Help versus Harm: The Impact of NGO Interventions

Abstract

Aiding Peace? The Role of NGOs in Armed Conflict. By Jonathan Goodhand. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. ITDG Publishing (ISBN: 9-78158826462-6). The slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994 marked one example among many during the twentieth century in which genocide occurred and the international community failed to intervene. By contrast, the world's powers were moved to action in 1999 when NATO forces intervened in the former Yugoslavia to prevent the kind of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that had been seen previously in Bosnia. These two cases, in particular, set the stage for the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which was established in 2000 to forge a consensus on when and how humanitarian intervention should occur. The Commission's report, The Responsibility to Protect, lays out a perspective that has received growing international support. It argues “that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe—from mass murder and rape, from starvation—but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states” (International Commission 2001:VIII). However, this perspective is only one side of an ongoing debate that Jonathan Goodhand analyzes in Aiding Peace? The Role of NGOs in Armed Conflict . It is the maximalist approach, which argues that humanitarians should intervene to stem violence and protect the innocent. An alternative perspective—the minimalist approach—holds that humanitarians should not expand their activities and mandates but, rather, should retreat to the purer, more neutral position that the aid community has occupied in the past. This debate is a response to the empirical reality that, over the past decades, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have come to play a larger and larger role in relief and development work. As the level and range of NGO activities has grown, however, many observers have increasingly questioned their effectiveness and accountability. Although it was once assumed that NGO work must be improving …