Abstract
Alex Bellamy is an international relations scholar who has the happy knack of turning to gold whatever he sets his hand to, whether it is an English School treatment of international society or an advocate’s letter of support for the Responsibility to Protect. With this monograph, Bellamy is treading terrain that he obviously cares a great deal about: the quest to ensure that civilians are spared the scourge of mass atrocities. Analytically astute, empirically robust, and pleasingly ambitious, Massacres and Morality presents a sobering review of the gap between principles and practice in international politics as it bears on the norm of civilian immunity. This is essential reading for any scholar who is interested in the normative architecture of international society and the long struggle to institutionalize the widely held view that, whether in peacetime or war, civilians should be protected from arbitrary killing.
The point of departure for this book is the observation that civilian immunity is respected more in word than in deed. Connoting the principle that it is wrong to intentionally kill civilians, this Grundnorm is reflected in several ethical traditions, from just war to jihad. However, rather than pursuing its cultural roots, Bellamy details its codification and formalization in the rules of international society. He charts how, since the French Revolution, a complex skein of institutions and laws that proscribe the intentional killing of civilians and legislate for the prosecution of perpetrators has emerged and been consolidated. Yet, despite these developments, data suggest that the intentional killing of civilians remains a depressingly ‘persistent feature of global political life’ (p. 1). To make matters worse, a culture of impunity all too often protects the killers from ever having to atone for the wrongs they have committed. Bellamy sets himself the task in this book of grappling with how it can be that the norm prohibiting the intentional killing of civilians commands near universal assent while also being subject to recurrent (and often unpunished) transgression.
This demands that we consider the possibility that international society does not disavow mass violations of civilian immunity as fervently as it professes. Is it possible that the norm of civilian immunity is less powerful than we think, such that transgressions are not, all things being equal, necessarily deemed worthy of censure? Bellamy discounts this hypothesis. He contends that the norm that prohibits the intentional killing of civilians is genuinely strongly held, but adds that the reputation of the perpetrator and assorted contextual factors will condition whether and how international society responds to such acts. He devotes chapter 1 to devising a framework that captures these dynamics. From this platform Bellamy argues that actors may evade punishment for an act – even where that act is widely judged to be a violation of a fundamental norm such as civilian immunity – if certain circumstantial factors are in their favour and they can ‘succeed in preventing the illegitimacy of their behaviour (behaviour-legitimacy) from being translated into illegitimacy as actors (actor-legitimacy) among important audiences’ (pp. 28–9). In such cases actors are likely to escape unpunished, even unchecked, for violations of civilian immunity. This suggests that, dependent as it is upon the congruence of contextual factors for purchase, the norm of civilian immunity is flakier than one might otherwise have thought.
The remainder of the book, chapters 2 to 8, tests this proposition against a sweep of cases bookended by Revolutionary France’s Great Terror to the War on Terror. These largely historical chapters are neatly organized and rich in content, and they propel Bellamy’s normative inquiry forward in a lively, engaging manner. However, it is the breadth of the research that is most striking. Where massacres are concerned the author leaves no stone unturned, is careful to demonstrate how his argument relates to each case, and candidly acknowledges that the intentional killing of civilians is not confined to rogue states, but has been committed by all five permanent members of the Security Council.
In general terms I am persuaded by Bellamy’s argument that while the norm of civilian immunity is widely affirmed, its enforcement by international society is dependent to a large degree upon the contextual factors attending a massacre. I am, however, curious about the role that timing might play in the matter of how and when international society reacts to mass violations of civilian immunity. One can conjecture that it was a factor in, say, the static response to the Armenian genocide of 1915, or international society’s failure to arrest the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which arrived hot on the heels of the Somali debacle. Bellamy subsumes timing under the bracket of strategic considerations and trends. I wonder, however, if it deserves more prominence, or if there is more to be said about how the timing of a massacre informs the character of the response it provokes from international society.
Minor queries aside, this is a serious book on a hugely important topic. It sits comfortably alongside and indeed advances the work of scholars such as Nicholas Wheeler, Neta Crawford, and Alexander Downes. It deserves, nay needs, to be widely read.