The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience.

AuthorMaslov, Denis A.
PositionReview

The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience Michael Ignatieff (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998) 224 pp.

Michael Ignatieff's recent book, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience is an informative and thought-provoking work addressing a controversial topic: the role of morality in late twentieth century world politics. Ignatieff is primarily concerned with the West's response to the rise in ethnic conflict. His analysis of the moral implications of ethnic conflict deals with the imperative themes of attaining justice, admitting responsibility and recognizing truth. The fundamental problem that the book raises is whether the international community, split between the Western safety zone, filled with its affluence and moral relativism, and the zone of conflict, can arrive at a common notion of justice and responsibility which is applicable to all. Ignatieff believes that a concept is possible and makes a passionate case for a global conscience, although he recognizes the dilemmas and ambiguities confronting policymakers and citizens today. His motive in The Warrior's Honor is to uncover the complexity of attaining a universal concept of justice, and by doing so, bring the reader closer to it.

Each of the five chapters in this book appeared earlier in previous versions in other publications. Consequently, the animating idea of the "global conscience" and the exploration of moral ambiguities in modern internecine conflict are articulated in a mosaic of independent essays dedicated to a particular topic or conflict. Conscience leads to responsibility, and it is this connection which is the most powerful and implicit argument of the book.

The first chapter discusses the moral ambiguity of Western attitude toward suffering in distant places such as the Balkans, Zaire, Rwanda, Iraq and Sri Lanka, as mediated by television. Referring to daily experiences that each of us can empathize with, such as watching the nightly news, the first chapter forcefully argues that television bears responsibility for the way it covers international humanitarian crises. In an attempt to prevent Western viewers from becoming desensitized to violence, Ignatieff argues that Western television must dedicate shorter amounts of time displaying the violence and suffering occurring in the zone of conflict. He believes that this would mitigate the detachment that television brings into the homes of its Western viewers; lest the moral...

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