Reviews for Basic Documents in International Law

The average rating for Basic Documents in International Law based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-10 00:00:00 Cody Pata Want to know the difference between this book if it were written by an historian and this book as it's written by a sociologist? Numbers. An historian would come up with the idea, write the book, and then congratulate himself for a job well done. The sociologist collects tons of numbers to back up their theory, and only then pats themselves on the back. Dr. Ann Hironaka is definitely a sociologist. General consensus says ethnic strife is the cause of these long, vicious wars, and that's what I'd have said too. Dr. Hironaka makes the case that the International Community is more at fault than we realize. Her theory on why post-1945 civil wars last so much longer than they once did rests on four ideas that make sense. 1. The Great Powers made it a habit to agree on a side and then intervene on that side's behalf during a civil war. No Great Powers means no one sided intervention, which means no quick end to conflict. 2. Up until 1945, colonialism meant that nations were subject to a kind of natural selection. Weak states collapsed,strong states absorbed them. Or the weak state was a colony, and so its inherent weakness was hidden. 3. The Cold War took small, brush fire civil wars, and made the conflicts ideological, democracy versus communism, with no grey area. These wars lasted much longer than one would expect, yet petered out once the U.S.S.R. collapsed and communism fell out of favor as a viable ideology. 4. Every country has unhappy ethnic groups. In strong countries, the groups protest and vote to attempt change. In weak countries, with little to no recourse to alternatives, and governments and procedures that are corrupt, war breaks out. Often these wars are the government on one side, and disparate groups fighting "together" on the other. Even if the government wants to settle, it's often impossible make all these different groups happy. Even if the rebels win, the groups will often begin fighting among each other. The combatants may be different, but the war never really stopped. The point of all of this is that the International Community as a whole bears responsibility for the length of a lot of these wars, mainly by refusing to recognize secessionist governments and by pouring money and aid into governments to weak to prop themselves up. Without this flow of money and arms, the wars would quickly play themselves out. Overall a good view at a novel way to look at war in the Third World and why ethnicity probably plays a much smaller role than we think.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-16 00:00:00 Rodney Newkirk This book tries to explain why civil wars have become protracted. Hironaka argues that it is not that there are more wars starting, but that there are fewer ending. She puts this down to changes in the international system which have continued to support the borders of weak states that are unable to evolve into strong states in the Tillian sense. Seems to be simply a combination of Fearon and Zacher's earlier articles, with a statistical test to demonstrate it.