It’s an ironic twist that terms such as international law and the laws of war have found a new lease on life through their constant violation in the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the human fallout from the so-called “war on terror.” B.C. law professor Michael Byers attempts to use such events, including torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and the lengthy detention without charge of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay, as a framework for his exploration of the actual treaties and covenants by which nations are supposed to govern themselves.

A believer in what he calls these “imperfect” but necessary legal institutions, Byers shows how these laws are often relegated to a political, rather than judicial, interpretation, and are disrespected by the degree to which potential perpetrators hold and maintain global power. Along the way, Byers introduces concepts that have been the focus of much discussion in places like Kosovo and Rwanda: war crimes tribunals, the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention,” and the Canadian-inspired “Responsibility to Protect,” an ill-defined window dressing for military intervention that Byers does a great deal to discredit.

Byers wants his work to be accessible to the lay reader, and to a large degree he has made some fairly weighty concepts understandable, almost to a fault. The book is structured much like an introductory course outline, and some of its chapters read like raw notes for an incomplete essay. Perhaps fearing that he will lose his readers, Byers misses numerous opportunities to expand upon important statements, letting potential historical examples of international law violations languish in his text without proper highlighting and explanation.

He also misses a chance to analyze the bizarre notion that war – an institution which, as a condition of victory, requires killing a lot of people – actually has a set of rules that combatants are required to follow in the gentlemanly fashion of a cricket match. And like many Canadians, he turns a blind eye to this country’s own potential violations of these very rules, preferring to focus on the obvious and easier target of the administration of George W. Bush.

The impassioned language Byers saves for the final two chapters could have been sprinkled more liberally throughout the rest of his text, as when he describes such atrocities as the use of bulldozers to bury Iraqi troops alive during the 1991 Gulf War and the illegal use of collective punishment that devastated the citizens of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004. These faults aside, it is valuable to find a real analysis of concepts such as the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive wars and the historical revisionism that has been employed to defend them.