The Politics of the Rule of Law

Abstract

International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans: Virtual Trials and the Struggle for State Cooperation. By Victor A. Peskin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 272 pp., $85.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-87230-0). Civil War and the Rule of Law: Security, Development, Human Rights. Edited by Agnes Hurwitz, Reyko Huang. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008. 351 pp., $24.50 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58826-507-4). Plunder: When the Rule of Law Is Illegal. By Ugo Mattei, Laura Nader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 283 pp., $29.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-7894-5). Since the early 1990s, interest in the role of law as a systemic instrument of social and political regulation and change—in short, the institution of the “rule of law”—has surged among academics and policy makers, so much so that Thomas Carothers could remark in 1998 that “one cannot get through a foreign policy debate these days without someone proposing the rule of law as a solution to the world's troubles” (Carothers 1998: 95). The rule of law has a long pedigree as a normative concept in Western political and legal thought, with its roots going back all the way to Plato and Aristotle (Tamanaha 2004). Globalization and the proliferation of international governance institutions have recently broadened its field of application beyond the state to international contexts. Like many other widely used socio-legal concepts, the rule of law belongs to “the category of open-ended concepts which are subject to permanent debate and have to be constantly redefined to meet the needs of an ever-changing political and legal environment” (Grote 1999: 271), and it has remained an “exceedingly elusive notion” (Tamanaha 2004: 3; see also Stephenson n.d.). In addition, empirical blind spots continue to exist with respect to the effectiveness of the various instruments employed by rule of law programs (Carothers 2003, 2006). The three books reviewed here seek to illuminate this conceptual and empirical darkness and approach the rule of law from three different perspectives: international criminal justice, postconflict peacebuilding, and an ideological critique of neoliberalism. Because their orientation provides for little overlap, I will discuss them separately. Viktor Peskin's book, International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans, is a welcome addition to the literature on the effectiveness of international tribunals. Based on many years of field research, Peskin's study investigates the record of cooperation between the two Security …