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The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism

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Author: David Kennedy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$23.95~~
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Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1

ISBN: 0691123942
Dewey Decimal Number: 361.26
EAN: 9780691123943
ASIN: 0691123942

Publication Date: August 8, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
pIn this provocative and timely book, David Kennedy explores what can go awry when we put our humanitarian yearnings into action on a global scale--and what we can do in response./ppRooted in Kennedy's own experience in numerous humanitarian efforts, the book examines campaigns for human rights, refugee protection, economic development, and for humanitarian limits to the conduct of war. It takes us from the jails of Uruguay to the corridors of the United Nations, from the founding of a non-governmental organization dedicated to the liberation of East Timor to work aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf./ppKennedy shares the satisfactions of international humanitarian engagement--but also the disappointments of a faith betrayed. With humanitarianism's new power comes knowledge that even the most well-intentioned projects can create as many problems as they solve. Kennedy develops a checklist of the unforeseen consequences, blind spots, and biases of humanitarian work--from focusing too much on rules and too little on results to the ambiguities of waging war in the name of human rights. He explores the mix of altruism, self-doubt, self-congratulation, and simple disorientation that accompany efforts to bring humanitarian commitments to foreign settings./ppWriting for all those who wish that "globalization" could be more humane, Kennedy urges us to think and work more pragmatically./ppA work of unusual verve, honesty, and insight, this insider's account urges us to embrace the freedom and the responsibility that come with a deeper awareness of the dark sides of humanitarian governance./p

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

A Must Read May 12, 2007
0 out of 2 found this review helpful

'The Dark Sides of Virtue' is a very important read for anyone interested or already engaged in international law / international relations.

3 out of 5 stars

A City or Town, the Dark Side Nonetheless. February 10, 2007
0 out of 5 found this review helpful

The Shadowy Past of A Real Town., February 8, 2007br /Reviewer: Betty Burks (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviewsbr / br /The cover of this paperback is a gravestone along the lines of Brian Conley's weird book of ten years earlier. That was about Jim Love, a fictitious character who took cocaine. At the present time, a newly-appointed county commissioner admits he sold cocaine. The name refers to a story showing the dark side of Knoxville right out of the book, 'Suttree.' He blames it on a writer from Switzerland who thought that the "city" was dirty and ugly; she took morphine in 1937 making her views unreliable.br /br /The riverfront barges to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, were something I did not know about. Recently, he "interviewed" a California prostitute who purportedly practiced her trade in this town. I am wondering when he will find the two from New Orleans who are presently plying their wares to certain public bus drivers. That wasn't in 'Suttree.'br /br /Bars, alehouses, wine and spirits liquor stores abound in his books and articles of which they are comprised. In this one, Harry C. was deemed a hero because he sold liquor to the decadant residents for many years until shortly before his death. The violent street resembled those of the Wild West, like 'Suttree' pretty horses movie. McAdoo's electric trolley system back then was a forerunner of today's #1 in American bus system which was that only on paper. In actuality, it is struggling to keep going, cutting back on the hours and services but propsing a floating (in air) transit center along and under the Church Street bridge and hanging in mid-air over busy James White Parkway.br /br /These pieces are from a wild imagination. After a tragic train accident near the Cumberland Gap, "lightning danced along the telegraph wires and shocked some people using telephones downtown." You'd think he lived in downtown instead of a colony built by UT professors of long ago composed mostly of wealthy families. Granted, it is no mansion built of yellow stone, like so many in all parts of town, not well-kept up with a shabby yard and clutter like you'd find in East Knoxville. All in all, he is a modest, eccentric person old for his years.br /br /This is the city -- that's what Jack Webb mutters when Dragnet begins. Here is a country town now full of factions of deviants and crooks galore. On a day when I didn't feel like going anywhere I was stranded miles from the bus line by an unprofessional, unethical medical shuttle based in Jefferson City. I shouldn't have gone to water therapy because I felt so bad, but I keep my appointments. Once before, I ahd to quit this same activity due to transportation problems. But this takes the cake; after calling a third time, the mean, nasty opwner said he had told his driver not to come back for me. And so, an hour or so later, I find myself in the dangerous part of town, waiting for someone who cancelled after two trips and 30 minutes of waiting. Apparently, if she couldn't sit in the front seat, as Queen Bee, she couldn't go anywhere. So we were in the middle of Five Points, one of the most crime-ridden parts of town where anything can happen on those mean streets not unlike the bad, fictional 'Suttree' version of the Fifties here. It was an unpleasant experience for one who came so close to death by violence just weeks previously. br /br /This driver claimed to be the son of a Nashville preacher and yet he subjected me to fear in the jaws of fire. One couple did not escape a gory death in that area recently. There's nothing like living dangerously but that's not my choice of excitement. In a backward country town where the downtown has been taken over by misfits from up North and elsewhere, it is crumbling into ashes. Already a man was driven to despair by the mayor's despotic advisor (the one who does the dirty work), threatening to take his delapadated building down by the railroad because the yuppies complained about its condition. Now that is a mass of burned bricks, those same interlopers are deciding what will be built there. The owner lost everything, even his clothes, as he had been living in the chaos and his truck was stolen before the fire.br /br /In this town, money comes first. Those misfits don't have to be educated as long as they have money. Like that awful woman from New Jersey who moved to Pulaski, got on the City Council because of her husband's wealth, to change the town, and took over the literary club. Uneducated, uncoth Northeasterner who attempted to ruin the college town. And life goes on such as it is.

5 out of 5 stars

Sui Generis in Style and Substance September 18, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Though the style of this book might seem "perplexing" to new readers of Kennedy's work, this book is a culmination of a distinctive style of critical appraisal which meshes personal experience with doctrinal detail. For a more schematic version of the same theses, see the author's International Legal Structures or Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia. Here, Kennedy logs with humor and self-analysis his own imperfect quest to combine the "good fight" with the "good life." In the second and third chapters ("Spring Break" and "Autumn Weekend") Kennedy reprints two classic first-person narratives. The first takes place at a Paraguayan prison, (p. 37) and the second at an international conference on the future of East Timor (p. 85). These memoir-fragments invert the familiar human rights narratives of heroic war correspondents and indignant statesmen; Kennedy's frontline is neither the killing fields nor the seat of power, but a more familiar world for most of us: the mundane conferences and awkward conversations of a nascent "international civil society." He reveals with sympathy but not superiority the ambiguous motives, human faults and fantasies underlying cosmopolitan activism. While we might sometimes wince as Kennedy skewers well-meaning doers and hard-won deeds, the forcefulness of his critique increases proportionally with the poltical power of his targets.

2 out of 5 stars

A very perplexing book March 6, 2006
9 out of 11 found this review helpful

I would love to attend a lecture by the author or dine with him and a small group, or attend a seminar held by him --as his personal style of communicating,largely autobiographical and without notes, fits these mediums. This style in book format is exasperating.br /br /The author is clearly a keen observer and has had access to many people and institutions involved in international humanaritarianism, which (I think) he means as international promotion largely through law of human rights. Means other than though law -- religious movements, cultural movemments, economic vehicles, public health, public discourse, philanthropy, collaborations among small sets of nations -- these are not taken up. His case studies are few and seem selected not on the basis of a schema but it appears mainly as postcards from his personal experience. br /br /There are no footnotes, no bibliography, no direct evaluation of the UN. WTO, WHO, World Bank. He has developed no methodology to use to predict or explain success or failure of a legal initiative, while it is clear from the first pages that be believes this undertakings have at least very mixed results. Thus the reader cannot straightforwardly apply the lessons of the author to a real or hypothetical legal initiative -- for instance, abolition of capital punishment. the reader has pretty much to yank the author's findings out of these verbose pages.

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