These books represent how far the human rights revolution in the social sciences has come. The field of international relations, for example, was once dominated by military force experts, but today includes many scholars whose primary focus is human rights. Yet this interest in human rights developed largely in isolation from the larger body of international law of which it is a part. Through this separation or through the persistence of the old realist focus on military force, it seemed for a time that most international relations scholars interested in human rights were also advocates of humanitarian intervention. There have been a number of such interventions since the end of the Cold War, though only one that blatantly violated international law: the 1999 intervention by NATO in the Kosovo crisis. Then in 2003, the United States led a small coalition in invading Iraq, saying that it had the same authority to do so as it did for the Kosovo intervention. Advocacy for humanitarian wars began to diminish.

Thomas Weiss's Humanitarian Intervention is an attempt to persuade us that the use of force is really a necessary tool in the campaign for rights. Yet, in my view, the book does a better job supporting the case for lawful, nonlethal means of protection. Mark Gibney's International Human Rights Law is a discussion of just such means. He focuses on the use of courts to apply and enforce human rights law. He plainly believes in the power of law and its capacity to create a stronger sense that human rights principles are universal principles of interest to all everywhere.

Beginning with Weiss' book, there is much that will be familiar to readers who have followed the humanitarian intervention debate. The author explains in the preface that he was asked to “re-examine as succinctly as possible various pieces of a puzzle that I have been struggling to assemble for almost two decades … to call into question shibboleths” (p. xi). The “shibboleths” are apparently the critiques that have been made of humanitarian intervention, because the book is a single-minded argument in favor of it. Weiss plainly believes the case needs to be made again for “military humanitarianism” after the defections of such prominent former comrades-in-arms as the journalist David Rieff (p. 81), as well as the rejection by most of the world's nation-states, at the 2005 United Nations World Summit, of any new rights to use force.

The book's five chapters review concepts, history, and more recent developments, especially the 2001 report “Responsibility to Protect” that Weiss helped to write. The book is a good starting point for anyone new to the subject, but readers should be aware that this is a work of advocacy. The final line is indeed a dramatic question designed to elicit the reader's commitment to future military intervention, because Weiss concludes that that is what the victims of war in Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo would want: “While in UN diplomatic circles answers remain equivocal [as to whether military forces should refrain from humanitarian intervention] the answer by any of the 800,000 dead Rwandans—or millions of murdered Sudanese, Ugandans, and Congolese—would have been a resounding ‘no.’ What is yours?” (p. 154, paragraph break omitted).

The advocacy is ultimately unpersuasive. Even a pro-intervention author like Weiss has difficulty furnishing examples of successful uses of military force for humanitarian purposes. He blames this on the fact that interventions have been “half-hearted” (p. 86) and that there is no substitute for a longer-term commitment, which is “essential” (p. 82). But he does not provide advice for dealing with the reality that governments are unlikely to make such commitments. Humanitarian intervention is highly problematic and one of its chief proponents is unable to defend it. The one case of such a commitment in recent years, Iraq, is an abject failure. The Iraq case is a stark cautionary tale of the limits of military force—even when an intervening state remains in occupation for years and even when it provides billions of dollars for reconstruction.

Weiss's principal argument for humanitarian intervention is the suffering of human beings in Sudan, Uganda, Congo, and so many places. He fails to focus on the fact that people have suffered in these places because they were caught up in war. Looking at the situations of greatest suffering should lead to the conclusion that we must rid the world of war, not advocate its acceptability—even if for desirable ends. There is a reason the UN Charter severely restricts the right to wage war: Nothing causes greater human suffering than war. Alan J. Kuperman has pointed out that the advocacy for humanitarian war has likely encouraged new wars (“The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans,” International Studies Quarterly 52 [no. 4, 2008]: 49–80). The drafters of the Charter knew that war could not be eliminated entirely, but they also knew that peace is a necessary condition of the flourishing of human rights. The Charter is a peace regime; ignoring its binding rules can only have a corrosive effect on all international law—including the law of human rights. It undermines the effort to diminish the plague of war.

Mark Gibney provides an account of the means for enforcing human rights preferred in international law: courts. He discusses the large and growing body of international and regional courts hearing human rights cases. He acknowledges that national courts have long played a key role in such enforcement. He would plainly like to see more access to courts and even proposes a new world civil court. I agree with Gibney's view that more adjudication of human rights claims would be a good thing. But he underestimates the dramatic advances—in just 60 years—in the laws and processes for enforcing respect for human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted only in 1948. Today, people around the globe know that they have inalienable human rights. The human rights courts in Europe and the Americas are active. Africa has a new court. The International Criminal Court is getting to work. The International Court of Justice is busier than ever. It is not clear why he thinks a new court is needed, as opposed to encouraging greater use of existing courts.

Gibney has a tendency to lay the blame for deficiencies in judicial protection of human rights at the door of international law. The real blame lies with political leaders and national court judges who seem to know little about the power and purpose of international law. International law places virtually no jurisdictional limits on the right of national courts to hold individuals accountable for the most heinous international crimes, but Americans have not been held accountable even for torture. The United States has not joined the International Criminal Court, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, or the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. These are all problems of American leadership, not of international law.

Many IR scholars working in the area of human rights unfortunately lack comprehensive knowledge of international law. One detects this problem in Gibney's book. For example, he writes in Chapter 1: “Not a single state has ever filed an inter-state complaint against another state under the international system. Not a single state has brought a claim against another state before the International Court of Justice based on the human rights violations of this other state. And not a single state has allowed human rights victims to sue an offending state in its courts” (p. 18).

Later in the very same chapter, however, Gibney discusses the successful case brought in U.S. courts by the Flatow family against Iran for sponsoring a terrorist attack that resulted in their daughter's death (p. 39). In Chapter 2, he discusses in a highly critical way a well-known case respecting human rights at the International Court of Justice: Bosnia v. Serbia. In Chapter 3, he discusses a case in the U.S. Supreme Court in which Haitian refugees tried to enforce their rights under the Refugee Convention. The case was plainly wrongly decided under international law, but it is, nevertheless, an example of a state allowing the use of its courts to bring human rights claims against itself.

These are just a few examples from Gibney's book. The International Law Reports have reported on interstate legal claims since 1919. Today the Reports run to 130 volumes. The U.S. Supreme Court handed down Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in 2006 in which a non-American successfully claimed rights under the Geneva Conventions against the United States.

There is no doubt that the world's courts can do a better job of enforcing human rights. The way to do this is not necessarily by creating a new international civil court or through changes to the core rules of international law. The next important step, as both Weiss's and Gibney's books demonstrate, is to close the knowledge gap respecting international law. Such a development would do wonders for creating the next human rights revolution: protection through peaceful means, especially courts.