The moral appeal of human rights and humanitarian claims has grown considerably since the Cold War's end. This growth has been accompanied by an inexorable scholarly interest in examining the nature of these moral claims and explaining and assessing their political impact on international relations. Much of the interest has thus revolved around exercises in normative theory, intent on determining the moral foundations of domestic and international politics such that human rights would be properly protected. Equally, there has been a growing amount of interest in studying the institutionalization and dissemination of human rights norms through social constructivist methods. Aside from these normative and social-theoretical approaches there is now an appreciation of the need for an historical inquiry into the changing character of human rights and humanitarianism. Precisely what form this historical inquiry should take is a matter for further research, but the books under review here afford us an opportunity to elucidate the different dividends flowing from normative, social constructivist and historical approaches.

There are different ways of analyzing moral claims in politics, and the three books under review remind us of that fact. Eric Heinze's Waging Humanitarian War offers a philosophico-normative enquiry into the question of humanitarian war. It is primarily concerned with philosophically defending the moral claims of humanitarian intervention in international politics. Clifford Bob's edited collection, The International Struggle for New Human Rights, employs a loose social constructivist framework to explore struggles to promote and institutionalize human rights norms in a context of material constraints and competing political interests. This more empirical approach examines the social processes and mechanisms through which moral claims such as human rights find traction, or don't, on the agendas of international politics. Finally, Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss's edited volume, Humanitarianism in Question, offers the widest-ranging critical interrogation yet of the complex intersection of philosophico-normative, social-constructivist, and historical questions arising out of humanitarianism's rapid and contested rise to prominence on the international agenda. While the contributing chapters do not espouse a single theoretical viewpoint, the volume as a whole reaffirms the normative, social and historical approaches to analyzing the place of moral claims in politics.

Underlying much of the literature on human rights and humanitarianism is an assumption that the purpose of academic research on the subject is to measure the degree to which international politics is undergoing a “moralization.” This brings with it a correlative assumption, that the historical direction of international politics must be subject to a normative judgment based on the extent to which human rights are promoted and institutionalized. From this historiographical vantage point we can redescribe the books under review according to their engagement with the supposition that history reveals a moralization of international politics, or manifests an “historical sign” of moral progress, to adopt a Kantian idiom.

Heinze's book seeks to reconcile the competing claims of morality, law and politics within a single prescriptive framework. As the author puts it, this book wants to “remind its readers that reconciling what morality demands, what the law permits, and what is politically possible, should never be thought impossible” (p. x). This immediately raises the question of what grounds might be available for this reconciliation. Heinze draws on consequentialist ethics to reconcile the moral, legal and political dimensions. He hopes this will produce a normative argument that is simultaneously logically consistent and empirically precise. But, above all his book is, as Heinze puts it, “an exercise in normative theory” (p. 10).

The aim of this normative exercise “is to develop a more detailed threshold of human suffering that observers can employ to recognize situations wherein humanitarian intervention stands a reasonably successfully chance of doing more good than harm” (p. 5). Heinze argues that the ethical impulse behind humanitarian war may lie in solidarity with suffering strangers or the commitment to human security, but these impulses alone are insufficient to warrant resort to war. Waging a humanitarian war, he holds, must be conditional upon meeting certain other criteria provided by consequentialist ethics. Most importantly, the employment of “deadly military force” must be “likely to maximize human security” (p. 39). Against Kantian forms of moral reasoning, Heintze argues that any humanitarian war must be judged not simply against good intentions or a conception of right, but according to whether it reduces suffering caused by large-scale human rights violations, including ethnic cleansing, war crimes and genocide and does not exacerbate human suffering. It thus requires empirical analysis of the intervention's effectiveness and probability of success in addition to ethical evaluation based on maximizing human security. This, he believes, will ensure that a high threshold is maintained against humanitarian wars waged for ulterior motives, or where intervention may inadvertently cause harm.

Heinze's consequentialist approach is clearly and logically developed, but nonetheless invites further engagement, not only as a moral theory, but also, from an historiographical perspective, as an expression of the assumption that history reveals the moralization of international politics. For even though Heinze gives his book the subtitle, The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention, as if he were genuinely seeking a neutral ground for the reconciliation of ethics, law and politics, it becomes clear that politics and law are to be reconciled and grounded on the deeper substrate of ethics. This is why he believes law essentially “serves to codify ethical norms” (p. 5), and why he is critical of legal positivism for failing to submit to “persuasive moral arguments” (p. 5). He thus searches for an alternative legal foundation which coheres with the prior and privileged moral claim of human security. As sophisticated as Heinze's attempt is to lay the grounds for a moral theory of humanitarian war, it does not in the end provide the reconciliation to which it aspires.

A more empirical and constructivist approach to the analysis of moral claims in politics can be found in Clifford Bob's collection, International Struggle for New Human Rights. Bob argues in his Introduction that human rights emerge no differently than any other policy objective. This assertion is not intended to undercut the moral significance of human rights, only to anchor them in the social and material circumstances of politics. He acknowledges that, “while this view runs counter to recent idealizations of rights, it jibes with a realistic appraisal of rights claims and rights law as politics” (p. 8). From this perspective, it is more important to understand and explain the political interplay of norms and institutions in giving human rights concrete legal form, than to exercise normative judgment.

Bob's volume offers an interesting collection of empirical studies into the way obscure or neglected rights claims struggle to exert themselves on the international human rights agenda. The volume makes clear that this is a struggle, and that just because human rights are deemed by many to be universal and unalienable does not mean that there is agreement on what constitutes a human rights violation. If nothing else, the book's chapters demonstrate that human rights are historically contingent. Bob himself thus explains how, until the 1990s, Indian human rights organizations failed to recognize the Dalits' (or untouchables') experience of discrimination, violence and humiliation as a violation of human rights; Jeremy Youde (Chapter 5) explains how efforts to combat HIV/AIDS have led advocacy groups to argue for its inclusion in public health policy and in international human rights agendas; and Julie Mertus (Chapter 4) explains how groups representing lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender individuals succeeded in adding “a new right to sexuality on the international agenda” (p. 52). These, as well as the chapters on disability rights, female genital mutilation, extreme poverty, water rights, and children born of wartime rape, provide invaluable empirical evidence of the way that moral claims are asserted, received, and eventually accepted into international human rights agendas.

The great contribution of this volume is to remind us that while human rights may be regarded by many as a species of moral claim, they must invariably be staked out in the political domain. Human rights are thus afflicted by all the tensions, conflicts and interests normally associated with politics. Of particular interest is the way these chapters tell their historical stories. For despite the great variation in the construction and reception of these “new rights,” the volume as a whole develops a narrative in which history succeeds in opening up a closed international agenda of human rights to the realization of previously marginalized or neglected rights. It thus embodies the Kantian historical assumption that international politics is undergoing a progressive moralization as it succeeds in giving human rights formal legal expression.

The assumption that international politics can be interpreted through “historical signs” of moral progress is less evident, though not entirely absent, in the Barnett and Weiss volume. The collection begins with the most impressive account of humanitarianism in a single chapter of which I am aware. Entitled “Humanitarianism: A Brief History of the Present,” the editors' chapter (Chapter 1) contextualizes the question of humanitarianism in the growing willingness of outsiders to save suffering strangers and the heightened dangers faced by humanitarian action (p. 2). In approaching humanitarianism as “an artifact of various historically produced and socially situated discourses” (p. 41), Barnett and Weiss treat their subject as a contingent intellectual and political practice. As they point out, humanitarianism's purposes and principles remain contested (p. 3), something confirmed in Craig Calhoun's illuminating chapter (Chapter 3) on the history of humanitarianism. Calhoun historicizes humanitarianism by showing how the imperative to reduce human suffering has constantly changed in meaning and migrated and expanded its focus since its modern inception. Rather than issue out of a single origin, Calhoun shows how it emerged out of an array of different religious and secular principles and practices advocated by eighteenth century reform movements who drew, in different ways, upon ideas of charity, the ethics and laws of war, and cosmopolitanism (p. 75).

In addition to making a definition elusive, these historicizations deprive humanitarianism of an oft-imputed moral purity, and condemn it to function as a political practice where it runs up against rival humanitarianisms as much as against other actors, interests and forces. This point echoes Clifford Bob's claim that human rights are subject to the same political forces as any other policy. Indeed, one could draw the same conclusion after reading James Fearon's chapter (Chapter 2) on patterns of emergency relief aid, Stephen Hopgood's chapter (Chapter 4) on what, if anything, distinguishes humanitarian from commercial organizations, Janice Gross Stein's chapter (Chapter 5) on the challenges of accountability for humanitarian organizations, or Barnett and Jack Snyder's chapter (Chapter 6) on “grand strategies” of humanitarianism. Humanitarian organizations face similar challenges to any other private or public organization, not just in raising funds and efficiently and effectively pursuing their goals, but in drawing attention to their cause on packed domestic and international agendas.

This emphasis on the politics and history of humanitarianism flows through most of the chapters, especially the book's last two chapters: Barnett's essay (Chapter 10) on “Humanitarianism as a Scholarly Vocation” and Peter Hoffman and Weiss's chapter (Chapter 11), written primarily for practitioners, on humanitarianism's relation to practitioners and social scientists. Both are especially welcome for their willingness to reflect critically on humanitarianism as a body of knowledge and as a practice. Equally, both cast doubt over the idea that humanitarianism can be studied in terms of the moralization of international politics. As Barnett puts it, “an ever-present danger in writing about humanitarianism, and nearly any aspect of international ethics, is the seductive pull of a Whiggish view of history” (p. 235). Thankfully, this collection, which deserves to be widely read by scholars and practitioners, is largely free of this view. While the contributions are excellent on their own, they add up to something more than the sum of parts by consistently returning the reader back to questions about the circumstantial realities which shape the ongoing historical construction and reception of humanitarianism.

The three books reviewed here make important contributions to the study of humanitarianism in international relations. But beyond their own contributions, they give us pause to think again about the politics of moral claims and the historical assumptions on which they are grounded. Taken together they prompt us to conceive of humanitarianism as an open-ended and historically contingent array of moral, medical, logistical and political practices designed to alleviate human suffering. If nothing else, this understanding permits a more historical and contextual inquiry into the moral claims of rights and humanitarianism in international relations.