Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda

Barnett's analysis of the Rwandan crisis provides insight into the operations of the United Nations and its bureaucracy... He explores a cultural landscape few outsiders have viewed.... Yet, despite the insights, which explain alternative logics, this important, crucial analytical work tends to expose how the UN's decision-making bureaucracy, run by good people, can contribute to the evil and darkness of Rwanda.

A searching and nuanced moral analysis.... Barnett carefully examines the U.N.'s institutional values and the ways in which decent international civil servants adhered to norms that repeatedly drew their attention away from the Rwandan crisis.... This insightful, balanced book reveals an unsettling paradox: in making choices it deemed moral, the U.N. tolerated the ultimate immorality of genocide.

Eyewitness to a Genocide is an important book on international ethics. Michael Barnett provides a superb analysis of bureaucratic decision making, of evil and how 'good' people contribute to its destructive force.

Michael Barnett offers a chilling explanation of why the UN froze while about 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were hacked to death in Rwanda in 1994. Mr. Barnett, a political officer in America's mission to the UN, blames an institutional culture which led the UN's well-intentioned staff to become entangled in conflicting interests and end up concluding that doing nothing was the proper way to proceed.

Michael Barnett provides insight into the problematic character of humanitarian diplomacy under current world conditions. Eyewitness to a Genocide is a highly sophisticated book that makes us rethink the role of the United Nations, enabling us to understand the operational ethics and geopolitical constraints that control this global organization supposedly dedicated to peace and justice.

The bureaucratic culture within the UN... produced a common understanding of the organization's role in world politics. This vision was embodied in abstract concepts such as neutrality, impartially, and consent.... Applied to the Rwanda genocide, these benchmarks dictated inaction. As a result, many UN officials sincerely believed that standing idly by was not only correct but also the morally virtuous stance. A chilling work despite its pervasive academic jargon; recommended for all international affairs collections.

This elegantly written book helps makes sense of the senseless: why the world, exemplified through the UN, stood by silently as hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were brutally murdered in the spring of 1994... Towering above all is Barnett's wedding of concise analysis, insider knowledge, ethical principles, moral outrage, the bureaucratic ethos in New York, misreadings of the situation on the ground, and a balanced attempt to assess blame. Highly recommended.

This is an unusual, thought-provoking and important book about the UN's response to the genocide in Rwanda. Barnett does not simply seek to document the monumental mistakes that were made and assign blame. He tries to explain those mistakes with reference to the structural characteristics of the UN, in particular the nature of the bureaucracy, and by recreating the universe of the Secretariat in terms of political constraint, moral concerns, and knowledge about Rwanda.