The international response to the war in Bosnia included humanitarian initiatives intended to address the psychological suffering of the war's many victims.These interventions relied on philosophical assumptions about the nature of the "traumatized self" and theoretical assumptions about how victims of violence heal. Lessons learned by humanitarian workers in the field in Croatia and Bosnia have seriously challenged these assumptions, particularly the prevailing notions of trauma which focus on the intrapsychic experience of individuals.Viewing traumatic violence as an event that happens to people, rather than an ongoing, social process that occurs between people, obscures the fact that people suffer within communities and through social relations. 1 The traditional view lends itself to simplistic, though more easily-fundable humanitarian projects, while the second calls for long-term, community-based, and culturally-specific initiatives. Beyond the obvious policy applications there is, for the human rights community, a more urgent reason to amend the philosophical bases of humanitarian intervention. By ignoring the relational aspects of trauma, we shelter ourselves from the blunt recognition that our interventions may have traumatizing effects on the populations we are trying to serve. Human rights organizations and their activists, as journalists, advocates, and witnesses, as mediators, peacemakers, and peacekeepers, as facilitators for and providers of humanitarian aid, do not stand outside of the events we monitor, but are full players whose presence and activities have a range of effects, both positive and negative, both expected and unanticipated, from the moment we decide to intervene. The sociology of the unintended consequences of social action has a long history, beginning with Robert Merton's classic essay in which he identified ignorance of existing social conditions, errors in judgment, and lack of attention to expected outcomes as dynamics which inevitably produce unanticipated results2 An analysis of unintended consequences is at the center of contemporary discussions of risk and the social dynamics of natural and manmade disasters. Ulrich Beck has suggested that modernity can be defined by