Filled with tough criticism of Western governments’ interventionist foreign policies and challenging questions for...
Aid worker Foley takes a critical look at the changing role of humanitarianism.
Based on his online articles for The Guardian online edition, this text charges that political humanitarianism has become a multibillion-dollar industry that significantly influences foreign-policy decisions in Europe and the United States. “Political humanitarianism” is Foley’s term for the blend of the politically activist human-rights movement and traditionally neutral humanitarian organizations providing relief assistance during conflicts and natural disasters. Since the 1990s, he asserts, political humanitarianism has increasingly pushed for military intervention on the grounds that the international community has a right, even a duty, to protect people. He cites interventions in the Balkans, East Timor, Haiti and Africa as raising questions about the conflicting claims of human rights, national sovereignty and international law. There is no basis in international law, he writes, for invading a country in order to democratize it; the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be classified as humanitarian. Drawing on his experiences in numerous areas of conflict, he concludes that humanitarian goods and services are too often employed to further political and military objectives. On assignment in Kosovo, he witnessed the international administration’s failures there. More recently in Afghanistan, he observed aid being poured not into areas with the most need, but into those where it was most likely to weaken the power of warlords and buy the local population’s allegiance. He points out that the integration of humanitarian assistance and military intervention poses serious challenges to aid workers and has inevitably led to a steady increase in the number of attacks on them. Foley calls for a return to the traditional principles of humanitarian aid work—independence, impartiality and neutrality—as well as a more pragmatic approach to the issue of intervention and recognition of the limitations of humanitarian aid’s ability to address the problem of inequalities of wealth and power.
Filled with tough criticism of Western governments’ interventionist foreign policies and challenging questions for supporters of humanitarian aid.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84467-289-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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