Review: Mobilizing the Will to Intervene

Abstract

MOBILIZING THE WILL TO INTERVENE Leadership to Prevent Mass Atrocities Franck Chalk, Romeo Dallaire, Kyle Matthews, Carla Barqueiro and Simon Doyle Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. 191PP, $14.99 (Paper). ISBN 978-0-7735-3804-7Since the United Nations' 2005 world summit that produced a document referring to the responsibility to protect (R2P), the academic literature on humanitarian intervention in general and R2P in particular has grown rapidly. While the actual practice of humanitarian intervention effectively stalled following the controversial invasion of Iraq in 2003, NATO's 2011 intervention in Libya and the subsequent crisis in Syria have reinvigorated the debate. As a result, Mobilizing the Witt to Intervene explores themes that are of great contemporary relevance. Unfortunately, the book's prescriptions are old-fashioned, based on dubious assumptions, and of limited use.The book grows out of the work of the research of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. The institute's to Intervene Project, established in 2007, is laudably based on the conviction that mass atrocities must, ideally, be prevented and, if necessary, swiftly halted. It seeks to combat the apathy that has too often characterized the international response to intra-state crises. In explicitly targeting democratically elected political leaders, the authors seek to bring about nothing less than a paradigm shift (xxi-xxii). To achieve this goal, they argue, it is necessary first to mobilize domestic public opinion through NGO advocacy and media coverage and second to convince leaders that intra-state crises constitute threats to international security. This dual-pronged strategy aims to make it impossible for elected leaders to ignore their constituents' demands for action and to convince them of the necessity of a robust international response (3-12). To illustrate the scale and nature of the problem, the authors examine two case studies - the 1994 Rwandan genocide and NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo. These case studies are the best part of the book and provide detailed and illuminating insight into decision making in the United States and Canada.Despite the forensic analysis of these cases, however, the book is simply out of date. It is especially curious that a book published in 2010 focuses on two case studies from the 1990s. Surely the many intra-state crises since 1999 - in Darfur, Iraq, and Sri Lanka, to name but three - are more salient today? The 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (sponsored by the Canadian government) focused extensively on Rwanda and Kosovo. The lessons that Mobilizing the Will to Intervene advances have received exhaustive attention elsewhere.Moreover, the book's argument is almost endearingly quaint. The idea that global civil society can and will hold the leaders of democratic states to account and pressure them into doing the right thing was widely touted in the 1990s. But global public opinion had a negligible impact on the invasion of Iraq and responses to the massacres in Darfur. The authors ignore these facts, which call their proposed solution into question.The book's mantra is that mass atrocities have negative consequences beyond the state in which they occur. The authors colourfully describe mass atrocities as seismic wrecking balls destabilizing and destroying social, economic, health and political infrastructure. …