Contrary to expectations, the collapse of communism did not lead to a Pax Americana and a stable world order. Instead, numerous conflicts since 1990, especially in the non-Western world, have led to serious violence—even genocide—and failed states. However, these conflicts have resulted in a new type of interventionist politics in failed states and societies experiencing ethnic or regional conflict, led usually by the United States and the United Nations. Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions offers a comprehensive analysis of the policies that have often accompanied such interventions, especially efforts to build the rule of law.

The authors demonstrate that, although the notion of “rule of law” seems commonsensical, it really encompasses multiple dimensions that need to be better understood if efforts to implement it are to be successful. In the Introduction, “A New Imperialism,” the authors point to the ambiguity that surrounds the implementation of the rule of law in post-conflict societies because the motivations behind many interventions—Iraq being perhaps the most egregious example—are often questionable. Can Might Make Rights? goes on to argue for a substantive, rather than a minimalist, conception of the rule of law. In other words, in the authors' view, building the rule of law will only be successful if practitioners recognize that promoting it “is an issue of norm creation and cultural change as much as an issue of creating new institutions and legal codes” (p. 75).

This study includes a number of well written and highly informative chapters on the core issues surrounding implementing the rule of law in post-conflict societies. These include such topics as blueprints for post-conflict governance, the challenge of justice system reform, accountability for atrocities, creating rule of law cultures, and enhancing the planning, funding and local ownership dimensions of rule of law efforts. One comes away from this volume understanding both the incredible challenges and complexities that face efforts to establish the rule of law in post-military conflict situations, but also a sense of empowerment due to the analytic tools that the authors provide the reader.

Were this volume to be expanded, I would suggest that more attention be given to the critical impact economic reconstruction and development have on efforts to create the rule of law. One can fashion a highly sophisticated rule of law program for a post-conflict society. However, if that society continues to suffer from serious economic dislocation and unemployment, such programs will most likely not succeed. The authors suggest the importance of social and economic reconstruction to the success of rule of law efforts (e.g., p. 355), but really do not treat this issue in any detail.

Iraq underscores the importance of the relationship between economic reconstruction and the rule of law. During the 1991 Gulf War, the bombing of Iraq pushed its level of industrial development back to that of the early 1960s. Between 1991 and 2003, harsh United Nations sanctions, the continued destruction of all institutions of civil society by Saddam Hussein's regime, the collapse of the national education system, and the development of oil smuggling as a core component of the economy created serious barriers to efforts to establish the rule of law following the United States toppling of the Ba^cth regime. Despite having a highly professional judiciary whose roots extend back to the Baghdad College of Law founded in 1908, Iraq was not ripe for the rule of law. The decommissioning of the ethnically integrated conscript army of 385,000 men, and the firing of 500,000 public sector industry workers by the US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) during the spring of 2003, exacerbated the economic decay that Iraq experienced after the Gulf War. With Iraq's unemployment rates running as high after 2003 as 60–70% among youth under the age of 25 (65% of the population), it is no wonder that criminal activity and government corruption, and recruitment to insurgent groups and sectarian militias, have all intensified while respect for legal norms has been sorely lacking.

While the authors do reference concrete examples of rule of law efforts in post-conflict societies, such as Rwanda, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, one would have liked to have seen these cases discussed in greater detail. Such detail would have helped better explicate the arguments put forth by the authors. Including a number of detailed case studies in an appendix, so as not to disrupt the flow of the volume's arguments, would have given the reader more empirical material to assess the validity of the authors' many well developed and compelling hypotheses. An example of the need for greater detail is the case of post-conflict Somalia where the authors, when discussing the role of police forces in developing the rule of law, argue, in a counterintuitive fashion, that the “police were well trained, disciplined, and generally nontribal” (p. 203). Three pages later, they argue that the police in Iraq's southern post city of Basra “reportedly have perpetrated kidnapping, torture and summary executions against rival sectarian groups, against a wider background of insecurity, insurgency, and sectarian violence” (p. 206). One would like to know why these two post-conflict societies provide such different patterns of policing.

Nevertheless, Can Might Make Rights? represents a major contribution to codifying, in a sophisticated and compelling manner, the multiple dimensions and complexities facing rule of law efforts in post-conflict societies. It provides an important caution to any efforts at intervention in a society experiencing serious political instability. It suggests that states such as the United States, France, and supranational organizations such as the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity, carefully consider their motivations for intervening and plan for as many contingencies as possible to assure the best possible outcome once that intervention has occurred. Obviously, none of these considerations informed Bush administration policy in Iraq in 2003, with the now obvious disastrous outcomes. Hopefully, recent efforts by the United States government to take social and economic reconstruction in Iraq more seriously will also have a salutary impact on the country's ability to build and implement the rule of law.