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Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace-or War, Mary B. Anderson (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), 171 pp., $16.95 paper.
Traditionally, the development community has tried to steer clear of conflict situations. Focusing instead on their humanitarian and development missions, aid agencies have considered themselves and their funds to be neutral and nonpartisan. Recent books on Rwanda and Somalia, however, have cast serious doubt on this view. Peter Uvin, for example, has examined the interaction of development aid with the forces and processes that led to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. "In countries like Rwanda," he writes in Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, "where development aid provides a large share of the financial and moral resources of government and civil society, development aid cannot help but play a crucial role in shaping the processes that lead to violence." Michael Marin has described a much more sinister scenario in the case of development aid in Somalia throughout the 1980s in his book The Road to Hell: The Devastating Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, concluding that aid is mostly incompetent and inadvertently destructive, and that it propagates a system of dependency, corruption, and violence.
if, as these books seem to suggest, aid has the potential to inflict even more suffering on communities already vulnerable to conflict, then should we do away with international development aid altogether? In her insightful and practical book Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace-or War, Mary B. Anderson responds: "It is a moral fallacy to conclude that because aid can do harm, the decision not to give aid would not do harm" (p. 2). A joint effort of...