Humanitarianism and Suffering is a very good and most welcome book. It makes a significant contribution to a much needed historical consciousness in humanitarian studies. It also examines the humanitarian ethic in international relations in terms of the psychological ideas of empathy and narrative—two concepts which usually receive only superficial treatment in the thinking of politicians and humanitarian agencies.

The multi-disciplinary contributions in this volume are from a range of impressive scholars in history, political science, anthropology, literature, human rights, and sociology. The only thing I really missed in this collection is a good chapter on the psychology of empathy. As too often happens in international relations, most contributions in this book work to a very general psychological assumption. In this case it is Richard Rorty's assertion that international empathy and solidarity are set in motion by “sad and sentimental stories” (“Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” in S. Shute and S. Hurley, eds. On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1933, p. 71). This is true, of course, but social psychology has much deeper and more nuanced understandings of empathy than this, and is a discipline that could add great value to global politics. Likewise, psychological studies must have more to tell us about our use and abuse of narrative and stories as well.

The book's starting point is the editors' proposition that from the eighteenth century on, there has been a great shift towards a much wider kind of empathy in global society. The editors make this point in their introduction by marking Voltaire's championing of the Calas affair in 1762 as a critical moment in the extension of empathy to ordinary people. In an excellent opening chapter, Thomas W. Laqueur traces the democratization of empathy in the anti-slavery movement and identifies the emergence of the novel as a new genre in which stories of ordinary people's lives were told and empathized with by the political classes.

All the chapters in this volume make for well-informed and edifying reading. They zoom in on particular historical events and the narratives projected around them, making a fascinating series of short histories. Flora Keshgegian's account of American attitudes towards “starving Armenians” between 1915 and 1929 is resonant with American evangelical policy towards South Sudan today; Margaret Kellow's comparison of dilemmas around slave redemptions in nineteenth century America and twenty-first century Sudan is highly pertinent; there are succinct and compassionate analyses of truth commission narratives in Argentina, Morocco, Algeria, and Rwanda by Elizabeth Jelin, Susan Slymovics, and Lars Waldorf; Kirstin Bergtora Sandvik's revelation of the stories that people are coached to tell in order to become refugees, and Laura Suski's analysis of the stories that aid agencies tell about children as victims in war and disaster are both frank and disturbing.

Rony Brauman's chapter describes how the media and the aid world made a fundamental “category error” concerning the tsunami by telling it as a story of a war-like emergency, rather than a tale of natural disaster. Ron Dudai builds on the work of Stan Cohen to give a powerful description of how human rights reporting does—and does not—work to generate empathy and action. Michael R. Marrus' chapter reminds us of the many atrocities during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and western politicians' emerging desire (and inability) to do something about them—a sad prologue to the Holocaust. Joseph R. Slaughter has an interesting textual analysis of Henry Dunant's A Memory of Solferino, in which he rightly points out that Dunant's goal was mainly to create empathetic attraction to a new heroic humanitarian worker. This, of course, has been an unfortunate aspect of Dunant's legacy, creating humanitarian workers in an imperial image as the righteous foreigner.

Important common themes leap out from these various contributions. The difference between humanitarian action and human rights work is striking for all contributors. Humanitarian action is about momentary and personal relief. Human rights work is about systemic political change. In practice, as for example in slave redemption, they often collide: human rights activists want the system of slavery abolished; humanitarians cannot resist the imperative to buy the freedom of a particular slave and their family. In so doing, humanitarians may increase the market for slaves or give slave owners an alibi by showing that slavery is not absolute or totally inhumane. Most of us can understand the ethics of both the humanitarian reliever and the human rights reformer.

The notion of empathy as a powerful international political currency is convincing. People have really to feel and connect if they are to make things happen across borders and continents. As Laqueur notes: “Ethics is about making human communities not abstract claims” (p. 46). But equally convincing is the failure of empathy and the fact that it is necessary, but not sufficient to right wrongs. This is the tragic truth of Bulgarian massacres in 1876 and Darfur massacres in 2003. Humanitarian intervention remains as difficult as it always has been. But massacres have reduced within rights-based states born of empathetic citizen politics. If we can use empathy to shape global political consciousness and institutions, we may reduce the global death toll.

Any success in this arena will depend on how we tell the story of suffering and injustice. This book makes it clear that there are good and bad ways of telling. As the editors point out, “Despite the best intentions, many narratives are prey to realpolitik, hypocrisy, and political manipulation” (p. 25). Many tellings of political suffering have been half-truths or deeply paternalistic, racist, and infantilizing. The storyteller holds great power. One narrative tends to dominate, and it is not always the best one. One of the great lessons of this book is to not always believe what you hear about people's suffering and humanitarian action. The great virtue of humanitarian action is that it is impartial—helping only on the basis of need. Its great vice may well be that its storytelling is always partial, seldom giving sufficient political context, usually exaggerating victimhood, and overemphasizing the centrality of the humanitarian role.

Suffering is simple. It hurts terribly. But descriptions of how it comes about and of what it means to different groups are complicated. Suffering has both history and narrative. I am lucky enough to be writing this review on the Mediterranean island of Lesbos. This is a place that has known much wealth and much suffering. In the last 2500 years, Lesbos and its people have profited from the flowering of Mediterranean trade. But many of its inhabitants have also known the bitterness of Roman and Ottoman rule, population transfer, and Nazi occupation, as well as civil war and the loss of economic power. Here, there are layers of suffering and the lost narratives of many different groups and individuals. To empathize is not just to feel, it is also to understand. Humanitarian appeals and political grandstanding have often been better at cultivating empathetic feeling rather than empathetic understanding. We can be grateful to the editors and contributors of this volume for encouraging us in pursuit of the latter.