Richard Falk
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.
Howard Adelman
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.
The Economist
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.
Astri Suhrke
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.
July 2002 Choice
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.
