Book review: War as Protection and Punishment: Armed International Intervention at the ‘End of History’ by Teresa Degenhardt

Teresa Degenhardt's War as Protection and Punishment offers a crucial lens for understanding and critiquing how penal discourses animate the justification and operation of contemporary warfare. Examining three post-Cold War military interventions – in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya – Degenhardt demonstrates that war, especially when waged to rescue victims of mass atrocities, embodies an unquestioned desire to punish and control the behaviour of perceived criminal groups within the international sphere. These insights remain strikingly relevant today, as political leaders and media outlets continue to justify military action – for example, Israel's campaign in Gaza or Russia's aggression against Ukraine – not only through the language of international law (e.g. self-defence) but also through the language of retribution. These punitive discourses, often invoking the necessity of collective punishment, reveal not only the violent intentions of those who articulate them but also how the emotional drive to punish wrongdoings is enacted through military intervention.