Review: Freedom's Battle
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| Author | Daniel Sargent |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200906400218 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| International Journal | Spring 2009 | 589 |
| Reviews |
Occupational Hazards
is an important contribution that appli es time-
honoured realist concepts to a timely and practically important subject.
Though scholars and policymakers may disagree with Edelstein’s theoretical
approach and empirical scope, all should refer to this book as an important
marker in the evolution of our thinking about the dynamics of military
occupations.
Alexander Cooley/Barnard College, Columbia University
FREEDOM’S BATTLE
The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention
Gary Bass
New York: Knopf, 2008. 528pp, US $35.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0307266484)
The calls to action are familiar. The foreign correspondent’s account of bodies
pulped and corpses dismembered. The howls of the victims in the
recollections of one or two survivors. The plunder of cities and the inevitable
epidemic of rape.
The pathology of mass violence recurred too frequently in the 20th
century. Armenia, Nanking, Auschwitz, Biafra, Bangladesh, Rwanda,
Sarajevo. The list is partial, but it conjures that century’s special horrors. But
what did such nightmares mean for those who observed from afar? What did
they owe to victims of whom they, in the infamous phrase of British prime
minister Neville Chamberlain, “knew nothing” (19)?
Such ethical dilemmas were not original to the 20th century. They can,
as Gary Bass argues in his impressive new book, be traced back to at least
the 1820s. In a landmark account of the early politics of humanitarian
intervention, Bass broadens our historical horizons to encompass atrocities
that other authors have overlooked. Scio, Damascus, Batak. These wer e
among the 19th century’s worst outrages. They were also the subject of fierce
discussion between aroused “atrocitarians” and conservative non-interveners
in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.
Repeatedly, Bass tells us, the 19th-century powers decided for
intervention. In his main case studies—Greece in the 1820s, Syria in the
1860s, a nd Bulgaria in the 1870s—the i nterventions were successful and
constructive. Even more striking, they proceeded with multilateral support
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