The paradox of human rights practice is this: It may promote domination as much as it also may provide a vocabulary to resist it. Unraveling this paradox is at the heart of Adam Branch’s Displacing Human Rights.

In this book, Branch uses the case of Acholiland in northern Uganda to answer three related questions critical to scholarship on humanitarianism and political development in conflict settings (p. 3). How is it that millions of aid dollars are spent on relief with little positive social or political change to show for it? Why are displaced citizens who face forced internment not organizing politically? And what is the role of nongovernmental organizations?

Branch’s answer to these questions, which forms the book’s main argument, is an unequivocal critique of post–Cold War interventions by Western aid groups in Africa. The people of northern Uganda, particularly those who live in poverty in the government’s forced internment camps, find themselves caught “between state violence and NGO discipline” (p. ix). More specifically, Branch argues that the dominant image of Africa, especially in the West, is one of a violent and politically immature region inhabited largely by victims of human rights abuses who are in need of salvation. This inaccurate, reductive, and demeaning construct of African personhood and politics, the author continues, undermines political agency, represses local communication and organization, and eventually intensifies conflict (p. 6). Ultimately, the author finds Western donors, United Nations agencies, and NGOs complicit in human rights abuses through their support of the Ugandan government’s “militarization and authoritarianism” (p. 10).

The book follows a logical organization and structure. The succinct introduction summarizes the main argument. Two historically focused chapters follow. Chapter 1 provides background on post–Cold War interventions in Africa generally, and Chapter 2 details the colonial and postcolonial history of Uganda and interventions into Acholiland. Following these two historical chapters are five case studies (Chapters 3–7) of human rights–based interventions in Uganda led by UN agencies, the World Bank, international NGOs, or Western governments. Each case-study chapter follows a similar pattern, describing the form and logic of the intervention under scrutiny and concluding that it “tended toward generally counterproductive consequences for democracy, human rights, and peace” in Uganda (p. 44).

Chapter 3 argues that just as governments may ignore political rights during times of emergency, so too may aid agencies that ought to be committed to protecting those rights. The chapter focuses on encampments for internally displaced persons, which the Ugandan government deployed as a forced internment scheme against the Acholi population, under the guise of protecting citizens using international help. Branch concludes the discussion disparagingly toward UN agencies and other aid groups, which he sees as accomplices to international crimes committed in Acholiland (pp. 112–13).

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with twin grassroots endeavors—funding peacebuilding programs and elevating “traditional” authorities to positions of local power. Here, the parallels with colonialism are striking. Development models imported by foreigners limit autonomy, create hierarchy, and restrain local political organizing. Branch laments that grassroots opposition to these programs are branded as deviant (p. 120), which causes political frustration and disillusionment, especially among youth (pp. 148–49).

Chapters 6 and 7 take on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). Branch carefully details AFRICOM’s militarization of African states in the name of development assistance and fighting terrorism (pp. 221–23). Similarly, the ICC’s “one-sided” investigation against the Lord’s Resistance Army insulated the Ugandan government from criticism as it was conducting systematic abuses of its own (p. 191). Meanwhile, local justice efforts were “shut down” as people inappropriately were encouraged to abandon their political battles in order to wait for the ICC to alleviate their suffering (p. 198).

Following these five case studies, the book concludes with an impassioned call for Western “disintervention” in Africa, or a “negotiated” withdrawal “for the sake of human rights” (pp. 241, 246). Branch fervidly declares to his readership: “We must stop pretending that Western intervention in Africa is a practice of saving strangers” (p. 245). Put another way, Africans ought to have the freedom to create African-based solutions. The international community—and Western nations and NGOs in particular—should then be held accountable for disciplining, depoliticizing, and militarizing African persons and societies (p. 240).

Many political scientists will find this book useful, including as an undergraduate teaching tool. It is clearly written, and the forceful tone of the arguments stimulates thoughtful engagement. The book’s conception of “total interventions”—which use the moral language of human rights to justify meddling in African affairs—will be helpful for those studying or teaching the comparative politics of the developing world. The book is also remarkable for its sharp analysis of both plunder by Western aid groups and moments of resistance by Ugandan people—including opposition to forced internment, to enforced human rights ideologies, to cultures of aid dependence, and to the “humanitarian regime” itself (pp. 106–7).

Some in the discipline of political science may want more to follow from this book. Law and courts scholars, those sympathetic to interdisciplinary law and society approaches, and political theorists of rights may want to see additional work that aligns this book’s conclusions more closely with the extensive literature on the discourse of rights. That is, in what ways does human rights as an ideology or human rights as a practice cause the corrupt behavior that Branch documents in Uganda? Those interested in field research, particularly empirical work in war-ravaged settings, may want more specificity on methods: How many interviews were conducted, what was the format, what archives were consulted, and how were these data coded and analyzed? Finally, while beyond the scope of this book’s critical inquiry into Western aid groups, Branch carves open space for researchers to extend his findings by studying a range of foreign interventions, including the role of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian NGOs, companies, and state aid agencies in promoting alternative forms of power and ideology in Africa.

Branch ultimately calls on his readers to help terminate the legacy of “harmful” practices on African soil, particularly those carried out in the name of human rights (p. 247). While he proposes a grassroots solidarity between Africans and non-Africans rooted in human rights language, it is unclear the extent to which those who hold social power (e.g., well-funded local NGOs, “traditional” male authorities, and those who speak English well) would define the contours of those grassroots relations and whether the human rights discourse he seeks might also be corrupted, just as it had been presented in his five case studies.

Overall, Displacing Human Rights is a monumental history of politics in northern Uganda and human rights interventions of the early twenty-first century. The task now belongs to political scientists and legal scholars to debate the author’s proposals and, with graduate students and other young scholars, to extend the author’s significant findings to other epochs or other contexts within and beyond Africa.