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Cooperation and Conflict

2015, Vol. 50(3) 418 –419© The Author(s) 2015

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Book review

Tal Dingott Alkopher, Fighting for Rights: From Holy Wars to Humanitarian Military Interventions,

Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, 209pp; ISBN 9781409445395.

Literature on rights is rich in historical, political and philosophical accounts of the evolu-

tion of human rights from the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century

until today. Fighting for Rights puts the understanding of rights in even longer historical

 perspective, beginning where rights thinking was not centred on human  rights but on

divine rights during the era of the crusades, followed by rights of states in secular 18th

century Europe. Tal Dingott Alkopher aims to uncover the constitutive effect of rights on

war in legitimising the use of force. Challenging realist accounts built on material power-

 based explanations, she carefully carves out a social constructivist conceptual frame-

work for studying the constitutive role of rights on war.

The main part of the book is made up of three case studies from different historical

epochs. Without denying the importance of instrumental and material motives,

Alkopher contends that the crusades of the medieval era were constituted and engen-

dered by the social structures of divine law and rights in medieval European society.

Crusader politics are enabled and explained by ideational variables related to holy war

conceptions of emperors’ and knights’ rights and duties, and to the security of Christian

society. The following case study shows how mutually exclusive and absolute con-

cepts of rights of states fostered the territorial wars of the 18th century. This was par-

ticularly so with regard to the right to use force. War was considered a natural product

of the Westphalian state system, amounting to a zero-sum game for constituting sover-

eignty and balance of power.

The third case study is on the NATO-led intervention in Kosovo in 1999, put in lightof the changing normative context surrounding the interventions of the 1990s (northern

Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia). Entering into the more recent International Relations debate on

motives behind such interventions, Alkopher explores the social and political process

through which human rights have acquired a meaning that international actors are ready

to fight for. She does not dismiss explanations related to security threats, political lead-

ers’ interests or NATO’s efforts to redefine its mission, but wishes to locate those in a

 broader enabling social and normative context. This chapter accounts well for debates on

humanitarian intervention since the 1990s, but does not in itself provide an original argu-

ment or empirical contribution. In light of the book’s long historical perspective, how-ever, the chapter uncovers the changing normative context in which such interventions

are enabled. A collective recognition of individual human rights has been added onto the

rights of states that earlier dominated international relations and law.

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Book review 419

Overall, the book makes an important empirical contribution in tracing the emergence

of the understanding that law and rights did not stem from the divine but could be pur-

 posefully produced by humans. The account is based on existing studies of how rights

and war have been understood by European intellectuals, political leaders and diplomats.

The implications of its focus on European history and elites for the theoretical contribu-tions of the book could more explicitly have been discussed by the author. In the case of

Kosovo, Alkopher acknowledges the importance of Kosovo’s European location for the

decision by international actors to use force in the face of human rights violations. By the

end, she brings up Darfur as a case that challenges her theory that human rights constitu-

tively impact state behaviour in international affairs. Here, the author does not convince

in arguing that the (weak) response that actually took place to massive human rights

violations still shows the constitutive impact of human rights. Other works have cogently

exposed the multifaceted web of motives related to interventions (or lack thereof) in

contemporary international relations (e.g. Pattison, 2012) and in a less European-centred,more critical perspective examined the use of rights for justifying force (Orford, 2008).

The edited volume Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Simms and Trim, 2013) pro-

vides an unrivalled account of responses to massive human rights violations in Europe,

Africa and Asia from the emergence of the international system of states until today.

The historical account of Fighting for Rights is at times too detailed but is enriched by

the constructivist lens employed throughout the book, uncovering the political and intel-

lectual processes through which understandings of rights continuously evolve. This is a

valuable and nuanced addition to contemporary International Relations constructivism

that sometimes equals simplistic claims that norms matter.

References

Orford A (2008)  Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in

 International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pattison J (2012)  Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: Who Should

 Intervene? Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Simms B and Trim DJB (eds) (2013)  Humanitarian Intervention: A History. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Magdalena Bexell

Department of Political Science, Lund University

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