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Book Review
David Kennedy
The Dark Sides of Virtue:
Reassessing International Humanitarianism.
Princeton University Press,
2004
Published in Global Law Books Project, Edited
by Joseph Weiler and Miguel Poiares Maduro (2005).
Reviewed by Vik Kanwar
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Review of Karl-Heinz Ladeur’s edited volume Public Governance in the Age of
Globalization (2004)
Review of Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception(2003)
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Untimely Interventions?: David Kennedy on Humanitarianism as
a Vocation
Professor David Kennedy likes telling stories about the
unstable border between legal practice and activism. I was reminded while reading
his newest book, The Dark Sides of
Virtue, of a story he might appreciate. Years ago, as an idealistic law
intern, I worked with an experienced international lawyer on a
“plowshares” case. The case involved civil disobedience by anti-nuclear
activists at a missile silo and their subsequent arrest by military police.
As we met in a converted closet only half-ironically called the “war
room,” my supervisor asked me to formulate some creative remedies
using domestic law, international human rights law, and humanitarian law. He
went on to say, “In case you don’t know what humanitarian law
is, it’s a joke,
there’s nothing ‘humanitarian’ or ‘legal’ about
it. It’s just a nice and Orwellian way of saying ‘the etiquette
of mass murder’.” The
Dark Sides of Virtue is filled with similar stories charting the
excessive devotions and disillusionments, private ironies and public
solidarities that circulate among human rights advocates. While this book
should not be dismissed as an archive of outdated “strategic
interventions,” it bears the strong mark of the 1990s, when the Left
was divided over “humanitarian intervention.” As
“humanitarian bombs” fell on Belgrade in 1999, mainstream “liberals” typically
claimed to harness power against cruelty, while “progressives”
sought to puncture liberal hypocrisy, and “critical” scholars
like Kennedy deconstructed their debates. Since September 2001, starker
choices have compelled a rapprochement between liberal humanitarians and progressive
activists— even in the “war room” we speak more
reverently of humanitarian law— and Kennedy’s book arrives in
time to reconsider the value of a “critical” project at
present.
Kennedy’s choice of topics
covers a broad swathe of contemporary concerns. In each case, the subject
is “the humanitarian” actor in contexts of increasing power and
responsibility. In his introductory chapter (p. 3), asking whether
international human rights movement is “more part of the problem than
the solution,” he develops a comprehensive checklist of reasons to be
skeptical. His rights-skepticism is inspired more by legal realism than realpolitik,
and inflected less by the traditional Marxist critique of rights than more
recent feminist and postcolonial interventions. Yet Kennedy’s
reference to “the solution” is fundamentally misleading. He
remains rigorously anti-programmatic, “critical” in a sense
best articulated by Foucault: “My point is not that everything is
bad, but that everything is dangerous.” For
Foucault as much as Kennedy the vocation of activism is an imperative (“If
everything is dangerous then there’s always something to do”),
but one that cannot be defined in terms of success. The best Kennedy can do
is to log with humor and self-analysis his own imperfect quest to combine
the “good fight” with the “good life.” In the
second and third chapters (“Spring Break” and “Autumn
Weekend”) Kennedy reprints two classic first-person narratives. The first takes place at a Paraguayan
prison, (p. 37) and the second at an international conference on the future
of East Timor (p. 85). These memoir-fragments invert the familiar human
rights narratives of heroic war correspondents and indignant statesmen; Kennedy’s
frontline is neither the killing fields nor the seat of power, but a more
familiar world for most of us: the mundane conferences and awkward
conversations of a nascent “international civil society.” He
reveals with sympathy but not superiority the ambiguous motives, human faults
and fantasies underlying cosmopolitan activism. While one may wince as
Kennedy skewers well-meaning doers and hard-won deeds, the forcefulness of his
critique increases proportionally with the power of his targets. Thus, the remainder
of the book shifts from activists to policy-makers. These four chapters— also the most substantively
satisfying— apply the same analysis to the following topics: (1) pragmatism
in humanitarian policy-making, (2) the “rule of law” in
economic development, (3) refugee protection, and finally (4) humanitarian
intervention. In the end, the book’s most glaring defect is that is
doesn’t contain its own sequel; Kennedy might now proceed to newer
dangers and complacencies international society concentrated on two poles:
the torque of the “war on terrorism” and the inertia of “global
governance.” While “liberal consensus” is a perpetual
myth— today as much as in the 1990s— a truly dissonant voice is
all the more important for its recent muted-ness.
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