In recent years, there have been concerted efforts to ensure that the different components of the international response to crisis-affected countries, whether conducted under the banner of the United Nations or not, are integrated in pursuit of a stated goal of comprehensive, durable, and just resolution of conflict. This includes a drive to purposefully make humanitarian assistance to victims, one of the principal forms of outside involvement in crisis situations, supportive of the “international community's” political ambition. The implication of the coherence agenda is that meeting lifesaving needs is too limited in scope, and that the principles of impartiality, neutrality, and independence that have typically characterized humanitarian action should be set aside in order to harness aid to the “higher” goals of peace, security, and development.

The integration of political, military, and humanitarian action in responding to complex emergencies offers a compelling promise of resolving long-term problems and thereby providing peace and stability to an entire population. Significant changes are needed, however, to realize this promise fully. The most critical improvements relate to strengthening the humanitarian leadership within the UN system and so refocusing the collective effort on the protection of vulnerable civilians. A movement of independent, complementary agencies working together to realize protection will strengthen the humanitarian component of integrated missions and make a difference in people's lives.

The UN humanitarian response in Afghanistan spans fifteen years during which humanitarianism has waxed and waned. A retrospective look at this period provides insights on an interesting range of approaches and respect/disrespect for basic humanitarian principles. Afghanistan shows, for example, that definitions of what was “humanitarian” have expanded and contracted to suit particular political contexts. During the Taliban period the definition of humanitarian action was extremely wide and covered rehabilitation and even development activities; post-September 11 we see a dangerous level of contraction that compromises the application of its basic principles for the sake of pursuing nation-building activities in the service of political agendas.

The past decade has seen profound changes in the relationship between humanitarian and political action. The political determinants of humanitarian crises are now acknowledged, so too is their chronicity, and the limits of relief aid as a form of intervention are thus more fully understood. In 1994, in the refugee camps of Goma, Zaire, there was widespread manipulation of aid resources by armed groups implicated in the genocide in Rwanda. This experience highlighted a wider concern that, rather than doing good, emergency aid can fuel violence. The apparent consensus that humanitarian assistance can somehow stand outside politics gave way to calls for tighter linkage between aid and political responses to crises.

The integration of humanitarian action into intervention operations, and particularly the inclusion of a military component, carries risks—but none so great as to be worth sacrificing integration on the altar of humanitarian purity. As in the case of Iraq in the first, emergency phase of an operation, humanitarian teams working closely with the combat troops can greatly reduce civilian suffering caused by shock, displacement, and lack of access to necessities of daily life. In the transition phase, as the military begins to turn over power to an independent political authority, integration of development teams is likewise important. Integration in the interest of humanity is no vice. Humanitarian exclusivity in the interest of purity is no virtue.

The Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) was created in 1964 to provide emergency nonfood humanitarian assistance in response to international crises and disasters, in order to save lives and alleviate human suffering and to reduce the economic impact of those disasters. The office operates under the overall mandate of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is to provide “economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States.”1 OFDA coordinates relief efforts for the U.S. government, and funds relief efforts by UN humanitarian agencies, private nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other international organizations.

The overriding challenge faced by policy-makers in the post–Cold War era is not, as many would have us believe, the achievement of integration of humanitarian action into the prevailing politico-military context. It is rather the protection of its independence. The debate, rather than focusing on fitting humanitarian action more snugly into the given political framework, should explore how to ensure the indispensable independence of humanitarian actors from that framework.

The experience of the Humanitarianism and War Project, an action-oriented research and publications initiative studying humanitarian activities in post–Cold War conflicts, suggests the essential elements of such independence. They include structural protection for humanitarian action against political conditionality; more sensitivity to local perceptions regarding humanitarian actors and action; tighter discipline within the humanitarian sector by those providing assistance and protection; increased attention to the origins of aid resources and of the personnel administering them; greater participation and ownership by local institutions and leaders in crisis countries; and an agreed overarching political framework that gives higher priority to human security.

While useful proposals to reform International Financial Institutions (IFIs) have been widely discussed, the lack of meaningful financial accountability has received little attention. Considering the substantial damage done by IFIs, this is surprising both from an ethical and an economist's point of view. In a market economy anyone must face the economic consequences of their actions and decisions. If consultants give advice negligently or without obeying minimal professional standards, they have to pay compensation for the damage they have caused. National liability and tort laws serve the purpose of compensating those suffering unlawful damages and of deterring such behavior. By contrast, tortious damage caused by IFIs must be paid by IFIs' borrowers, including many of the world's poorest people. IFIs may even gain financially from their own negligence by extending new loans necessary to repair damages done by their prior loans. One failed adjustment program calls for the next. This mechanism makes IFI-flops generate IFI-jobs and additional income. This perverted incentive system rewarding errors, negligence, and even violations of the very constitutions of IFIs is absolutely at odds with the principles on which Western market economies rest. It must be brought to an end. This essay presents the idea of financial accountability, showing how easily reforms making IFIs financially accountable could be implemented. Moreover, embracing financial accountability would bring IFI operations closer to the intentions of their founders, who wanted IFIs subject to the basic legal and economic concepts of financial accountability not exempt from it. The market mechanism and its beneficial incentive system must finally be brought to IFIs.

Articulating and examining the likely consequences of different theoretical and policy approaches to economic justice serves to highlight potential trade-offs and conflicts among them, and helps us to think more carefully about these trade-offs and what their consequences might be. Some of us, for example, might support a liberal free trade regime because we believe it promotes greater income equality among countries. But we might also reasonably assert that such a regime exacerbates economic injustices within some countries by causing dislocation and unemployment, particularly among vulnerable socioeconomic groups such as unskilled workers. This essay presents three models that seek to capture some of the central normative concerns that have been expressed by critics of economic globalization-communitarian, liberal internationalist, and cosmopolitan prioritarian. I indicate the kinds of economic models and data sets that are relevant to determining whether and to what extent greater openness to global trade poses a threat to economic justice as conceived by each of these approaches. Specifically, I use these analytical tools in order to relate changes in openness to foreign trade to other social and economic outcomes, particularly changes in income inequality and poverty, which have tended to draw the attention of nearly all theorists of economic justice. I characterize and critique the approach to economic justice that has been (implicitly) adopted by the major international institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. I conclude with some policy implications and suggestions for further research in the area of international economic justice.

Tzvetan Todorov's book, originally published in 2000 in French and now available in a superb translation, paused at the end of a violent century to attempt to assess-as the title and subtitle suggest-how to remember it and what lessons to learn. A contemporary figure in the long tradition of French-speaking moralists, Todorov writes beautifully and with ethical passion about some of the darkest crimes in humanity's recent history. For Todorov, these crimes are not just past: reflecting on them can provide guidance for contemporary international affairs, such as NATO's intervention in Kosovo or the current war on terrorism. Todorov's basic theses are two: first, totalitarianism counts as the primary novelty of the twentieth century and has to be the basis for moral reflection about it; second, there is a proper manner of response to totalitarianism, which consists of the defense of a democratic and pluralistic alternative politics, one that reacts to the disasters of the past with moral vigilance in the present.

… Many in France since the mid-1970s have adopted the concept of “totalitarianism”-much criticized elsewhere-to refer to the new alternatives to democratic rule-fascist and communist-thrown up by the twentieth century. … Todorov is intervening in a characteristically French debate in which the distinction of the regimes from one another has become part of a much larger ideological dispute and therefore freighted with heavy implications.

What implications? For of course, it is hard to gainsay Todorov's argument that it is necessary for the experience of politically evil regimes to be at the heart of moral reflection today. Even so, Todorov's book illustrates some of the difficulties toward which such a commitment can lead….