The Humanitarian Conscience
Caring for Others in the Age of Terror
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Humanitarian action, long dismissed as a realm apart from major foreign policy concerns, has become an omnipresent element in international affairs. It now shapes the world in which we live and it will have increasingly imporant impact on the way decisions are made in international crises. W.R. Smyser looks at the history of humanitarian activity and it's growth since the horrors of WWII were made public, tracing its early stages connected to the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the present day when human rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch, are as influential as modern nation states in influencing the course of internation events. This is a monumental portrait of the way in which individuals who are not officially part of any government work to alleviate human suffering and physical destruction around the world.
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A former senior official in U.S. and U.N. refugee programs, Smyser begins by describing humanitarians at work, taking pains to demonstrate that they undergo risks and hardships no less than those faced by soldiers. He discusses the development of human rights in a natural-law context from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas before introducing his villain: the sovereign national state. As they developed from the Renaissance through the 19th and 20th centuries, Smyser argues, states have asserted and enforced total authority within their borders and have disregarded international relations in favor of their own interests. The result is an increasingly callous disregard for human lives. Genocide was the defining crime of the 20th century, first as an outgrowth of its brutal wars, then as a manifestation of a sovereignty that is essentially unchallengeable within the existing international system. (The recent U.S. invasion of Iraq presents a complication to this argument.) Smyser's solution, predictably, is to strengthen humanitarian protection through the United Nations. He describes the parallel rise after WWII of permanent U.N. organizations for dealing with refugees and non-government organizations (NGOs) with humanitarian missions. He discusses the successful extension of their activities as the refugee problem became worldwide in the contexts of decolonization and superpower conflict. Smyser describes the 1990s as a "lost decade" in humanitarian terms and argues that humanitarian concerns have been relegated to the back burner in the new century's renewed climate of international anarchy. He concludes with an eloquent appeal for the West to base its policies on humanitarian goals.
