Humanitarian Action, Democracy Building, and Human Rights: Two Good Ideas, But Do They Complement Or Contradict Each Other?

Public Lecture by David RIEFF, PSIA Visiting International Faculty (History of Humanitarian Action), New-York based journalist and author.
Through this series of lectures by highly distinguished guests on pressing global issues, PSIA is offering a vibrant platform for public debate in international affairs.

It has been under the signs of three master ideas -humanitarian action, democracy building and human rights- that the soi disant international community has re-moralized international relations.
But even were the practical application of these ideas brought into line with the moral claims that are now commonly made for them, are they in fact compatible, even at their best? Or, instead, does the interplay between them better reflect Hegel’s axiom that tragedy was the conflict of two rights?

David Rieff is currently teaching History of Humanitarian Action at PSIA. David Rieff is a New York-based journalist and author. During the 1990s, he covered conflicts in Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Liberia), the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), and Central Asia. Now a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, he has written extensively about Iraq, and, more recently, about Latin America. He is the author of eight books, including “Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West” and “A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis”. His memoir of his mother”s final illness, Swimming in a Sea of Death, appeared in January 2008. Based in New York City, Rieff is currently working on a book about the global food crisis.
David Rieff is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research, a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Additionally, he is also a board member of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch, Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute, and of Independent Diplomat.
Through this series of lectures by highly distinguished guests on pressing global issues, PSIA is offering a vibrant platform for public debate in international affairs.