The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism

by David Kennedy and David Kennedy

Book Overview

In 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.

Rooted 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691123942
• ISBN13: 9780691123943
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A Must Read

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

Sui Generis in Style and Substance

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.