Explaining and justifying humanitarian interventions is now a major focus of international relations and political science, with studies taking a variety of theoretical, policy, and normative approaches. Key questions include whether and when interventions should occur. What form should they take, military, humanitarian, or some hybrid? What are the effects on local communities, both the immediate objects of intervention and communities elsewhere facing analogous problems? What purposes do interventions serve among the intervening countries—from fulfilling moral imperatives to advancing imperial designs? Do they cause more harm than good? And why do we seemingly see more of them, or at least more talk about them, today than in the past?

These books cannot be expected to provide definitive answers. Yet each in its own way makes a contribution to important debates surrounding various forms of intervention. Tal Dingott Alkopher’s Fighting for Rights is the most expansive, applying constructivist theory to explain how varying conceptions of rights shape states’ engagement in war, whether humanitarian or otherwise. The book is ambitious in empirical scope, with chapters ranging from the Crusades to the Seven Years’ War and to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, among others treated at lesser length. Alkopher is successful in showing the usefulness of constructivist insights in interpreting these and other cases. She deftly demonstrates how in different eras, dominant conceptions of rights, which she describes with admirable clarity, have influenced war making. This occurs in three ways: Ideas about rights help “constitute” the actors, shaping their identities and actions; violations of rights evoke intense emotions, sometimes spurring combative reactions; and concepts of rights affect notions of just war, legitimating conflict in certain situations.

These points are well taken and suggest the gains to be made by applying constructivist theory to the study of war. However, there are also lingering questions, particularly about the extent to which these factors play an explanatory role, rather than merely adding an interesting new interpretation. In discussing Kosovo, for instance, Alkopher canvases a large number of explanations for the intervention, many of them conflicting with one another, and “does not disagree with any” (p. 120). Beyond these, she then offers her constructivist account. This suggests that contemporary human rights concepts help explain the international community’s intervention. But, of course, it was not the “international community” in the form of the United Nations that intervened, but a particular coalition of the willing in the form of NATO. In such a case, how powerful were rights concepts? More broadly, the problem with failing to challenge other explanations is that one is left wondering what led to intervention. Was it the ideational factors noted? Or was it instead underlying material factors that were then simply concealed or justified using convenient language and ideas of the day? It is no doubt correct, as Alkopher argues, that the broad social context of rights (and other ideas) played a role in the Kosovo intervention. But if this was primarily as window dressing to hide the real motivations of the actors, the rights language seems less than constitutive. On the other hand, if rights language has real power, why did similar interventions not occur in other contexts shortly before Kosovo and why have they not since then?

To her credit, the author recognizes this problem, briefly discussing Darfur as a case in which military intervention might have been expected, given claims of genocide in Darfur and the human rights context she sketched as being so important to the Kosovo intervention. Yet her explanation of why there was no military intervention—doubts about the effectiveness of action; rival security ideas focused on terrorist threats; and fears about arousing religious tensions--—suggests areas for further development of her argument. Most important, when and to what extent do rights discourses in fact have the impacts Alkopher suggests? Despite these questions, her book is a valuable contribution to the constructivist literature in international relations.

Larissa Fast tackles a different aspect of intervention in her important book, Aid in Danger. Her focus is the many perils facing humanitarian aid workers. This problem is often depicted as growing in the twenty-first century, as epitomized by the 2003 bombing of the UN’s headquarters in Baghdad that killed the UN’s Sergio Vieira de Mello and many others. Fast posits that these dangers do not stem only from the obvious “external” threats faced by humanitarians. After all, they engage with combatants, they work in conflict zones, and they are easily perceived as political in such troubled contexts. In a more novel argument, she shows that various “internal” factors contribute as well. Bureaucratized aid agencies may not screen local employees sufficiently or may act in ways that treat them unfairly. Foreign aid workers may act thoughtlessly or recklessly in cultural contexts they do not understand. More generally, resentments may build when privileged, transient outsiders are dispatched to help beleaguered but sometimes reluctant residents. All of these factors contribute to the daily dangers faced by aid workers, but they are seldom recognized in the media or academic accounts. Nonetheless, they have long taken a substantial toll in humanitarians’ lives, albeit one usually measured in individual tragedies rather than large-scale massacres.

Fast’s own “relational” approach to violence against aid workers combines both external and internal factors, although rightly focusing on the understudied and common internal ones. From this perspective, Fast makes several important points. First, she resets the historical context, showing that the perception that aid has recently become riskier is unproven. There is little data to show this, and there are numerous historical incidents revealing that humanitarianism has always, unsurprisingly, been risky. Second, she makes a number of useful practical suggestions for aid agencies. For one thing, she questions the “fortification” mentality that has overtaken aid operations, particularly since their association with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. From the perspective of aid agencies and the UN, providing heavy security is an obvious way to save their aid workers’ lives. Fast, however, notes problems with this approach—most importantly the distancing of aid workers from local recipients, potentially exacerbating the internal sources of misunderstanding and violence. Once the highly political decision to intervene in these kinds of situations has been made, however, one wonders whether aid agencies have any choice but to protect their workers. In less conflictual situations, such as aid after natural disasters, the author’s preferred policies make sense. In war situations, however, the key question would seem to be the prior one: Should aid agencies intervene at all, even with ostensible neutrality? Is it in fact possible for humanitarians to be “neutral” in the aftermath of an unprovoked war, such as in Iraq?

Finally, Fast urges that aid groups return to a forgotten principle that motivated early humanitarians. Those like Henri Dunant, founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were motivated by more than impartiality, neutrality, and independence—basic tenets of many contemporary humanitarian groups. In addition, Dunant and others were sparked by the idea of “humanity,” compassionate concern for the dignity of others. For Fast, greater attention to this principle might make it possible to reduce both external and internal factors endangering workers and undermining aid to the vulnerable. This is a wonderful idea, but rather vague. More useful are the practical steps she proposes and the relational matrix she provides for aid agencies to carry out her ideas.

Joshua James Kassner’s Rwanda and the Moral Obligation of Humanitarian Intervention also appears to place its faith in humanity. This is primarily a book of political theory but one that ultimately argues for an “aspirational but attainable” (p. 10) move away from current views of sovereignty and the UN Charter. Although motivated by the international community’s signal failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, the author’s ethical argument for a duty to intervene would extend to all regions in a revamped international system. This ambitious project rests on a carefully delineated argument. At its base is the claim that there are certain circumstances, involving widespread and major human rights violations, under which no one could reasonably deny that there is an obligation on states to use force against the perpetrator. Kassner lays out seven such conditions and claims that they were fulfilled in the Rwanda case. Viewed in retrospect, this may well have been the case. But it is fair to wonder whether even statesmen who subscribed to such a presumed duty, yet were acting in real time in 1994, would have agreed that intervention would have posed no threat to international peace and security or that an intervention would not have sparked retaliation, spillover, and potentially greater loss of innocent life.

Certainly, these kinds of questions swirl around similar cases today, such as human rights violations in Syria and Iraq, despite substantial international support for the “responsibility to protect” principle. The Libyan intervention, too, justified in the name of responsibility to protect but quickly spiraling beyond it—and as Alan J. Kuperman has shown, (“A Model Humanitarian Intervention? Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign,” International Security 38 [Summer 2013]: 105–36) sparking greater violence in Libya and neighboring countries—raises profound questions about the ability of statesmen to foresee consequences. More worryingly, it also raises major concerns about their good faith in doing so.

None of this means that Kassner’s work is purposeless. As an exercise in philosophical thinking about international morality, his book is impressive. Moreover, it includes a searching and novel critique of a major rival to his approach, and one that, though still aspirational, is far closer to being implemented and accepted, namely, the aforementioned responsibility to protect. For Kassner, this doctrine is the most progressive we have, but its institutionalization fails to provide a “settled starting point” for deliberation about interventions (p. 178). In its stead, he argues that the current norm of nonintervention should be converted into a rebuttable presumption against intervention. Tasked with determining whether that presumption falls would be an institutional structure built on the principle of subsidiarity, with subregional and regional institutions playing primary roles because of their better knowledge of local conditions, and international institutions playing secondary if still powerful ones. Once an intervention was agreed to, the various executive functions involved in carrying it out would be divided among competent authorities, including the previously mentioned political institutions, militaries, and nongovernmental organizations.

As a blueprint for a new, more ethical approach to intervention, this design is well considered. It might even be able to influence far-thinking policymakers willing to consider radical change to the international system. The question remains, however, whether in the real world, acting in real time, knowing the effects of other interventions, and under pressures of domestic and international politics, statesmen would fulfill any duty that they have taken on. Notably, the Genocide Convention, already imposes a duty to intervene in the worst cases. Yet in numerous cases since the Convention’s signing, cries of genocide, even legitimate ones such as in Rwanda, have gone unanswered.

To summarize, all three books assume that interventions are generally a good thing, even if in their actual implementation (or not, in the case of Rwanda), they may sometimes have problematic effects. Left unanswered are questions of whether this is the case—whether external humanitarianism in fact holds the answer to internal conflict, and if so where and when. These questions are pressing in the context of certain interventions that have arguably made matters within countries worse. Consider, too, that particular military interventions can provide incentives to local activists elsewhere to turn to violence, as the Syrian rebellion following the Libyan intervention seems to suggest. The questions are also important even in situations of economic underdevelopment, where it is less than clear that humanitarian assistance and broader development aid is effective. Assuming that there are situations where interventions make sense, however—and it is doubtless the case that there are some, as Kassner suggests—these books offer important insights into why, how, and on what basis interventions might occur.