanitarian intervention in the 1990s. Challenging arguments that warfare is primarily a rationalistic endeavor, Farrell shows that military practices are deeply embedded in cultural norms and cognitive models. His analysis is grounded in theoretical arguments and literatures drawn widely from political science, sociology, psychology, history, and international law. Farrell is interested in tracing cultural change and the causal impact of norms on military practices. In short, he wants to show “how norms evolve to shape military organization, military mobilization, and military operations” (pp. 15–16). The introduction to Norms of War lays out a theoretical framework that emphasizes mechanisms of norm creation, dissemination, and impact. Each of the subsequent four empirical chapters introduces at least one new literature, including sociological institutionalism, strategic culture, the social construction of technology, theories of international law, and collective memory and imagination. A brief concluding chapter assesses the normative mechanisms in comparative fashion. Overall, Farrell exhibits an impressive command of a wide range of theoretical and empirical material. The strongest chapters (Chapters 2 and …