Can intervention work rory stewart review

Log in. Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials. Sign Up. Pub Date: Aug. Page Count: Publisher: Norton. No Comments Yet. More by Rory Stewart. Pub Date: Sept. The book discusses issues that remain at the heart of the global political agenda.

These issues have also been central to the work of ESI since the legitimacy and dangers of interventions; the limits of international power and knowledge in state building missions; the temptation of liberal imperialism; the impact of international war crimes tribunals; how to get others to "want what you want" in building institutions; what outsiders can and cannot do.

The book has come out in the US in August as part of the Amnesty International Global Ethics Series, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of one of the world's leading human rights organisations. It will come out in Europe in September Can we stop wars and genocides and get rid of evil dictators? Can we then build modern, democratic states that thrive in our wake? Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus are well placed to pose and answer these questions From rather successful interventions, defined as Bosnia and Kosovo, the authors convey an important lesson: that is, the experience garnered in one place is generally not much use elsewhere.

The Economist. The writing is wonderful. He did not know the Pashto poetry that celebrated the expulsion of foreign armies. He did not take an interest in the honour codes of gangsters of Old Kabul. This was not his individual failing. He could have learned all these things, but he was not given the time to study them and he would not have been rewarded or listened to if he had known them.

Instead he, like most international civilians was an expert in fields that hardly existed as recently as the s: governance, gender, conflict resolution, civil society, and public administration.

They were not experts on gender and governance in Afghanistan: they were experts on gender and governance in the abstract. Success also tends to come in the first few months after an intervention — for example, removing previous Taliban laws that banned all female education, or freeing up the media.

He even turned it into an 18 minute TED talk. When does the Law actually rule? Conveniently, no-one can tell. I'm not advocating people living there. Though language skills and some time spent in cultural study would be helpful Stewart's piece is entertaining but not a positive look at nation-building, or intervention or whatever we are calling it.

Knauss talks extensively about Bosnia and the intervention there. I hadn't. It was 15 years at least. Quick show of hands, How many of you reading this knew that? Put your hand down, Mom. I found this piece muddled and somewhat meandering; Knauss may not have Stewart's gift for delivering a foreign land onto paper. I learned quite a bit that I didn't know, but the upshot is that Bosnia is largely a functioning country where people have returned from whence they were ethincally cleansed.

Which is good. I found some of the conclusions from the story at best unhelpful, though. The primary one of these was the aforemention increased force presence say, as per Rand Corp plan actually increases violence. What I can tell you is that if we didn't have troops out in Helmand, the Taliban would have gone about their daily business of extortion and occasional spasm of terror against the local populace I will not comment here on the new regime simply being a change of actors and not actions when we leave.

The most depressing conclusion was that "Nation building under fire" has never worked. So we're 0 for 3. Sample sizes are small 3 , so we have to examine the methodology, but no one is sure which method works, so that is hard if not impossible to do. The most interesting theory Knauss put out is that entry to the EU was a carrot to get leaders who hated each other and, indeed, each other's peoples demonstrably, having killed as many of them as possible to if not work together, at least negotiate on things they could find common ground on.

As opposed to say, murdering each other. Ultimately, what you get out of this book is a sense of pessimism. I love anything by Rory Stewart, and if you are interested in foreign policy it is well worth the read. If you are not, read Prince of the Marshes for your Rory Stewart fix. A final aside. Why do the voice actors feel the need to do accents? Do they have it in their contracts? This guy had a lilting Scottish accent and did a passable Afghan accent even pronouncing "Afghan" "Illfan" the way they do , but his American accent was generally just a growl, and many of his other European ones were just comical Italian was my favorite.

I would actually get excited when I knew it was coming. Just read the book folks. I know it gets dull, but just read the book. View 1 comment. Jun 28, Jerrodm rated it really liked it Shelves: america , history , war , development , middle-east , security , policy , europe , essays. The overall message is a sobering one -- peace-building and state-building are not impossible, but they are frequently orders of magnitude more complicated, dangerous and costly than we initially assess, and possible more than we can initially assess.

The essays draw principally on two recent examples of Western state-building exercises in post-conflict areas: Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. In both cases, the authors highlight the initial confidence with which policymakers went in about being able to engineer a solution, only to be befuddled by local conditions, resistant populations, etc.

The resulting step by step further into the state-building quagmire is an important lesson -- no matter how savvy, political leaders seem irresistibly drawn to the argument that "just a little more" effort, investment, troop presence, or whatever, is needed to tip the scales and get things moving in the right direction, at which point we'll be able to check out and let the process run on its own.

What I think our recent history has shown, and what these authors highlight, is that that idea is fundamentally flawed, and that any effort to remake the institutional and social fabric of a country or people requires, at minimum, a commitment of decades and a commensurately large investment of people and money.

That's not to say it's indefensible under all circumstances to do this, but the costs of such an investment, in lives lost, in war and post-war costs, in continuing exposure to foreign countries' populations and the resulting frictions that can engender, etc. It's not so much that one must go in with a clear exit strategy; it's that one needs to go in recognizing that the exit is a generation away, and that the problems that arise along the way are likely to be much larger and more complicated than they appear before hand, and some will be completely unforeseeable.

So enter only with trepidation. It's a useful message to revisit periodically, since we tend to periodically get sucked back into a "several thousand U. Oct 12, Euan Carey rated it really liked it. Excellent book that fights back against the narrative that there is a catch all solution for nation building. Apr 20, Antenna rated it really liked it. Focusing on Afghanistan since , Rory Stewart identifies reasons for the failure of intervention to achieve a "sustainable solution".

Goals have been unclear, obscured by buzzwords and western-style "management speak". Leaders sent in to sort out the problems have stayed for only short periods, with foreign specialists remaining ignorant of the local culture since they rarely set foot outside protected compounds for security reasons.

So, each successive surge of ever larger numbers of troops, Focusing on Afghanistan since , Rory Stewart identifies reasons for the failure of intervention to achieve a "sustainable solution". So, each successive surge of ever larger numbers of troops, with additional resources and revised policies, has failed to stabilise the situation. Little heed was taken of McNamara's "lessons" from Vietnam, notably that "there may be no immediate solutions.

We failed to recognise the limitations of modern high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine We viewed people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experiences. We do not have a God-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose. We exaggerated the dangers to the United States". In contrast to Stewart's somewhat rambling, anecdotal contribution which often seems overly concerned to display his literary style, Gerald Knaus produces a systematic, coherent and very informative analysis of the relatively successful restoration of peace in Bosnia from the late s, although recent events may have undermined this.

Triggered, some say too late, by shame over inaction in the face of genocide in Rwanda and Srebinica, intervention in Bosnia largely took the form of targeted bombing and training to support Croatian and Bosnian soldiers against the Serbs.

Knaus examines four interpretations of intervention in the Balkans. He is critical of the "planning school of nation-building" as developed by the American Rand Corporation think tank which argues that the number of troops and resources needed to subdue a population of a certain size can be calculated "scientifically" using formulae.

It is a simple questions of inputs versus outputs. The fact that Vietnam at one point had more than , troops covering a population of 19 million suggests the inadequacy of this approach, which is also likely to be prohibitively expensive anyway for a large country. At the other extreme is the "sceptical futility" school which Knaus finds too negative: "if you understand the culture, if you avoid counterproductive violence Knaus concedes that a period of tough, authoritarian "liberal imperialism" may be necessary as practised by Paddy Ashdown when High Representative in Bosnia, but he clearly favours what he calls "principled incrementalism", a kind of "muddling through with a sense of purpose" in, for instance, the process of enabling displaced groups to return with a degree of grassroots organisation.

Although very interesting and chastening reading, this book might have been more effective if ideas could have been integrated into a continuous whole, rather than presented in two separate sections by different authors with some repetition. Coverage of a wider range of war zones would also have been useful to demonstrate key points. Half autobiography, half policy critique, this essay by Rory Stewart has a few interesting anecdotes but isn't really worth buying.

His arguments are mostly sound, but the framing -- 'How Rory Failed to Prevent the Surge' -- can be a little trying. Aug 30, Shafiqah Nor rated it really liked it. This book was published in , and I can't help but observe how advance Stewart's thinking was on his essay on Afghanistan in what he had predicted would be a 'failed intervention'.

He compares it to Vietnam as another intervention based on "exaggerated danger to the Uniter States" and criticized foreign bureaucracy and revolving diplomatic core of countries for the lack of local expertise. Additionally, the buzzwords and jargon of "rule of law" and "sustainability" often seen in international development are complicit for such failures - there is also little will to understand local norms, especially when security becomes 'paramount'. Stewart also challenges the credibility of the Rand formula which is used as a "scientific method" of quantifying then number of troops to deploy.

I also enjoyed Knaus' piece, he challenges the idea of Bosnia being the 'successful intervention' too frequently cited as a model case. He explores the concept of moral obligation to intervene by the international community, and the fine balance of threading towards occupation.

The book brought back memories of my MA essays on state-building and consolidation of democracy. Aug 10, Alex B rated it it was amazing.