Liberalism is a constitutively incomplete political perspective, whether articulated by those on the left or the right, because a philosophy that primarily concerns liberty does not address questions of power–let alone the “justice” that Chatterjee seeks to promote. Instead, it presumes that the fulsome, popular liberty of the left or the individualistic, market-oriented liberty of the right provides a sufficient basis for dealing with any political problems that arise—a presumptuous assumption at best.

In the case of Sen or Chatterjee, the liberal assumption morphs into defenses of “pluralism” or “diversity,” which assume that all groups or differences can be automatically accommodated or “balanced”—another presumptuous  assumption. Moreover, it suggests that enlarging the tent of liberalism to include greater depth will promote harmony rather than conflict. It even presumes that the universality of liberalism could persist once the number of those norms expands, even though negotiations among them would occur only via a notion of “public reasoning” articulated by Sen (and implicitly the author) that is even more utopian than Rawlsian public reasoning built from original positions.

The conundrum of liberalism is that liberals want to solve problems of injustice and inequality without doing anything about them—like challenging the privileges of corporate power or the military bias in governmental priorities. Neither Rawls, nor Sen, nor Chatterjee touches the radical sources of social injustice. They don’t because they’re liberals. The only way to approach issues of global justice is to put everything on the table and attempt as peaceably and sensibly as possible to rearrange the conventions of power so as to benefit the powerless—not because the powerless are automatically virtuous but because there is much more evidence to indicate that the powerful are not.

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Ethics & International Affairs and the Carnegie Council are proud to present a special centennial roundtable, “Reflections on International Peace,” with contributions from David C. Hendrickson, Akira Iriye, Laura Sjoberg, Nigel Young, and Andrew Hurrell.

The entire roundtable is free for a limited time only, courtesy of Cambridge University Press. To read all the articles, click here.

Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order

Liberal Leviathan is a monumental work of political science that will stand for many years as a canonical statement on a topic—U.S. foreign policy and the liberal international order—that has been, and will continue to be, on the short list of the large topics of international history and politics. The book masterfully draws on history, advances international relations theory, and illuminates foreign policy choices of the past, present, and future. It also makes important contributions to the general theory of international orders (the circumstances, forces, and processes that shape their rise and fall), and of how the liberal international order differs from previous international orders and from the orders advanced by its rivals in the course of its rise. Henceforth, no serious student of American foreign policy and of international theory will be able to proceed without engaging Ikenberry’s powerful and carefully formulated arguments.

No brief summary can adequately convey the richness and nuances of the arguments in Liberal Leviathan, but the book’s essential claim is both clear and persuasive. Across the twentieth century, and particularly after World War II, the United States pursued a foreign policy that played a central role in the creation of an international order based on rules, the consent of the governed, and capitalist economic expansion. While certainly not encompassing all the states of the global international system, this liberal international order has been immensely successful in advancing peace, prosperity, and freedom, to the great benefit of much of humankind. Ikenberry argues that the United States undertook this endeavor on the basis of its national interest, and often successfully used its power to build this order. Unlike many previous paramount states, the United States as hegemon accepted some significant restraints on its own actions through international institutions, and in doing so it advanced not only the interests of others but also its own. Ikenberry’s lines of argument are particularly valuable because they dispel the widely repeated claims of “realists” about the intractable constraints of anarchic international systems, the dim prospects for interstate cooperation, and the irrelevance of domestic political forms.

A signal feature of Ikenberry’s masterly argument is its in-depth exploration of the ways in which this order has evolved as it dealt with crises, challenges, and changing circumstances. While Ikenberry’s account gives due weight to the impressive accomplishments of this order, it is not triumphalist in either tone or substance. It is clear that the liberal order–building project is incomplete, and that it has been subject to many disappointments. It is continuously challenged, both by new and unexpected developments, and by numerous critics and opponents. What emerges is not a picture of either the liberal order’s continual rise or of a spectacularly successful founding followed by slow decline, but rather one of a more complex pattern—of starts and stops, of experiments and adjustments, and of progress in some areas accompanied by reversals and impasses in others.

Ikenberry’s analysis is particularly valuable and innovative in that it grapples directly with the post-9/11 unilateral policies of the George W. Bush administration, which loom so large in perceptions that liberal internationalism is either dead, a sham, or even a menace to liberal values and the liberal order. He details the ways in which the Bush-Cheney administration openly challenged, even disparaged, rule-based approaches to solving international problems. But this turn, Ikenberry argues convincingly, ended in rather spectacular failure, and the United States has returned during the Obama years to a more moderate foreign policy and new global order–building initiatives.

This book is not, however, entirely a retrospective on the recent past. Ikenberry spends considerable effort looking ahead at the emerging world in which power is no longer so concentrated in American hands, and in which rising states, most notably China, are likely to play a more important role. He argues that the preservation and even expansion of the liberal rule–based international order is in the interest of rising states. He points out that the liberal order is likely to endure despite American relative decline because this order is so easy and beneficial to join, and because it is so large as to be very difficult to challenge or overthrow. If the United States is willing to accommodate emerging powers’ interests and expand their roles and “voices” in decision-making about international rules, then the liberal international order is likely to remain the valued means by which states address the many global problems they face in common.

A book of this scope and insight is also valuable for the many additional important questions that its arguments evoke. Will the liberal international order expand, persist, or decline? Ikenberry convincingly shows that the success of liberal order–building has always rested in large measure on its ability to contribute to solving some of the most important problems that many states and peoples face. Its future prospects are also likely to hinge on its ability to innovate in solving important problems, four of which appear to be particularly important, and potentially challenging.

One set of questions concerns Marxism. Would the American order have been so successful had it not been challenged by a militant global ideological alternative that made economic elites willing to make concessions and support policies that were aimed at solving many of the problems and grievances that Marxists claimed to be able to address? Are the rising inequalities plaguing democracies, including the United States, likely to be solved without some functional equivalent of the international proletarian movement? Or can the democracies, now largely freed of the need to combat a full-spectrum systemic challenger, move directly and effectively to realize the goals set forth in liberal democratic ideology?

A second set of questions concerns the environment, a topic that receives limited treatment in Liberal Leviathan. Although the liberal world order has built many regimes for the regulation of environmental destruction, the net effect of these efforts has fallen short of a full solution, and the recent record in addressing the paramount environmental challenge, climate change, has been particularly dismal. Economic growth has been one of the greatest successes of the American world order across the second half of the twentieth century, and it is unlikely liberal democracy would be as widely appealing, or as effective in generating power resources, without being connected to the productivity and growth of capitalist economic arrangements. Does the problem of environmental sustainability call into question the capitalist system of industrialism? Or do liberal democratic capitalist polities have the tools and approaches to lighten the human ecological footprint without diminishing wealth and human well-being? Unless the latter question can be answered affirmatively, the spectacular capitalist economic boom of the “advanced industrial democracies” in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is likely to be followed by a comparably spectacular ecological bust in the twenty-first century.

A third set of questions concerns the legacies of European and Western imperialism. The liberal international order analyzed so effectively in Liberal Leviathan is in some ways a global order, as virtually every country is a member of some of its flagship organizations and regimes, most notably the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. But in other ways this order is essentially regional, mainly concentrated in Europe, North America, and islands scattered across the globe. For much of the rest of humankind, in South America, Africa, and Asia, the rise of the United States and the growth of its international liberal order have been less positive, or at least they are widely perceived to be so. In large parts of the world it is the long and deep imperialism and colonialism of “the West” and its legacies of poverty and political weakness that loom largest. Can these legacies be overcome through development? Or are the states of the postcolonial world likely to remain or become essentially passive (at best) or hostile (at worst) to international order-building along liberal lines?

Finally, what of the United States itself? With its power in relative decline, facing a host of difficult domestic problems, and with a changing demographic, America is evolving in ways that call into question both its ability and its willingness to lead and bear the costs to expand, or even sustain, the project of liberal international order-building. Ikenberry’s account reminds us that liberal internationalism has never been all of American foreign policy, and that it has been vigorously contested even during its periods of greatest influence. He also reminds us that the liberal internationalist program owes much of its domestic political success to its ability to evolve and innovate. The rising chorus of voices from both the Left and Right against the American state and its extended international activities points to the growing difficulties for American liberal order-building.

—DANIEL DEUDNEY

Daniel Deudney is a professor of international relations and political theory at Johns Hopkins University and author, most recently, of Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007).

Judging State-Sponsored Violence, Imagining Political Change

As states emerge from periods of authoritarianism or civil war they are faced with the daunting task of engaging past political violence. Challenged by competing domestic demands and international pressures, and often hindered by limited resources and the sheer scope of past wrongdoing, states have a range of options at their disposal to engage in the transitional justice process. In her latest book, Bronwyn Leebaw argues that two competing frameworks have come to dominate the field of transitional justice. The first, “human rights legalism,” stems from the Nuremberg Trials and stresses the promotion of law, trials, and individual criminal responsibility in the aftermath of atrocity. The second, which she terms “therapeutic restorative justice,” has its origins in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) implemented by South Africa following the end of Apartheid, and focuses on repairing society and healing the wounds of the past.

Leebaw is highly critical of these competing approaches, and she is convinced that their emergence as the two dominant paradigms undermines the ability of states to effectively address past political violence. Most problematic for Leebaw is the process of depoliticization inherent in both frameworks, in which violence is stripped from its larger historical and political context. Criminal justice, in particular, is predicated on the notion of laws being applied objectively to past crimes. Moreover, both approaches reinforce the notion of a clear victim-perpetrator divide that ignores many important gray areas of complicity and resistance inherent in political violence.

Simply put, transitional justice processes are too often “framed as apolitical responses to the deeds and experiences of individual victims and perpetrators” (p. 92). In making this argument, Leebaw is careful to note that dealing with impunity and trauma are vital tasks and that we should not discard legalism and restorative justice. Rather, it is the way in which these two frameworks have been employed that is problematic, and a new approach is needed.

Consequently, to remedy these deficiencies Leebaw advocates conceptualizing transitional justice as a process of “political judgment.” Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, she argues that political judgment involves “action and deliberation” as well as “critical distance and detached reflection” (p. 29). In short, societies must examine their pasts from multiple perspectives and engage in active dialogue and persuasion to achieve new common ground. Taking this political judgment approach, Leebaw argues, will allow us to see the varying degrees of complicity in political violence, better reveal larger social issues that need to be addressed, and highlight the importance of resistance.

In making her argument, Leebaw critically engages a wide range of important transitional justice theorists beyond Arendt, including Judith Shklar and Desmond Tutu. The argument is empirically supported through close examinations of the Nuremberg Trials and the South African TRC, and also through briefer explorations of other important transitional justice cases, such as Rwanda and Argentina.

Readers will find the overall argument of the book compelling. The detailed discussion of the evolution of the two dominant competing frameworks is highly valuable, and few would disagree with the many limitations and internal contradictions that Leebaw adroitly points out. The incorporation of political judgment is a welcome addition to the debates, and others will surely draw on this new framework going forward. In addition, one chapter is devoted entirely to remembering different types of resistance, an issue that is largely absent from existing transitional justice discussions. Leebaw brings valuable new focus to issues surrounding resistance and offers advice on how truth commissions might investigate this important theme in the future.

For all of this, however, the book is not as groundbreaking as it aspires to be, largely because the transitional justice field is broader and further evolved than Leebaw gives it credit. First, while the two dominant frameworks do play a central role in how transitional justice responses are shaped around the world, scholars and practitioners are increasingly moving beyond the application of frameworks focused solely on justice or truth. There is widespread acceptance that a holistic approach—one that addresses the numerous complexities of past political violence through a variety of transitional justice mechanisms—is necessary for societies to move forward.

Second, the victim-perpetrator dichotomy is also not as pervasive and entrenched as Leebaw describes it. Theoretical and empirical debates on the opening up of secret police files or the institution of a vetting program, for example, have long recognized varying degrees of complicity. Similarly, debates regarding reparations programs have brought to light the potential for different degrees of victimhood. The field as a whole realizes that the victim-perpetrator divide is too stark, and that individuals can occupy both spaces simultaneously.

Third, despite her efforts to break down conventions, Leebaw reinforces, perhaps inadvertently, a state-centric approach toward transitional justice. The violence she focuses on is primarily “state-sponsored” (as the book’s title suggests), and she examines official, state-led responses to it. Yet we know that political violence extends beyond state actions, and that there is an increasing privatization of transitional justice processes. For example, I wonder how private efforts, such as a memorial built by a victims’ group, would affect the discourse and advance or hinder the creation of a common ground.

Finally, Leebaw’s political judgment approach may not be as novel as it seems at first glance. Many scholars have already shifted their focus to examining transitional justice as a process rather than as a goal, with acknowledgment of the potential for continuous revisiting of the past through the incorporation of new perspectives—a process that sounds very much like political judgment. That said, Leebaw’s latest book does provide the field with the framework for understanding and articulating this shift, as well as the theoretical underpinnings of it. For that reason, it is a valuable contribution to the study of transitional justice and will undoubtedly have an important impact on future work.

—ANDREW G. REITER

Andrew G. Reiter is an assistant professor of politics and international relations at Mount Holyoke College and is the coauthor of Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Processes, Weighing Efficacy (2010).

Sex & World Peace

This is an important, well written, and informative book that will serve a wide audience of graduate and undergraduate students, academics, and policy-makers, as well as the interested public. It is a testament to the writing and presentation of the authors’ argument that such a diverse audience will be challenged and enlightened by this work. And while there are particulars about which some will disagree, the breadth of information and analysis offered in Sex & World Peace provides ample material for spirited engagement and further learning.

The authors set forth three complementary but distinct arguments, each of which can be taken on its own merits. The first is that gender inequality, by which the authors mean the subordination of women, is a form of violence “no matter how invisible or normalized” it may be (p. 5). (The authors define gender as “socially defined differences between men and women” and inequality as an “aspect of violence based on . . . relative power . . . in society [p. 6]. Gender inequality, then, is the subordination of those who are different and lacking in power and status—in other words, women.) Second, security studies as both a discipline and a practice must account for women’s security in its identification and evaluation of independent variables. Third, what is learned from this book should be taken as a call to action and a call for positive changes in policy and practice.

The overarching premise of the book is that “we can no longer speaking, in the same breath, about the security of women” (p. 208). Further, the authors argue, the security of women is violated through gender inequality, which is itself buttressed by and constitutive of three specific forms of “micro-aggression” against women (p. 17). These are: “(1) lack of bodily integrity and physical security, (2) lack of equity in family law, and (3) lack of parity in the councils of human decision-making” (p. 19).

These claims, certainly, are not without centuries of precedent, as feminist scholars and activists have long pointed out. As Simone de Beauvoir, observed regarding relations between the sexes, “All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception” (The Second Sex, 1949, p. 717). The Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams devoted a book to the configuration of women and war, speculating that the difficulties in providing food for one’s family during times of war (“the labor for bread”) was crucial to understanding the costs of war, and specifically the costs to women (Peace and Bread in Time of War, 1922, p. 77). And, of course, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) took up the absence of women in the councils of politics, the persistence of patriarchy, and the complex interdependence of patriarchy and the promulgation of war.

And yet this great history of debate and storehouse of feminist scholarship and literature has still to become commonplace knowledge, much less a richly used resource, by those seeking to create greater global security, if not world peace. And, as the authors phrase it, it has not yet become “imperative” to understand the relationship between national/international security and the security of women, but it must (p. 101).

The authors venture that one of the reasons this relationship is continually overlooked or marginalized is the lack of an “acceptable conventional empirical warrant” proving it exists (p. 101). That is, that scholarship on the relationship of national/ international security and women has tended to be more narrative, qualitative, and empirical rather than conforming to “standard statistical hypothesis testing” (p. 100). Consequently, Sex & World Peace synthesizes an impressive array of studies, including the authors’ own research on the subject. The pattern revealed is that the higher the social, political, and economic inequality between men and women within a state, the more likely force and violence will be used to settle disputes within that state, and the higher the likelihood that that state would engage in international conflict.

Most significantly, Sex & World Peace further amplifies and corroborates the results of other studies on the topic. The authors have created their own dataset through a review of “the extant literature and . . . expert interviews to find qualitative and quantitative information on over 310 indicators of women’s status in 174 countries” (see womanstats.org/). As any scholar who has attempted to ascertain robust data on the status of women can attest, there are enormous gaps in the conception and collection of such data. Consequently, this prodigious dataset possesses immeasurable value for scholars and policy-makers.

Hudson, Ballif-Spanvill, Caprioli, and Emmett caution that the research drawn from their dataset continues to be exploratory, as the data is fresh and there are obvious limitations to proving causality (assuming that proving the existence of causal relationships is even the goal of such research). Instead, the authors argue that their research is generally oriented toward “assessing the significance of association in the context of . . . dominance hierarchies rooted in evolutionary human male reproductive strategies . . . which . . . create templates of violence that diffuse through society widely, affecting even state behavior in relation to external and internal entities” (p. 109).

Here is where the authors’ argument is weakest (although it is not necessarily needed to support the rest of their work), for while evolutionary male reproductive strategies may indeed be of note, identifying them as the causal factor, “the origins of a global predicament” or “how it happened,” in creating gender inequality is less convincing (p. 68). After all, their role and influence is difficult to measure, while the claim to universal and epochal significance is still yet more difficult to accept, considering the change in environmental and genetic interaction over a period of centuries (the authors’ are not clear as to how far back the process begins). Further, the importance of differences, differentiation, and multiplicity in cultures, experiences, environments, individual traits, and population trait differences vis-à-vis “reproductive fitness” over generations cannot be generalized away. (For more on this, see Anne Fausto-Sterling’s 2012 article “The Dynamic Development of Gender Variability” in the Journal of Homosexuality, and Rebecca Jordan- Young’s 2011 book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences.)

Finally, there remains a fundamental vagueness or confusion as to theorizing nature and nurture in regard to “natural selection” (p. 69). As Evelyn Fox Keller so clearly outlines in The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, there are multiple “ambiguities” in the scientific literature that lead to an “incoherence” in much of the assessment of scientific concepts—for example, in the idea of heritability—but Sex & World Peace takes many of these concepts as foundational, and not contested.

These concerns aside, using an impressive set of data, and with sophisticated empirical evidence, Sex & World Peace clearly and forcefully lays out the links between women’s security and international and domestic security, thus providing a clear template for change. While the authors’ explanation of male reproductive strategies as originally causing women’s “overall insecurity and oppression” may not be as convincing, that explanation need not be so if it encourages further exploration and analysis of this important subject.

—HELEN M. KINSELLA

Helen M. Kinsella is an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Read a response by John R Wallach here.

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It was not clear to most observers between 1918 and 1930 that “the war to end all wars”—far from stopping the recourse to arms—presaged many new wars, as well as the terminal weakening of Britain and France, the start of Pax Americana (culminating in 1939–1945), and the beginning of a nuclear-armed cold war (1945–1989). Yet, in another sense, World War I, insofar as it has come to be seen as one archetype of war—an icon of the absurdity of wars of mutual attrition—has had a profound and worldwide cultural impact. The Great War and its imagery imprinted itself on the human imagination. In poetry and prose, photography, art, film, and other modes of expression, its influence on cultural memory and identity, on modern meaning and human sensibility, has been remarkable.

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