Lucia Rafanelli’s new book vigorously defends what she calls “reform intervention” as a way to pursue justice by means of political action overseas and sets out a systematic account of the theory and ethics of doing so.
Rafanelli’s normative framework for thinking about these issues is broadly a liberal one, framed by “rights.” Though she is less interested in interventions that are directed purely at welfare, she doesn't chiefly focus on defensive interventions. Rather, her main concern is with interventions that seek to realize principles of justice as opposed to interventions prompted only by atrocities or large-scale rights violations. Rafanelli’s vision is of a practice through which actors seek to discharge what Rawls called a “natural duty of justice.”
The book is organized around four main themes. First is a typology of reform interventions. The remaining three are the demands, respectively, of toleration, of political legitimacy, and of self-determination. These three are often cited as standard objections to reform intervention: that it is typically intolerant by its very nature, that it necessarily violates the rights of all but the most egregiously illegitimate states, and that it negates the political self-determination of its intended beneficiaries.
Rafanelli argues that the principle of “nonintervention” that these objections uphold is grounded in three oversimplifications. One is that “reform intervention” is defined by the radical objective of regime change. A second is that reform intervention is the bailiwick only of states. And the third is that the means of intervention are typically coercive and usually outright violent. In effect, these assumptions reflect, Rafanelli argues, an excessively narrow definition of reform intervention that makes actions corresponding to that term very hard to justify. Challenging this definition and the assumptions on which it rests enables Rafanelli to open a range of possibilities for international political action that the standard view either prohibits or obscures.
First, if reform intervention refers to efforts to achieve greater justice in a foreign state, then surely it ought to encompass not only revolutionary transformation but also changes that are smaller in scale, more localized, or more modest in scope. Second, Rafanelli argues that the range of instruments through which actors can intervene in international affairs has proliferated enormously and, with it, the avenues through which to pursue change. Third, the growing range of tools increases the number and types of actors that can pursue it. A “proliferation of global political actors and of their capacities to exert influence beyond their own societies,” she writes, “has transformed global politics” (57).
Consequently, we shouldn’t feel bound by any of the standard assumptions about reform intervention. Its ambitions needn’t be so large: smaller-scale actions might reasonably seek more modest, incremental change. Such actions might be taken by individuals, civil society organizations, NGOs, or informal groups, not just states. And the means of acting needn’t, crucially, be violent. In fact, they needn’t be coercive at all, still less, military.
Instead, ethics and political philosophy ought to be sensitive to the varieties of intervention, each of which ought to be evaluated according to the degree to which it is controlling, for instance, rather than persuasive and according to the ways it interacts with the institutions in a recipient state. Similarly, they may be compared according to whether they are designed to help secure basic rights, or nonvital interests that are nevertheless important from the perspective of liberal justice. Examples to which Rafanelli turns include NGOs like Tostan, with its program of persuasive dialogue conducted within a framework of human-rights-informed discourse, and the Palestinian led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. She also cites Latin American opposition to Arizona’s SB 1070, the USA’s conditional offer of a preferential trade agreement to Oman and the EU’s refusal to supply pharmaceuticals to the USA that are used to create lethal injections.
To respond to the objection from toleration, Rafanelli offers a theory of “toleration as engagement.” Intervention, she argues, is sometimes not only permitted by toleration; it’s even motivated by it. For instance, intervention can seek to promote toleration within the recipient state. But toleration guides action in a second way too, as a second-order standard by which to judge the form that intervention takes. The more an intervention seeks to exert control over recipients, the more likely it is to override their values and preferences. In contrast, when actors like Tostan seek to cultivate sustainable development and mutual respect by teasing out the implications of the recipients’ own values, they seek to avoid such clashes and to satisfy the demands of toleration (74).
The legitimacy objection assumes that reform intervention can only be permissible against illegitimate states. Legitimacy, it is assumed, entitles states to exclusive control of their own affairs and to good standing in international relations. Reform intervention necessarily fails to respect this. In reply, Rafanelli expands the normative space for reform intervention by distinguishing different types of intervention according both to how controlling their means are and how they operate within the target society. Interventions that avoid directly opposing the target state’s institutions don’t impugn their legitimacy. On the other side of the equation, she argues, state legitimacy is a scalar matter and states can “suffer partial losses of legitimacy even without becoming entirely illegitimate” (151). When they do, then this weakens their claims against attempts at normatively significant improvement even by more direct means.
Lying behind the third standard objection—that reform intervention negates self-determination—and often motivating it is the worry that reform intervention is necessarily colonial in effect and often in intent. But when interventions help overcome barriers to self-determination for those disadvantaged within a recipient state, Rafanelli thinks they can counteract the effects of colonialism and domination. But to avoid the self-determination objection entirely, they must also act in such a way as neither to assert renewed domination themselves nor reinforce neocolonial subordination. Whereas some of her empirical cases already satisfy these requirements, others—such as the USA’s offer to Oman—do so only incompletely. Rafanelli’s theory also offers recommendations as to how such faulty cases may be rectified (201).
Having addressed the standard objections, Rafanelli considers (Chapter 5) the challenges of implementing an ethics of reform intervention in a “highly nonideal world” (202). The upshot is an analytical framework capable of recognizing that not all reform interventions face the standard objections at all. But, even when they do, it needn’t be decisive in ruling those prospective interventions out. The ethics that Rafanelli recommends is one in which reasons for and against action are weighed carefully to establish an all-things-considered argument for any choice. So, for instance, a strategy for pursuing justice in one case might fail to satisfy the principle of toleration completely. And yet, if the means are relatively uncontroversial—avoiding coercion, for instance—and the ends are sufficiently urgent or weighty, then the intervention might be justified overall.
An interesting sidebar to the ethics of reform intervention is the relationship Rafanelli imagines it having with just war theory. Rather than treating cases of military intervention in response to more egregious injustice as being cases for just war ethics in the first instance, she makes the suggestive comment that just war theory might be called upon after it has been judged under the ethics of reform intervention that she sets out (157).
Rafanelli defends the view that “if there is a global duty of justice [as she thinks], it obligates us to actively pursue justice—including justice in other societies—as part of our everyday engagement in global politics” (244). More than this, however, it also behooves states to open themselves up to reform interventions too, particularly those whose current positions of power in the global order tends to marginalize other perspectives.
One worry about this thought is that it puts properly motivated states and their citizens in an awkward position. On one hand, the need to act on the duty of justice as they understand it surely tends to reinforce their claim to a monopoly on political decision making within their territory. They should thus position themselves to be able to challenge other actors who might not share their understanding of what justice requires. But on the other hand, Rafanelli suggests they ought to leave themselves open to some interference by external parties whose understanding of what justice requires presumably differs from theirs—otherwise why would the action need to come from the outside? Unless, of course, we are assuming that the state being asked to open itself to intervention knowingly disregards justice rather than acting on a disputed understanding of what it requires and permits. But the argument is pitched at actors that are already on board with the idea that they must do what justice requires, so that doesn’t seem like the appropriate assumption to make. The resulting tension between a duty to act and a duty to be receptive to the actions of others is likely to be particularly acute in an era when informal interventions by foreign states have become so sophisticated and pervasive.
All told, this book offers an original and provocative argument and provides readers with a wide-ranging and sophisticated analytical framework for thinking critically about the ethics of pursuing justice beyond borders. It is an invaluable contribution to the literature on ethics and international affairs that should be widely read by both political theorists and those engaged in empirical research in the field.
