I have a short piece over at The Mark today about what Michael Ignatieff should do, now that running Canada is off the cards:
Michael Ignatieff, off to teach at the University of Toronto, is returning to the world of ideas at the perfect moment. This is not only because his bruising tenure in the Liberal party was so plainly over. Nor is it because, in his words, “the only damn thing that I can do that’s any use to anybody is to teach kids what I learned and what mistakes I made.”
It’s because some of the biggest issues he addressed in his pre-Ottawa days – when and how to intervene in foreign wars to save lives – are back at the top of the global agenda.
Ignatieff’s writings on the Balkans in the 1990s helped to shape the case for humanitarian intervention. He was a prominent member of the international commission that launched the idea of a “responsibility to protect” the vulnerable from slaughter in 2001. Even as Ignatieff lost Ontario, ideas he advocated were being implemented by NATO pilots with a UN mandate over Libya. But the Libyan war may leave those ideas in poor shape.
What can be done about this?
At this moment of strategic uncertainty, there is a need for robust new thinking about the basic strategic arguments for liberal interventionist policies and whether they still work.
This is where Michael Ignatieff could come (back) in. Readdressing interventionism would be a natural segue back into academia. He may be able to take this up in the congenial surroundings of the University of Toronto. But given the urgency of the crises involved, more may be required. Ban Ki-moon could, for example, appoint Ignatieff and a non-western statesman, such as former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, to lead a study on developments in crisis management and new models for humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping, mediation, and the use of force.
As I point out in the full article, there have been a lot of important reports on aspects of this problem recently (including the World Bank’s World Development Report and UN’s Civilian Capacity Review). But Ignatieff may be the public intellectual best able to draw the lessons from all those reports together into a coherent, resonant narrative about interventionism and conflict management day. We internationalists missed you, Mike.
