The Warrior's Honour [Hardcover]

Michael Ignatieff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 26, 1998

Since the early 1990s Ignatieff has travelled the world's war zones. He charts the rise of the new moral interventionists, the aid workers, reporters and peacekeepers, who believe that other people's misery is of concern to us all. He draws realisations about the ethics of engagement and the limited force of moral justice in a world war.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Between 1993 and 1997, Michael Ignatieff traveled through the battlefields of modern ethnic war, visiting Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan to consider the mixture of moral solidarity and hubris that led Western nations to embark on the campaign of "putting the world to rights." Why do some people and nations, he wonders, feel morally responsible for strangers thousands of miles away? In The Warrior's Honor, Ignatieff explores this question by skillfully combining eyewitness accounts of modern war with a historian's insight into the constancy of human conflict.

Ignatieff's concisely written essays examine four primary themes: the moral connection created by modern culture with distant victims of war, the architects of postmodern war, the impact of ethnic war abroad on our thinking about ethnic accommodations at home (the "seductive temptation of misanthropy"), and the function of memory and social healing. He firmly believes that "the world is not becoming more chaotic or violent, although our failure to understand and act makes it seem so." The Warrior's Honor takes an important step toward educating the reader about the historical context of modern ethnic conflict. Perhaps most importantly, Ignatieff fosters discussion of the means by which deeper, more permanent commitments can be made in the future to minimize such atrocities. --Bertina Loeffler --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

This collection of Ignatieff's previously published essays conveys through meticulous reporting the moral enigmas of current warfare. Each of the five essays poses a core dilemma: How has television's "promiscuous" gaze promoted both moral universalism and "generalized misanthropy"? How does Freud's idea of the "narcissism of minor difference" play itself out among the perpetrators of Bosnia's ethnic cleansing? Why does "moral disgust" in our reaction to Africa's killing fields deflect Western states from an effective response? The book's title comes from an essay about the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross to blunt the slaughter of Afghan innocents in appeals to "warrior's honor." Ignatieff (Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, LJ 3/1/94) calls for the creation of a "saving distance" between myths of historical violence and the imperatives of present life. He is not optimistic, but serious readers will not flinch from these durable and troubling essays. Recommended for all academic and public libraries.?Zachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Erie, Pa.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 207 pages
• Publisher: Viking/Allen Lane (February 26, 1998)
• ISBN-10: 0670877441
• ISBN-13: 978-0670877447
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,406,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lucid analysis of the things that most ail us, March 9, 2000

By 

hugh riminton - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (Hardcover)

At the moment there are many books being published examining the successes and failures of the humanitarian interventions that have followed the end of the Cold War - more failures than successes, truth be told. As part of my job, I read as many of them as I can. It is this book, however, that I constantly return to. My copy is dog-eared, and deeply scored with underlinings. In every paragraph, Ignatieff has something worthwhile - and frequently confronting - to say.

He addresses the role of the media and the triangle of relationships between audience/media/political leaders; he looks at the rise in humanitarian organisations and the peculiarities of the ethics under which they work; he brings insights from the field on the way the UN is so often programmed to fail.

The power of Ignatieff's writing stems from his unique capacity to bring together the perspectives of news correspondent, novelist and philosopher. He is direct and extremely readable, while also knifing into the subtle heart of the "New World Order."

In the chapter entitled "The Narcissism of Minor Difference" he comes as close anything I have read to explaining why ordinary people are moved sometimes to conduct atrocities on their neighbours. It is vivid and convincing.

If you feel exasperated by the hideous mysteries of ethnic and sectarian conflict, I urge you to read this book, if for that chapter alone.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Have a pencil close by!, September 7, 2001

By 

J. Michael Cole (Taipei, Taiwan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (Paperback)

The streets in downtown Montreal were filled with people - hundreds of them, shouting, waving banners and wearing the ubiquitous "target" emblem on their shirts. They had gathered to demonstrate against the NATO intervention in Kosovo, which had been launched by the Western alliance to end the ongoing cleansing of ethnic Albanians in the region. That particular day had a strange feel to it, not unlike the first day the US-led Coalition began bombing downtown Baghdad in 1991. In a way it felt as if war had somehow found its way, through a crack in space, maybe, into the otherwise peaceful metropolis. On that day, on the recommendation of a friend (thanks Robert), I purchased Ignatieff's The Warrior's Honor. However, I did not read it until very recently, as it had gotten lost (or drowned, rather) among the tons of other "must read" books (their reproductive rate is admittedly very high) that inhabit my bookshelves.

Now that I have read it, however, I understand why it so often gets quoted by other authors; despite its relatively short length, it is literally one of the very best books on the issue of ethnic-based conflict. Ignatieff's writing is extremely quotable, and on numerous occasions I found myself highlighting passages which so aptly drove to the heart of what other authors require whole chapters to evoke. Rich in sources - both literary and philosophical - it is, unquestionably, a master's exercise in conciseness and analysis.

The chapters "The Narcissism of Minor Difference" and "The Seductiveness of Moral Disgust" are especially enlightening, and I know I will be revisiting them frequently.

This book, along with Jonathan Glover's Humanity, should be read by anyone who hopes to cast a ray of light, however feeble, into the shadowy realms of man's inhumanity to man.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars When Warriors Lose It, March 13, 2004

By 

Donald B. Siano (Westfield, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (Paperback)

This is an eloquent book, veering to poetry at times. For a book about the modern wars of militias and warlords within failed states, its eloquence actually gets in the way of the message at times. Occasionally one can even see that sometimes Ignatieff says something just because he has thought of an eloquent way of saying it. Not that I am accusing him of insincerity, for he is not. Nor that the book is without an honest message, for it has several.

The book is a sort of meditation on the nature of these "modern wars" that is colored much by his own personal experiences in several of them. The observation that is central to the book is that diverse people (who are really much alike too) can fall into a state of viewing the "other" as the enemy when a state begins to fail to protect them, and anarchy looms. In successful modern states, the protection is present, and the fiction that diverse people are underneath it all, the same, is maintained.

The book has a very intelligent treatment of the dilemma of the various aid agencies such as the Red Cross and the UN Peacekeepers in trying to ameliorate the effects of war, and maintain their credibility, while not prolonging it or even intensifying it.

On the other hand, the author is a little too reverent of Freudian and even Marxist ideas on the nature of man, both of whom have about zero credibility to the discerning reader. His account of the "Narcissism of Minor Differences" is just so much hooey to me. Ignatieff seems to be entirely uninformed of modern thinking on this problem, which goes by the name of evolutionary psychology, and to me, seems so much more insightful and informative.

The general problem of war is not treated here, only a particular form of it. The wars that inform his thinking in this book are those in Angola, Lebanon, Ireland and, especially, Yugoslavia, with a few "lessons" from the holocaust thrown in. There is not much in the way of systematic study, but rather a grab bag of ideas and anecdotal observations. Eloquently written, though...