Displacing Human Rights

Today, Western intervention is a ubiquitous feature of violent conflict in Africa. Humanitarian aid agencies, community peacebuilders, microcredit promoters, children's rights activists, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, the US military, and numerous others have involved themselves in African conflicts, all claiming to bring peace and human rights to situations where they are desperately needed. However, according to Adam Branch, Western interventionis not the solution to violence in Africa but, instead, can be a major part of the problem—often undermining human rights and even prolonging war and intensifying anti-civilian violence. Based on an extended case study of Western intervention into northern Uganda's twenty-year civil war, and drawingon Branch's own extensive research and human rights activism there, Displacing Human Rights lays bare the reductive understandings motivating Western intervention in Africa, the inadequate tools it insists on employing, its refusal to be accountable to African citizenries, and, most important, its counterproductive consequences for peace, human rights, and justice. In short, Branch demonstrates how Western interventions undermine the efforts Africans themselves are undertaking to endviolence in their own communities. Displacing Human Rights does not end with critique, however. Motivated by a commitment to global justice, it proposes concrete changes for Western humanitarian, peacebuilding, and justice interventions as well as a new normative framework for re-orienting the Western approachto violent conflict in Africa around a practice of genuine solidarity.

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 Ugandaa welcome contribution, given the lack of work in the area on Uganda.

Adam Branch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University