Award Committee: Gerald M. Pomper, Rutgers University, chair; Jim Johnson, University of Rochester; Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, University of Utah

Recipient: Martha Finnemore, George Washington University

Book: The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About The Use of Force (Cornell University Press)

Citation: The committee has selected, Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About The Use of Force, to receive the Woodrow Wilson Foundation award for 2003. In this book, Finnemore asks scholars to consider the implications of the changing understandings of the purposes of force that she carefully documents in three areas: use of military force to collect debts, military intervention in sovereign states for humanitarian goals, and military intervention to support international order. In the first area, she documents the key role played by legal professionals in changing elites' understandings of the use of legitimate force. Because of these changes, the illegitimacy of military force to collect from debtor states is taken for granted in the contemporary period. In the second area, Finnemore shows how changing conceptions of who is human explains changes in state intervention-from the Greek War for Independence (1821-1827) to Kosovo. Finally, she documents and analyzes the four distinctive understandings of order from the 18th century to the current system and how those distinctive beliefs enable and constrain the use of military force.

What is most impressive about the book is the Finnemore never loses sight of why the empirical evidence matters. Throughout the book she contrasts her more constructivist approach with realist and liberal approaches to IR, carefully noting when those approaches fail to explain the evidence. Her book is also a model not only of theoretical but methodological awareness. For example, she notes how her emphasis on the intertwining of perceptions of utility and legitimacy "would not have been uncovered by a purely deductive, hypothesis-testing exercise." Indeed, she began her project in that very mode but switched when it could not explain the historical puzzles she encountered in her research.

This is a book that deserves to be read by political scientists in all fields, policy makers, and the attentive public. In jargon-free, prose Finnemore uses the sweep of historical evidence to ask scholars to rethink pernicious dichotomies (e.g. the fact/value and inductive/deductive dichotomies) that have stymied research and to more deeply question taken-for-granted assumptions about the ways in which the world works. Finnemore's emphasis on the power of ideas is a welcome challenge to previous reliance on material factors and "national interest" and her conclusions on the use of force--and the limitations on its effectiveness--are highly relevant to any discussion of world affairs.