What do you think?
Rate this book
The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War
The idea that we should ‘do something’ to help those suffering in far-off places is the main impulse driving those who care about human rights. Yet from Kosovo to Iraq, military interventions have gone disastrously wrong. The Thin Blue Line describes how in the last twenty years humanitarianism has emerged as a multibillion-dollar industry that has played a leading role in defining humanitarian crises, and shaping the foreign policy of Western governments and the United Nations. Drawing on his own experience of working in over a dozen conflict and post-conflict zones, Foley shows how the growing influence of international law has been used to override the sovereignty of the poorest countries in the world.
288 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2008
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 30, 2010
I'm not sure what this book was trying to say. It took a long time to go nowhere, and left me staring at it, dumbfounded. Perhaps it's my fault for waiting until the last sentence of the last page to give up on expecting to be enlightened. Or challenged, informed, entertained .. or .. something.
'The Thin Blue Line' is essentailly split into an introduction, a 'case study' type section with chapters on a number of countries, and what I expected to be a discussion and conclusion. Unfortunately, the discussion is sorely lacking, the case studies are recounts of peacekeeping escapades and some general statements about what the book is supposed to have demonstrated are tacked on at the end. The argument or line of thinking is absent for most parts of the book though - I kept re-reading the blurb to remind myself of what I was meant to be reading about.
I think I expected the thesis of the book to provide insight into the way that humanitarian interventions have been co-opted by intervening countries' political interests. Or some critique of humanitarian interventions, or an exploration of their worth or consequences; some kind of insight into how better to think about and analyse them. Something.
In some ways the book reads like a tale of woe, wanting to go back to the golden age of peacekeeping. I'd love to believe there was one, and that humanitarian intervention was ever untouched by the whims and wants of interventing coutries' foreign policy. In other ways it reads like like a diary, by someone who finally thinks they've lived through enough to justify writing a book, with the detail and the 'point' to be fixed at some point in the process.
As a result of the book I've decided that I don't ever want to work for the UN after all. I suppose that kind of clarity is a good thing. Overwhelmingly, though, a very disappointing book.
'The Thin Blue Line' is essentailly split into an introduction, a 'case study' type section with chapters on a number of countries, and what I expected to be a discussion and conclusion. Unfortunately, the discussion is sorely lacking, the case studies are recounts of peacekeeping escapades and some general statements about what the book is supposed to have demonstrated are tacked on at the end. The argument or line of thinking is absent for most parts of the book though - I kept re-reading the blurb to remind myself of what I was meant to be reading about.
I think I expected the thesis of the book to provide insight into the way that humanitarian interventions have been co-opted by intervening countries' political interests. Or some critique of humanitarian interventions, or an exploration of their worth or consequences; some kind of insight into how better to think about and analyse them. Something.
In some ways the book reads like a tale of woe, wanting to go back to the golden age of peacekeeping. I'd love to believe there was one, and that humanitarian intervention was ever untouched by the whims and wants of interventing coutries' foreign policy. In other ways it reads like like a diary, by someone who finally thinks they've lived through enough to justify writing a book, with the detail and the 'point' to be fixed at some point in the process.
As a result of the book I've decided that I don't ever want to work for the UN after all. I suppose that kind of clarity is a good thing. Overwhelmingly, though, a very disappointing book.
September 18, 2012
Brilliant, detailed, comprehensive account of the humanitarian and human rights industries and their failings (and successes) around the world. He writes convincingly and comprehensively about the problems of aid since the 80s, with the neutrality of NGOs dissolving into campaigning and collaboration with (mostly) Western governments. He discusses corruption and the rights and wrongs of witholding aid, aid dependency, the pressures from supporters and Western governments, the inadequacies and merits of international law and how they can be misused as a geo-political tool, and the folly of 'liberal interventionsim;. But despite the quite scathing criticisms of NGOs, he never loses sight of the good they also do. Properly thought-provoking and enlightening stuff by someone who knows that world better than almost anybody.
February 2, 2009
The main problem in this convoluted account, as I see it, is this: foley does not seem to have learned the (often) liberating lesson of dialectics. To him the relationship between humanitarianism and military intervention is like that of two great ships toting different goods, which while passing in the dark waters of even darker continents accidentally collide. awesome blasts of fire damage up close and inspire exultations from afar. Metal momentarily fuses until a rescue crew wrenches the behemoths apart. Repairs are made and the captains are given the okay by some inspection committee to continue on their own independent courses in neutral waters. An aberrant blip on the radar.
Humanitarianism, in foley's narrow narrative, went to war in the 90s, when the Security Council began using Chapter VII to override Article 2 of some UN bullshit. During the time that followed, humanitarian aid organizations have become increasingly involved to various degrees in military operations whose official names like"Operation Restore Hope", are but a slight veil for the more aptly described ‘shoot-to-feed’. Flash forward to Iraq and the army is dropping food packages that are the same color as cluster bombs, as Colin Powell says humanitarian organizations are a ‘force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team’. In one of his most provocative and honest statements Foley speaks of ‘objectively indistinguishable’ conditions in Afghanistan 2004:
He even goes as far to admit an overlap in motives between soldiers and aid workers in Afghanistan, both desirous “to strengthen law and order, weaken warlords, combat corruption and support human rights’. ‘Worthy objectives’ all for a ‘reasonable future in Afghanistan’, notes Foley. Despite these oh so noble intentions, however, interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq ‘clearly cannot be classified as humanitarian’, for in what he seems to think is a turn of events, aid is being used to support the military, not the other way around. For Foley to protect the bad humanitarianism from the good, he relies on an account that, tremendously limited in historic scope (this shit has been going down since at least Thucydides), cannot perceive a pattern.
Such narrative framing makes it much easier to render objective indistiguishability contingent. Let us take a characteristic nugget of wisdom from Foley: after incorrectly and hastily diagnosing the problem in Somalia (i.e, supply falling short of demand, assessing the flooding of the with food as a good thing--read jenny edkins’ whose hunger? to turn this on its head) he speculates that the main lesson of Operation Restore Hope may be that ‘humanitarians should have argued more forcibly against the militarization of the mission’ (66). This enormously naive and stupid lesson amounts to the idealization of idealism: apparently aid workers can equip themselves with a broad-sword of peace to fend off brutes in camo while simultaneously murmuring incantations with a charm pendant possessing powers of ethical discernment by which to assess and make transparent their motivations.
What gives Conor? How, after everything you’ve outlined, would this be possible? The short of it seems to be that he needs to sever the space between force and helping in order to maintain the possibility of what we might also term purity and he does so through nostalgia for a time I am going to go ahead and say didn’t exist. The SS Idealism life preserver Foley uses to keep afloat, head just above water, is something Foley calls ‘neutrality’. His elegy laments the loss but hopes for the resurrection of this distinguishing criteria, which apparently characterizing humanitarian organization traditionally, is defined by the absence of ‘an overarching vision for how societies should be organized, and consciously restrict themselves to helping certain categories of people on a temporary basis’(4). this is too irritating of a premise for me to take the energy to critique here, though i'd make the effort if a reader of this thinks my little vitriolic diatribe is in dire need of substance.
The sentence in which Ms. Sorentino threw the book at the wall: ‘Western governments may well display hypocrisy and double standards towards human rights in the rest of the world, but this should not be a reason to stop documenting and denouncing violations wherever and whenever they occur’ (223). ??? Here’s the lesson Sara-Maria thinks conor foley should have learned: to shut up and to take his experiences seriously.
If someone commissioned me to write a thorough review I think I could bury this guy. No, I take that back. He gets some breathing room for exposing the dilemma of human rights’ claim to universality, the power differential in an attempt to establish ‘humanitarian accountability’, for mocking the motivations of the righteous, and for being relatively upfront about his insider status as disaster zone peeping tom.
Ultimately, though, a symptomatic failure of courage, not anywhere near the ‘groundbreaking’ work it’s touted to be.
Humanitarianism, in foley's narrow narrative, went to war in the 90s, when the Security Council began using Chapter VII to override Article 2 of some UN bullshit. During the time that followed, humanitarian aid organizations have become increasingly involved to various degrees in military operations whose official names like"Operation Restore Hope", are but a slight veil for the more aptly described ‘shoot-to-feed’. Flash forward to Iraq and the army is dropping food packages that are the same color as cluster bombs, as Colin Powell says humanitarian organizations are a ‘force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team’. In one of his most provocative and honest statements Foley speaks of ‘objectively indistinguishable’ conditions in Afghanistan 2004:
…it was sometimes difficult to distinguish aid workers from soldiers since they often drove the same white vehicles as us, dressed in civilian clothes and concealed their weapons. There were allegations that some American PRTs used humanitarian assessment missions as a front for intelligence-gathering operations. On one occasion, US forces handed out leaflets encouraging people to inform on insurgents and threatening to withdraw assistance to such areas if the insurgency continued. (111)
He even goes as far to admit an overlap in motives between soldiers and aid workers in Afghanistan, both desirous “to strengthen law and order, weaken warlords, combat corruption and support human rights’. ‘Worthy objectives’ all for a ‘reasonable future in Afghanistan’, notes Foley. Despite these oh so noble intentions, however, interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq ‘clearly cannot be classified as humanitarian’, for in what he seems to think is a turn of events, aid is being used to support the military, not the other way around. For Foley to protect the bad humanitarianism from the good, he relies on an account that, tremendously limited in historic scope (this shit has been going down since at least Thucydides), cannot perceive a pattern.
Such narrative framing makes it much easier to render objective indistiguishability contingent. Let us take a characteristic nugget of wisdom from Foley: after incorrectly and hastily diagnosing the problem in Somalia (i.e, supply falling short of demand, assessing the flooding of the with food as a good thing--read jenny edkins’ whose hunger? to turn this on its head) he speculates that the main lesson of Operation Restore Hope may be that ‘humanitarians should have argued more forcibly against the militarization of the mission’ (66). This enormously naive and stupid lesson amounts to the idealization of idealism: apparently aid workers can equip themselves with a broad-sword of peace to fend off brutes in camo while simultaneously murmuring incantations with a charm pendant possessing powers of ethical discernment by which to assess and make transparent their motivations.
What gives Conor? How, after everything you’ve outlined, would this be possible? The short of it seems to be that he needs to sever the space between force and helping in order to maintain the possibility of what we might also term purity and he does so through nostalgia for a time I am going to go ahead and say didn’t exist. The SS Idealism life preserver Foley uses to keep afloat, head just above water, is something Foley calls ‘neutrality’. His elegy laments the loss but hopes for the resurrection of this distinguishing criteria, which apparently characterizing humanitarian organization traditionally, is defined by the absence of ‘an overarching vision for how societies should be organized, and consciously restrict themselves to helping certain categories of people on a temporary basis’(4). this is too irritating of a premise for me to take the energy to critique here, though i'd make the effort if a reader of this thinks my little vitriolic diatribe is in dire need of substance.
The sentence in which Ms. Sorentino threw the book at the wall: ‘Western governments may well display hypocrisy and double standards towards human rights in the rest of the world, but this should not be a reason to stop documenting and denouncing violations wherever and whenever they occur’ (223). ??? Here’s the lesson Sara-Maria thinks conor foley should have learned: to shut up and to take his experiences seriously.
If someone commissioned me to write a thorough review I think I could bury this guy. No, I take that back. He gets some breathing room for exposing the dilemma of human rights’ claim to universality, the power differential in an attempt to establish ‘humanitarian accountability’, for mocking the motivations of the righteous, and for being relatively upfront about his insider status as disaster zone peeping tom.
Ultimately, though, a symptomatic failure of courage, not anywhere near the ‘groundbreaking’ work it’s touted to be.
May 18, 2025
a deeply uncomfortable read.
April 12, 2011
This book was kind of a confusing mess. In some ways, the jumbled nature of Foley's discussion reflected the problems he was writing about. International law tries to apply universal principles to very context-driven situations. Humanitarian aid brings a one-size-fits-all, short-term relief package to all the narrow and radically different crises around the world. How can Foley explain what went wrong with the humanitarian interventions in Somalia, Kosovo, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Iraq without diving into all their historical minutiae, leaving the reader lost? Meanwhile he's trying to comment on the overarching laws and patterns of global intervention, the problem of which is that they're applied with little recognition of specificity. So his digressions become themselves lost, irrelevant to the arguments.
The book is worthwhile because Foley asks a lot of good questions, and his breadth of experience bring up a wide range of issues. He troubles the simple ideological answers academics apply to these issues from safe havens in distant ivory towers. It's important to be critical, but to do so from a practical understanding of consequences of action and inaction. Foley asks good questions, raises unasked ones. But the answers he finally offers are trite and useless. His very last line, while maybe true and maybe fitting in another work, came out so dishonest: "In reality, they [aid workers] are just another part of the problem." Everywhere else in his book Foley challenged this oversimplified condemnation; what an easy, cheap ending.
A contribution to the field but not a standalone book.
The book is worthwhile because Foley asks a lot of good questions, and his breadth of experience bring up a wide range of issues. He troubles the simple ideological answers academics apply to these issues from safe havens in distant ivory towers. It's important to be critical, but to do so from a practical understanding of consequences of action and inaction. Foley asks good questions, raises unasked ones. But the answers he finally offers are trite and useless. His very last line, while maybe true and maybe fitting in another work, came out so dishonest: "In reality, they [aid workers] are just another part of the problem." Everywhere else in his book Foley challenged this oversimplified condemnation; what an easy, cheap ending.
A contribution to the field but not a standalone book.
July 15, 2009
Do good intentions always help the intended beneficiary? And our motives always pure? Those are two of the questions tackled by Foley. The final paragraph of the book sort of sums it up: "(Aid workers) might help individual people in a crisis zone, but they can never be absolutely certain that the overall impact of their presence does more good than harm. While their presence pricks the world's conscience that 'something must be done,' it simultaneously reinforces the delusion that humanitarian action can ever be enough. In reality, they are just another part of the problem."
December 26, 2010
how the doctrine of humanitarian intervention provides cover for wars of aggression
November 16, 2023
The Thin Blue Line desperately needed an editor to push the author for a re-write. I kept turning to book cover--not the introduction, not the conclusion, the book cover!--to understand Foley's thesis. The structure of the book is confused, and the core arguments get lost. The personal & factual accounts of many charged international incidents are described with surprisingly passive, academic language.
Finally, in the context of reading this 15 years after publication and decades after many of the events, to really follow any threads of argument (to the extent they do exist) requires a surprisingly high bar of knowledge of history, international legalese, and the alphabet soup of organizations thrown around with abandon.
Finally, in the context of reading this 15 years after publication and decades after many of the events, to really follow any threads of argument (to the extent they do exist) requires a surprisingly high bar of knowledge of history, international legalese, and the alphabet soup of organizations thrown around with abandon.
October 1, 2010
Conor Foley calls the roll of genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape as a political/military weapon, mass murder and other horrors of the past couple of decades including a few natural as opposed to man made disasters. He has been at the aftermath of many of them: Somalia (civil and religious war); Kosovo (ethnic cleansing); Sri Lanka (civil war); Indonesia (tsunami); Sudan (ethnic cleansing, civil war); the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Turkey (state sponsored mass killing). Looming over everything is the slaughter of up to 800,000 Tsutis citizens of Rwanda by their Hutu neighbors while the United Nations ignored it or even tacitly encouraged it by pulling out troops. In retrospect it is clear that a couple of regiments of airborne infantry could have slowed and diverted much of the killing saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and a division could have stopped the massacre in its tracks.
The utter barbarity of Rwanda in 1994 is most used to justify "humanitarian intervention" which can range from military and political operations that infringe on the territory and sovereignty of a country on the hawkish end to the more dovish definition of impartial distribution of relief assistance during armed conflict. Foley's view is that most situations, dire though they may seem, are not as straightforward as Rwanda. He was in Kosovo during the height of the Serbian/Albanian battles and through the NATO led air strikes. Foley sees Kosovo as a telling example of "we must do something" which often leads creates more killing and destruction than would have happened without intervention.
The International Committee of the Red Cross gets high praise from Foley because they insist they won't take sides in any conflict but will work solely to alleviate the suffering caused by combat no matter who is firing the weapons. As other organizations have become more political, feeling they need to denounce human rights violations, such as Doctors Without Borders did in Sudan--which got them kicked out of the country--the Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations are able to continue their work by simply doing it.
One example is the work of the Red Cross in Guantanamo. While Red Cross personnel knew of human rights abuses, including torture, against prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghirab the were restricted to petitioning the U.S. government. In other words the ICRC wasn't able to go public--and never does. It gets in access to prisoners or to conflict zones because it is specifically and rigorously non-political and is often the only organization that is allowed such access. Its mission is strictly humanitarian, to ease the suffering of inmates and offer food, water and medical care to those caught in warfare and for whom it is a matter of life and death.
Foley doesn't have many answers--which is to his credit. He realizes that the specifics of humanitarian intervention will vary widely from crisis and be a constant source of debate.
The utter barbarity of Rwanda in 1994 is most used to justify "humanitarian intervention" which can range from military and political operations that infringe on the territory and sovereignty of a country on the hawkish end to the more dovish definition of impartial distribution of relief assistance during armed conflict. Foley's view is that most situations, dire though they may seem, are not as straightforward as Rwanda. He was in Kosovo during the height of the Serbian/Albanian battles and through the NATO led air strikes. Foley sees Kosovo as a telling example of "we must do something" which often leads creates more killing and destruction than would have happened without intervention.
The International Committee of the Red Cross gets high praise from Foley because they insist they won't take sides in any conflict but will work solely to alleviate the suffering caused by combat no matter who is firing the weapons. As other organizations have become more political, feeling they need to denounce human rights violations, such as Doctors Without Borders did in Sudan--which got them kicked out of the country--the Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations are able to continue their work by simply doing it.
One example is the work of the Red Cross in Guantanamo. While Red Cross personnel knew of human rights abuses, including torture, against prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghirab the were restricted to petitioning the U.S. government. In other words the ICRC wasn't able to go public--and never does. It gets in access to prisoners or to conflict zones because it is specifically and rigorously non-political and is often the only organization that is allowed such access. Its mission is strictly humanitarian, to ease the suffering of inmates and offer food, water and medical care to those caught in warfare and for whom it is a matter of life and death.
Foley doesn't have many answers--which is to his credit. He realizes that the specifics of humanitarian intervention will vary widely from crisis and be a constant source of debate.
March 5, 2014
this was the second time Ihad read this book (which was first published in 2008) so I went through it quite quickly. I wanted really to see if it was worth keeping as a source and reference book, and it is. He is extremely knowledgeable, both first-hand and from what has been written, on humanitarianism. He tries to draw the conclusion that humanitarian interventionism is bad (which is why I was not sure the book would be worth retaining) but he does not succeed, despite very creditable efforts. Intellectual integrity keeps on breaking through. So, I'm glad I read this book. There are unresolved issues of course, and none of us has all the answers - but here are most of the questions, in a safe and creditable place.
August 26, 2018
This was a very interesting exploration of humanitarian work.
It looked at many different instances of humanitarianism throughout the world and at different times in history. It used the different stories to discuss different aspects of humanitarianism such as militarization, backfiring efforts or universality of human rights.
I don't fully remember why I put this as 3 stars because I rated it a while ago. However I did think that he had a bias in favour of the humanitarian work. Also, his writing suffered from the curse of knowledge, with his explanations requiring the reader to know specific obscure bits of information to be understood.
It looked at many different instances of humanitarianism throughout the world and at different times in history. It used the different stories to discuss different aspects of humanitarianism such as militarization, backfiring efforts or universality of human rights.
I don't fully remember why I put this as 3 stars because I rated it a while ago. However I did think that he had a bias in favour of the humanitarian work. Also, his writing suffered from the curse of knowledge, with his explanations requiring the reader to know specific obscure bits of information to be understood.
August 10, 2020
Foley analyses the history of humanitarian intervention in its most recent phase, and the change from humanitarianism to human rights organizations. He addresses the risks of advocacy for humanitarian organizations. Specifically focusses on Afghanistan and Kosovo. His argument is fairly unclear; apart from the fact that both humanitarianism and human rights advocacy are risky and may contribute to the problems that they are seeking to address.
May 23, 2009
The author has experience but I am not sure what he is trying to tell us.
I wish he knew how to write clearly...he may have a point but it is buried in too many facts about too many things followed by a personal account. It made me dizzy.
I wish he knew how to write clearly...he may have a point but it is buried in too many facts about too many things followed by a personal account. It made me dizzy.
December 4, 2009
Interesting. Case studies about humanitarian aid demonstrate the difficulty of unintended consequences and how difficult it is to give assistance without the negative impact of our cultural biases.
January 28, 2009
Incredibly dull. I didn't make it past the third chapter.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews