Book Review: The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

Abstract

organizations case was regarded as an “afterthought to many at Nuremberg,” Hirsch explains, yet it proved immensely influential in shaping the infrastructure of transitional justice, and opened the door to subsequent national trials. Auguste Champetier de Ribes, the French chief prosecutor, argued that “declarations of organizational guilt were essential for the work of postwar peace. . .for they would remind the world that there is such a thing as ‘a moral law’” (365). What Hirsch’s impressive account makes abundantly clear is that the Allied prosecutors were operating under vastly different notions of both moral and criminal law. The Soviets would settle for nothing short of guilty verdicts for all defendants, while the Americans questioned the legality of some charges and hesitated to argue for collective criminality. “International law, like Europe itself, was fracturing into socialist and Western camps,” Hirsch writes (409). And the Soviets had an indelible hand in its creation. “We see how Soviet lawyers and diplomats used the language of the law both to justify domestic show trials and to usher in an international movement for human rights” (415), she argues. This landmark history documents the contested emergence of international law, and demands that contemporary discussions of the limitations and possibilities of human rights no longer overlook the Soviet role in shaping their emergence. Hirsch disabuses readers of the “Cold War myth of the uplifting Nuremberg moment” (415), underscoring how international cooperation and rivalry often go hand-in-hand, and that the rigid lines separating liberators and perpetrators may “sometimes blur” (415).