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A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, David Rieff (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 384 pp., $26 cloth.
The humanitarian endeavor, David Rieff reminds us, is an approach to human suffering that upholds the status quo: it provides relief, not rescue. Humanitarian assistance reaches across dividing lines in war and other upheavals by refusing to take sides; it is driven by need, not by right. The humanitarian answer to injustice is alleviation, not remedy.
A Bed for the Night chronicles the sharp decline of this impartial approach to relief. As the 199os progressed, horrific conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda made its ethical and operational limitations all too apparent and seemed to call for a more muscular humanitarianism that would not just bring relief but also help to build peace. The use of military force for humanitarian ends was indispensable to any such enterprise, marking a clear departure from the classic precepts of neutrality and impartiality that had guided the work of relief agencies. It also placed humanitarian assistance firmly within the orbit of state power, highlighting the financial dependence of aid agencies on donor governments and their operational proximity to military deployments. Before long, these states had discovered the utility of humanitarian assistance for the pursuit of their own goals, resulting in an alliance of utopian humanitarianism and foreign policy that was grounded in sound institutional self-interest on both sides. At the same time, the shift from relief to rescue enhanced the role of human rights concerns in the humanitarian endeavor...