But the outcome, Wheeler concedes, may have produced a much more favorable view of the intervention. Such are the complexities of nearly all such interventions, and Wheeler is particularly adept at identifying the competing claims and stacking them against his standards.

Why states intervene at all—how and why “saving strangers” is now viewed favorably—is explored in Martha Finnemore’s valuable book, The Purpose of Intervention. Finnemore traces the emerging concern with human security, namely, the growing acceptance of new norms about who is human and our obligations to such people. “New beliefs about social purpose reconstitute the meaning and rules of military intervention, and ultimately change intervention behavior,” she writes. “By creating new social realities—new norms about interventions, new desirata of publics and decision makers—new beliefs create new policy choices, even policy imperatives for intervenors.” Her argument challenges “realists” who regard state interests, not squishy sentiments, as the engine of world politics. Norms are at the center of the intervention enterprise, emerging norms like sovereignty as responsibility—that’s the good news—but consequences and underlying motivations do not always conform with the newly minted social beliefs that drive publics to demand intervention.

The consequences of action are a thicket of uncertainty, and some are far less clear than the experience in Kosovo. Interventions in Somalia, Afghanistan (1980–92), and West Africa arguably have left matters worse than before, and many others remain dubious. The theorizing “takes place in a state of vincible ignorance,” Holzgrefe acknowledges; “the empirical claims upon which different ethical theories rest are little more than guesswork”—a warning that might have been heeded by Pentagon planners in Iraq. Theorists generally assume that “better coordination” or “good governance” will take care of post-intervention chores, a managerial—and, one is tempted to say, imperialist—mindset that is often a prelude to failure. Intervention (whether military or not) has powerful social and political impacts, and while one might sincerely calculate that the good from intervening will outweigh the bad, little attention in the academic theory or in the practice of states is given to unintended outcomes, a central theme of the practitioners writing on these topics.

More significant, the contributors to Humanitarian Intervention essentially leave out any discussion of causes—the reasons why humanitarian emergencies arise in the first place. If obligations exist to ameliorate calamities underway, are there obligations to prevent calamities? Are not the origins of a crisis useful in sorting out remedies? In his contribution, Michael Ignatieff does speak of failed states as a principal challenge in preventing human-rights violations, and mentions quickly that “[s]tructural adjustment programs that force governments to cut payrolls, slash services, and privatize state enterprises have been unpopular and sometimes counterproductive.” Giving such short shrift to a central cause of weakening states is very much in keeping with the official discourse about humanitarian crises—that they have everything to do with the dictator, the warlords, or the ethnic rivalries, and nothing to do with us in the Western democracies. Fortunately, Wheeler does take this up forcefully at the end: “The West’s conception of humanitarian intervention is so ideologically biased that the ‘silent genocide’ of death through poverty and malnutrition is rendered natural and inevitable.” But because humanitarian intervention is constructed as a military act, and rarely are militaries called on (or should be) to prevent or ameliorate famine and other deprivations, this topic is marginal in the theorists’ view.

This lacuna of accountability, to which we will return, is consistent with the general picture of humanitarian crises as being somewhere else—in some godforsaken corner of the globe among, as Condoleezza Rice famously put it, the roadkill of the earth—and also as being emergencies—sudden ruptures in the normal order of things. As my colleague Craig Calhoun said in a speech last year, “we tend to think of disasters as in principle avoidable, even while we contribute to them and while the death toll grows. . . . Yet, we insist in thinking of them as exceptions to the rule, unusual and unpredictable events. In fact, emergencies have become normal.” As “normal” events they have causes that rise from the global social and political order. They are not merely predictable, but probably avoidable. The identification of “humanitarian intervention” with military action is, paradoxically, a tacit claim of powerlessness to do anything short of war to prevent the streams of refugees, the genocides, the famines. It is as if to say, we will tolerate brutal regimes and human deprivation unless and until conditions are so severe that only the military can rescue the victims. This is another form of avoiding responsibility and shifting blame.

*  *  *

In fact, much of the wealthy world does act to prevent or ameliorate human suffering, through economic development aid and, when things go badly, through intervention with food, medicine, and shelter. Sudan, Somalia, Haiti, Mozambique—this list is long, though no two cases are precisely alike. These situations of deprivation, disease, and conflict are, as one scholar puts it, the “dark side of globalization.” Increasingly, analysts see a troubling connection between two roles played by the powerful and wealthy countries of the world. The implements of development—aid, loans, trade accords, etc.—are applied as a set of reforms to ensure that the beleaguered countries fit into a global system emphasizing stability, markets, and democratic practice. At the same time, globalization can undermine the ability of states to respond to crises while creating conditions conducive to war economies. In this account, humanitarianism itself is seen then as the superficial if pervasive policing (i.e., intervention) of the complex and often deteriorating situations that liberal economic and political governance (i.e., globalization) has been so intimately involved in creating. Processes of globalization and processes of intervention are thus intertwined.

Nowadays, intervention—or, in the currently acceptable parlance, humanitarian action—draws an abundance of players (a variety of nongovernmental organizations, private militaries, health professionals, faith-based groups, and so on), many of which are contracted by states or multilateral agencies. That they tend to be from the West, often work for U.S. or European agencies, and offer their services by fostering new kinds of social and economic organization raises questions about these proxies, their values, goals, and conduct. The matter of coherence in responding to emergencies is an often-cited problem in this regard, but the discussions about coherence among practitioners and think tanks focus on optimizing coordination of policies among agencies and multiplying the tasks of humanitarian response—for example, adding democratization to famine relief. That is a very difficult set of tasks to undertake, singly or in combination, and the results are often disappointing, but the pursuit of multiple agendas is demanded by Western governments to stretch their dollars and euros further than perhaps they should go. This sometimes-ideological agenda also subverts the bedrock principle of neutrality among the relief groups: it can make them appear to be tools of the powerful and can even make them more vulnerable to attack. So humanitarian practice grudgingly has moved from the Red Cross ideal of helping civilian victims during wartime to a vast enterprise of relief and development (political and economic) in places the international community’s most powerful members deem important.

This set of issues has been taken up in recent years by a number of people who have worked for the likes of Oxfam or Médecins Sans Frontières and have published damning critiques of humanitarianism. Joined by a few skillful journalists such as Deborah Scroggins and Michela Wong, they pose a vigorous challenge to the popular beliefs and political bromides typically associated with saving strangers. (It remains a mystery why there are virtually no first-hand accounts by victims of emergencies in the literature, or fictional treatments of much note beyond the new French novel, Frontières, by aid leader Sylvie Brunel.) This literature is remarkably frank and self-searching about the international community and its claims—without sacrificing intellectual quality. Three stand out in this group: Mark R. Duffield’s Global Governance and the New Wars, Alex de Waal’s Famine Crimes, and Fiona Terry’s Condemned to Repeat? They outclass the peevish The Road to Hell by Michael Maren, and other journalists who dip in and out and never quite get it right. Among a very few others, these three have worked in places like Sudan and Cambodia, and have since taken the time to reflect and to construct a framework for understanding the chaos and suffering.

The first task is to get a picture of what the challenge actually is. Fiona Terry concisely debunks widely held perceptions about the post–Cold War chaos, promoted by sensationalists such as Robert D. Kaplan, who predict, for example, a “coming anarchy,” new ethnic conflict and failed states, civil wars and attendant disasters derivative of newly inflamed hatreds. There is nothing new about large-scale refugee flows or famine or ethnic wars, nor are attacks on relief workers or other atrocities uniquely post-1989 (“respect for the laws of war was not uppermost in the minds of combatants during the Cold War conflicts in Vietnam or Central America”). Mortality in wars and refugee numbers were declining through the 1990s. We witness these dislocations more dramatically than before, not least because the humanitarian enterprise expanded so quickly in that decade and was more centrally placed in conflicts. This central place, often negotiated with warring parties to gain access to victims, also makes the aid agencies targets for lucre: along with pillaging locals, stealing resources, and other crimes—also scarcely new—the warriors can now grab the humanitarian assistance itself. Food and other supplies are valuable commodities, and looting of aid caravans is now such standard practice that many relief workers transact how much the warlords will seize. It is this phenomenon writ large, the introduction of a new force of non-military humanitarian intervention—often unaccountable, badly planned, politically disruptive—which is new and disturbing in the sincere attempt to help the world’s neediest people.

Terry not only details the troubling consequences of the “new humanitarianism,” but accuses political leaders of willful ignorance. “The causes of most crises are political; some consequences may be humanitarian,” she writes. “But labeling them ‘complex emergencies’ and ‘humanitarian crises’ disconnects the consequences from the causes and permits the international response to be assigned—and confined—to the humanitarian domain.” This is the nub of it: in what ways are the crises of famine, displacement, or even conflict—always depicted as challenges to the international order—in fact a consequence of that same order?

Duffield’s entire book is an impressive attempt to answer that sort of question. “The new humanitarianism represents a government-led shift from humanitarian assistance as a right to a new system framed by a consequentialist ethics,” he asserts. “That is, humanitarian action is now only legitimate as long as it is felt to do no harm and generally support the conflict resolution and transformational aims of liberal peace.” Those transformational aims include, perhaps most importantly, a global trade regime that favors the wealthy and punishes poor nations, and conditions for membership in the global system that demand much smaller government services.

The latter—“structural adjustment” is the felicitous term used by its chief enforcer, the International Monetary Fund—has reduced the size of Third World countries’ expenditures on education, health, infrastructure, etc. These policies have weakened states in their capacity to deal both with chronic problems, from food shortages to tepid economic growth, and with more acute crises, such as the collapse of the price of its main export commodity or the rise of a warlord. In varying degrees, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Congo—altogether, places where millions of people have been killed in the last 20 years—are consequences of a global economic system that has, in effect, favored a form of warlordism (often exercised from the capital) over governance in which strong states, via government bureaucracies, can deliver services and are accountable. The mechanism by which global economic forces lead to warlordism appears to be fairly direct in some cases: the IMF (or an individual donor government) demands that state enterprises be sold, reducing patronage and income; a foreign investor both cuts services and is lured into paying protection to an emerging warlord, who trades on the state’s decline and deals in drugs and guns, which then become new sources of social dislocation and the only viable economic activity. It is easy enough (and partially true) to say that the real problem lies with corrupt political leaders. But weak states tend to be more corrupt, and opportunities and incentives for corruption are multiplied by the system of privatization in particular.

That Africa and other troubled regions are poorer today, with less control over their own destiny than when they were liberated from colonialism, has much to do with the global economic order and not very much to do with the “new humanitarianism.” Still, as Duffield argues, there is a troubling connection. “Complex emergencies arise on the borders of liberal peace where it encounters political systems whose norms differ violently from its own.” Taming these borderlands is an international security decision, and sometimes requires military intervention; at the very least, such decisions (in Washington, London, Brussels, the IMF, etc.) see economic and political development, market reform, relief, and security as bundled together to achieve the goals of the “liberal peace”—marketization, in short, supported by “good governance.”

Consider the problem of cattle rustling in the Horn of Africa. Tens of thousands of pastoralists are in a chronic war with bandits and each other in this semiarid region where land and water resources have tenuously supported their nomadic way of life for centuries. Beginning with British colonialism, the pastoralists have faced a gradual closure of the common resources long available to them, most recently as a result of large-scale privatization of land and water. Traditional authority systems are undermined, and conflict has become intense due to social dislocations, land tenure transformation, and the ample supply of small weapons made available during the Cold War and from various armies in the region. These “borderlands,” still rich in natural resources desired by the West (including wildlife tourism), are thus “disciplined” by marketization and proxy security forces, while humanitarian agencies are called in to deal with localized famine that the donors and their NGO agents dutifully attribute to bad weather and outmoded forms of husbandry. Meanwhile, displaced pastoralists fill the cities with new shantytowns and raise an alarming level of street crime. “Good governance” in this case is the fulfillment of privatization, delivery of aid to the beleaguered herders, and clamping down on the crime in the cities—-but it is governance that cannot address proximate causes of the problems.

For Duffield and others, this comprehensive system poses a painful dilemma for practitioners—the good-hearted minions of Oxfam, CARE, Save the Children, and the hundreds of others who rush to the scenes of disaster. Much is made in some quarters of how such NGOs exploit suffering to raise money and go so far as to manipulate journalists keen for scoops and exaggerate the scale of misery. Both Terry and de Waal document and prescribe remedies for this. The larger problem, however, is NGO “complicity” in the liberal peace. Says Duffield:

A new security framework has emerged in which stability is now regarded as unfeasible without development, while development is non-sustainable without stability. For a number of NGOs, this fusion has led to an uncomfortable realization. It has become increasingly difficult to separate their traditional non-governmental development and humanitarian activities from the wider aims and implications of this new security framework. At the same time, those who support such agencies or help them achieve their aims are also implicated through this strategic realignment.