Adam Branch, in Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda, sets out to critique the various ways the international community intervenes in, and otherwise affects, domestic conflict situations with the avowed goal of protecting human rights. Through the lens of the conflict in Northern Uganda, we see how such human rights interventions are instrumentalized and may end up having an opposite effect to the one intended. While there is other literature looking at the negative/unintended consequences of international human rights action, what Branch brings to the table is a breadth of analysis while simultaneously focusing on Uganda—a welcome contribution, given the lack of work in the area on Uganda (as opposed to, for example, Rwanda or Darfur).

Branch begins by noting that despite the vast amount of resources and effort poured into northern Uganda, little has changed. He partially situates this observation within an analysis of the “official discourse” of the conflict—and indeed almost any conflict in Africa. There are the evildoers—in this case the Lord’s Resistance Army—the victims—in particular the innocent children—and the saviors—the West. Africa is seen as one vast teeming population of suffering humanity, and as a result there is little room for imagining agency on the part of Africans from the perspective of the West, which then justifies the broad array of humanitarian actions taken in Uganda—and elsewhere—and which can also entrench the suffering the intervention is supposed to address.

These interventions take two forms. The first, which Branch calls humanitarian rights intervention, is centered on the idea of rescue—violating sovereignty to protect human rights. After its failure in Somalia and Rwanda, the international community quickly moved onto the second type of response—total intervention. Such intervention goes beyond just protecting people in the midst of crisis and is characterized as “regular, consensual interventions that sought peace by reconstructing or reforming social, political, and legal order.” It thus delves deep into every aspect of African life and undermines democratic accountability even as it promotes empowerment. Branch develops an analytical framework in which to analyze the political consequences of such interventions which rests on two main dimensions—instrumentalization, and administration and discipline. Branch points out that a number of different actors can attempt to instrumentalize human rights interventions for many reasons, such as gaining access to resources, justify and support counter-insurgency activities, and facilitate a variety of political projects. Aid agencies may also instrumentalize interventions for their own interests. The administrative function “normalizes states, economies, cultures, societies, and individuals in line with given models.” This “anti-democratic, morally justified technocratic administration” intrudes on all aspects of society, makes life and death decisions, and tries to remake societies according to western democratic human rights models, but which ends up undermining human rights and democratic accountability as states and populations are “disciplined” to conform to a particular external ideal or agenda.

Branch provides a critical account of the violence in Acholiland, critiquing the role of the Ugandan state—which is enabled and supported by the interventions—and examining the construction of ethnicity which is frequently assumed to be a given, but which has been manipulated, reified, and used to justify mass internment. This account looks at the development and role of the LRA which has been used by both the Ugandan government and outside powers to justify internal repression and external “discipline.”

The book then turns to a variety of elements of instrumentalization and discipline. First, Branch discusses the negative role humanitarians played in supporting Ugandan mass internment. The government took advantage of the rise of the LRA to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of people, putting them in camps. This was ostensibly to protect civilians from the LRA, although the camps did a poor job of providing protection and the displaced lived in poor conditions, cut off from their homes and livelihoods, and in reality the displacement had as much to do with controlling the Acholi population. When the humanitarian organizations saw the squalid conditions people were living in, they jumped right in with significant humanitarian resources, thus supporting and enabling the government’s internment policy and counterinsurgency strategy. There thus came to be a situation of mutual dependence between the government and aid agencies. The government needed the aid to keep the camps going—and provide moral legitimation—and the aid agencies needed state violence to implement their programs.

Beyond humanitarian aid, external peacebuilding activities came in force. The World Bank engaged in both state-building and peacebuilding activities, the former ultimately supporting the government’s brutal counterinsurgency activities, while the latter depoliticized community development through its management techniques. NGOs, too, tried to depoliticize community activity, leading to self-pacification of communities and undermining agency. Much of this work focused on child soldiers, who were portrayed as helpless victims needing to be rehabilitated, even though they frequently exhibited significant, complex agency. Women’s rights was another theme of the peacebuilding agenda, even though the external interveners failed to adequately appreciate the many dimensions and understandings of women’s right in Uganda.

Branch moves on to discuss the role of debates over justice in general, and the International Criminal Court, in particular, noting how the savage-victim-savior structure created a particular narrative which further empowered the government. The government wanted to bring in the ICC to provide it with moral legitimacy for its war in Northern Uganda, while the ICC was eager to start investigating cases. The ICC failed to investigate government crimes, focusing solely on the LRA, thus providing the government with impunity while legitimizing the government’s counterinsurgency violence. The government had previously put into place an amnesty which was designed to induce members of the LRA to lay down their arms and be reintegrated into society. The introduction of the ICC thus sparked a significant, if simplistic, debate over peace vs. justice, which was exacerbated when the ICC demanded that the amnesty law be amended to exclude the top LRA leaders.

Finally, Branch looks at the US military role, and in particular the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), which became operational in 2008. According to President Bush, AFRICOM would bring peace and security to Africa by promoting the “goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth.” Thus, a military organization was staking a claim to all the various elements of total intervention. These liberal ideals legitimized the multiple agendas which AFRICOM was intended pursue, namely the war on terror, maintaining access to resources, and dealing with weak states and ungoverned spaces more generally. Thus human security justifies the militarization of US policy in Africa. This is further justified by human rights actors who call for a militarized response to the LRA, in particular Invisible Children which is focused on rescuing children abducted by the LRA (and which most recently called for military intervention to bring Joseph Kony to justice in the highly simplistic Kony 2012 campaign). There are a now a few hundred US “advisors” participating in the hunt for Joseph Kony, legitimized by human rights and liberal ideals who have completely forgotten the role of the CIA in the region (and in particular in the Congo). And US aid directly supports the Ugandan state in its counterinsurgency (and indeed countercivilian) activities.

Branch ends the book by calling for popular sovereignty to be at the heart of Western policy toward Africa, and for the west to disintervene in Africa, that is to recognize its “moral duty to stop what we are doing now and try to promote a more just global political order, one that values democracy and autonomy.” This is all well and good, and one would heartily the call for more autonomy for Africa, for the democratization of the African Union, a prerequisite for more effective African action, and for “solidarity” between the west and Africa. Certainly there is a lot to be critical about when assessing outside intervention in Africa, and one wishes western approaches were more solidaristic and supportive of the people of Africa rather than of frequently authoritarian states. Yet, this last section is low on specifics about how we get there. This is perhaps not surprising given that we political scientists are much better at providing extended critique than we are of identifying practical, concrete, feasible solutions to address our critique. And this should not get in the way of the fact that Adam Branch has written an excellent book which should make us think harder about how human rights serves not only to support the protection of rights but can also legitimize action which undermines those rights.