What does the arrest warrant of the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Joseph Kony, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), and the World Food Program's food aid strategy for internally displaced persons have common? In Displacing Human Rights, Adam Branch, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at San Diego State University, contends that these are some of the ‘various faces of a single, imaginary global-interventionist agent’ (p. 23) who uses the language of human rights even while reducing the possibility of the emancipation of its subjects. Branch draws on decade of research into the conflict in Northern Uganda (including his doctoral research under the supervision of Mahmood Mamdani at Columbia University) to demonstrate how human rights interventions – a term he uses to include relief aid, peacebuilding, international law enforcement and military intervention – tend to be instrumentalised by unaccountable power-holders and used to demobilise the search for political solutions to fundamentally political problems. If Branch is right about the many ways in which well-intentioned interventions can extend the suffering of those on whose account they are legitimated, then this book will provide fodder for fruitful debates among scholars, practitioners and activists working on Africa and elsewhere for decades to come.

Theoretically, Displacing Human Rights states that human rights interventions share a common internal logic, which typically starts by representing suffering in Africa as the suffering of humanity. However, the representation is coupled with an unequal distribution of agency, with Westerners being empowered as ‘responsible redeemers’ (p. 5) authorized to aid helpless Africans. Consequently, apolitical interventions have been crafted, not simply to address immediate threats faced by those in need of assistance, but rather as ‘total interventions’ (p. 26) to achieve peace through reconstructing every aspect of African political, economic, social, psychological, cultural and legal order – a breakdown in any or all of which are thought to constitute the causes and consequences of conflict. A permanent need is established for moral agents who act outside political and democratic accountability to intervene in order to address past, present and potential causes and consequences conflict; in a context where no objective way to measure progress or success is thought satisfactory, interventions can take ‘their own expansion as their measure of success, and the ends are displaced by the means’ (p. 33). Other displacements take place too: ‘human rights are displaced from the political to the administrative, from the popular to the elite, from the autonomous to the dependent, from emancipation to control, from struggle to demobilization’ (p. 7).

A key strength of the book is its ability to analyse and reveal common patterns in seemingly disparate and complex empirical instances of counterproductive human rights interventions in Uganda. Such examples range from the distribution of aid to the camps into which the Ugandan government deliberately displaced persons, precipitating a crisis where ‘state violence and humanitarianism each depended on the other for its own viability’ (p. 91); to peacebuilding and ‘ethnojustice’ agendas which have been used by different actors in their own struggles for power. It also analyses assertions about the ICC's role in peace and justice for Northern Uganda, how the law silences the dissent of those demanding an investigation against the Ugandan army, a result of which the Court seems to ‘conform to the demands of abusive or antidemocratic states’ and can be ‘responsible for intensifying the violence it claims to resolve’ (p. 193); and criticises the fact that in the name of ending the ‘bad’ violence of the LRA, activists who were historically a movement for peace, have successfully (and ahistorically) called for ‘good’ violence, that of the international community, to arrest Kony in the name of international justice. As a consequence, armies of the region now have legitimacy to foray further into the conflict-ravaged central African space in the name of justice, consequences to civilians notwithstanding. In this zeitgeist of what Branch terms as ‘militarized peace’, it should be no surprise that the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) – which played a central role in the military campaign in Libya – presents itself as though it were an NGO, in both its ‘unprecedented embrace of ideas of peacebuilding, participation, partnership, empowerment, cultural understanding, and human security,’ and in the way it has championed conflict prevention through military intervention (p. 217).

While the book does not seek to be comparative, it could have done more to theorise about the extent to which interventions might be different if they took place in domestic political conditions different from those of Uganda, contexts where, perhaps because of shifts towards political competitiveness, regime elites are less secure than those of Uganda, and thereby less able to use human rights interventions as political resources without risking their own political control. It could also have benefited from a richer engagement with some of the literature on transitional justice, where discussions are ongoing about the extent to which the ICC can be instrumentalised for purposes quite incidental to the pursuit of justice.

Displacing Human Rights closes with hope by proposing solidarity between Western and African activists, whereby each group works in their own political communities on common challenges, each living with the consequences of their actions. However, Branch also acknowledges that such solidarity would require human rights activists to avail noninterventionist human rights discourses, and recognise the political autonomy of the subjects of intervention (and the impossibility of outsiders to provide such autonomy), effectively invalidating the very model of intervention. In short, other than the possibility that an intervention can provoke resistance among its subjects, the way forward is a revolution. Whether this approach is desirable, the conditions under which it might be possible, and what, in an imperfect world, other realistic alternatives might be, are all questions that should be debated by scholars and practitioners. It is for this reason that that this book should be required reading for all those working on various themes in Africa today.