The Warrior's Honor

A detailed Summary of The Warrior's Honor


Michael Ignatieff's The Warrior's Honor is a graphic and unflinching portrait of modern warfare and humanitarian engagements to make war more "civilized." While Ignatieff is skeptical towards avowedly "neutral" engagements such as the Swiss Red Cross, he retains a measure of hope or at least reserved optimism for the prospect that warring parties can reconcile if "rituals in which communities once at war learn to mourn their dead together" (190). The tone of the book is both journalistic and literary, and the conclusion could be described as visionary and prophetic. Ignatieff offers a challenge to individuals to challenge their assumptions about themselves to break the cycle of narcissism, bigotry, and violence. He has an anthropological understanding of why groups of people act in particular violent ways given their histories and myths, but he tempers this with a social psychology


drawing from Freud and Hobbes to understand what happens in anarchic situations of brutal warfare. He is at his best when he shows that recent liberal humanitarian engagements are not so removed from the colonialist legacy of the 20th century and Conrad's depiction of Kurtz's "moral disgust."

Ignatieff's work is very political, arguing that governments or NGOs simply cannot take the neutral political stance towards modern wars. He argues that war should first be seen as a natural human condition (a very Hobbesian view), and secondly, that war is one solution to ethnic conflict. Is he arguing for a return to T.R.'s "Gunboat Diplomacy?" I assume that he believes that since the UN, or the U.S. or EU, will become involved in these armed conflicts around the world anyway, they should act decisively, firmly, and quickly rather than make half-fast engagements and muddy up the situatio

Some common words found in the essay are:
UN EU, Red Cross, Freud Hobbes, Civil War, Warrior's Honor, Gunboat Diplomacy, ignatieff offers, humanitarian engagements,

Approximate Word count = 599
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels

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