The warrior's honor: Ethnic war and the modern conscience - Michael Ignatieff

THE WARRIOR'S HONOR is a provocative and hard-hitting book about post-modern warfare and its complex moral dimensions. Since the early 1990s, Michael Ignatieff has traveled the world's war zones, from Bosnia to the West Bank, from Afghanistan to Northern Ireland, and here reflects on what he has seen in places where ethnic conflict has become a way of life.

In a series of vivid portraits, Ignatieff charts the rise of the moral interventionists – the aid workers, reporters, peacekeepers, Red Cross delegates and diplomats – who believe that other people's misery, no matter how far away, is of concern to us all. He brings us face to face with the new ethnic warriors – the warlords, gunmen, and paramilitaries – who have escalated war to such unprecedented levels of savagery. And he looks at the encounters between these two groups: at the ambiguous ethics of engagement, at the limited force of moral justice in a world of war, and the inevitable clash between those who defend tribal and national loyalties and those who speak the universalist language of human rights.

Passionate and profound, this is an incisive exploration of the troubled connection between the zones of safety and the zones of danger that configure the modern world.