Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders.

• Author: Greener, Beth
• Position: Book review

ARMED HUMANITARIANS: The Rise of the Nation Builders

Author: Nathan Hodge

Published by: Bloomsbury, New York, 2011, 338pp, US$26.

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As befits the writing of a defence reporter, Nathan Hodge's book on Armed Humanitarians is direct and concise. Hodge's first few opening pages paint an evocative picture of aspects of the United States' recent involvement in Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. These opening pages of the book do not initially place value judgments as to the desirability of such developments. However, on page 12 Hodge lets loose the claim that 'there has been a horrific failure to equip ourselves for success in this mission'. Throughout the book he argues that in these deployments the military lacked essential skills such as cultural knowledge, whilst civilian personnel lacked expeditionary capabilities and had little incentive to deploy to dangerous places. Hodge argues that such gaps allowed for the rise of the 'armed humanitarian'--personnel typically ferried around by private contractors with high levels of force protection and too much distance between themselves and those that they were supposed to be engaging with.

Hodge's book considers the rise of this class of 'armed humanitarian' and outlines the 'experiences, frustrations and lessons of nation-building', constituting, in his words, an 'accounting' of recent efforts. In undertaking this accounting Hodge appears most concerned with the invidious contradiction of 'the more you help, the less you empower the host government'. He underscores the need to acknowledge the limits of external intervention, arguing that 'without a reliable partner, the whole thing is doomed to fail' and that 'developing a functioning state and a thriving civil society is a process that has its own internal dynamic'. At the end of the book he essentially concludes that 'less is more'.

In arguing that there are limits to nation-building Hodge joins the growing legion of commentators uncertain about the ability of outsiders to manufacture either 'states' or the more general aim of'peace' in post-conflict sites. The critical peacebuilding literature, in particular, has taken umbrage at the notion that so many of the processes currently advocated as the path to peace for postconflict sites (state-building, democratisation and economic liberalisation) are either natural, desirable or can be driven by external actors. Hodge also aligns with a growing number of commentators who argue that...