Christopher Coyne defines humanitarian action very inclusively in this critical review of its theory and practice since World War II. He discusses recent forms of humanitarian intervention authorized by the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), such as the U.S.-led intervention in Libya in 2011, but spends more time on humanitarian emergency rescue efforts, such as the response to the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and especially on humanitarian development assistance programs, such as the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He acknowledges that “militarism and humanitarianism have become indistinguishable” (p. 40) in many of these cases. Yet in this volume he is not concerned with this dimension of humanitarian action. Militarized or not, according to Coyne, it is no accident that humanitarian action has been “doing bad by doing good.”

Coyne argues that as a result of the conventional wisdom that short term humanitarian relief will not have much effect unless more long-term development assistance is put into place, a “growing bureaucracy of state-led development assistance” has dominated humanitarian action” (p. 39). It is this misguided dependence on the state to reduce real suffering and violence that has made matters worse, not better. Before he reviews the practical problems that state-led humanitarian action has created, Coyne presents what he considers its more fundamental theoretical flaw: the failure to appreciate the insights of economic theorists like Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, and Thomas Sowell. The cure for what ails humanitarian action, he argues, is a healthy dose of private property and free markets. Without them, he claims, assistance may provide poor countries with more of the “outputs” that “planners” and “the man of the humanitarian system” think they need, but they will not be in a better position to produce and trade for the things that they themselves really want and need. That is, they will not achieve “economic progress” (p. 72).

What makes private property and markets, as opposed to centralized planning, effective in this sense is their ability to adapt to complexity. There have been recent attempts to rethink development assistance using the concept of complexity (e.g., see Ben Ramalingam, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, 2013); however, Coyne takes his cues from classic libertarian texts and insists that “[m]oney prices, which serve as a common unit of calculation, capture the relative scarcity of different goods based on context-specific conditions and communicate this information to others in the economy” (p. 67). Juxtaposed against this idealized view of the market are references to alleged Soviet-like attempts at central planning. “The Soviet experience,” he reminds us, “illustrates the important difference between more production and real wealth creation” (p. 77). He then goes on to suggest that a similar “mentality” can be found in many of today’s large nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam, but it also surprisingly afflicts other leading development theorists such as Jeffrey Sachs (p. 73). According to Coyne, the contemporary development theorist continues to “frame humanitarian action as a technological exercise, constrained only by available resources and the perceived state of scientific knowledge” (p. 79).

Having laid bare what he considers the underlying theoretical mistakes of humanitarian development assistance, the author goes on to discuss some of the many ways that this planning mentality has backfired. He describes his approach as a form of political economic analysis, but the argument in these middle chapters, while less polemical than his inference from first principles of free market idealism, is mostly derivative. Humanitarian development assistance, he claims, has not been driven by lofty humanitarian ideals or a commitment to the common good. It has been the product of bureaucratic politics, interest-group politics, and corruption on both the delivery and the receiving ends. Instead of market competition, which would have made economic growth possible, this kind of political competition has not only made long-term economic development impossible but also worsened the living conditions of those who urgently need short-term relief (p. 92). Furthermore, Coyne argues, the linear and technological thinking embodied in many assistance programs has had dire unintended consequences. For example, he cites the important work of Alex de Waal on the negative effects of aid on government accountability (p. 154) and Fiona Terry on the danger that aid may fall into the wrong hands (p. 156).

As Coyne’s argument winds down in a final third section, its Manichaean structure becomes transparent. On one side are the top-down, arrogant planners who feel unconstrained by the complexity of the human experience. They have repeatedly failed to accomplish their ends, and attribute this either to inadequate resources or to a lack of political will on the part of politicians with whom they must work. On the other side are those like Coyne who are more realistic, logical, and adaptable and who do not mistake increased output for the economic growth only a free market and private property can provide. The author describes his preferred conception of development as “an ongoing process of discovering new and improved allocations of scarce resources” (p. 179). Not only will “development as discovery” lead to the kind of economic growth that poorer countries themselves will actually value, but it will have other moral and political benefits rooted in the “endogenous” customary rules of the developing societies themselves (p. 185).

Let me raise two objections to this kind of Manichaeism. The first deals with Coyne’s claim to be applying a realistic economic theory. There is much to be said for the use of markets in assisting poor countries to achieve higher levels of economic growth. However, Coyne has oversimplified the role of markets in poor countries. Just guaranteeing private property rights, enforcing contracts, and leaving markets alone to coordinate preferences may lead to greater inequality and fewer pathways out of poverty. Just focusing on contract enforcement without dealing with the way that risk is shared among market participants is a recipe for the concentration of wealth in a context like that of much of sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture is highly rainfall dependent. Only the better-off will be able to take risks involved in market contracting, and if the poor do, most likely they will eventually lose (e.g., see Frank Hollinger and John M. Staatz, Agricultural Growth in West Africa: Market and Policy Drivers, 2014).

The second objection is prompted by Coyne’s passing comments on Mali, a very poor country that he uses to illustrate the unintended consequences of the U.S.-led humanitarian intervention in Libya in 2011. Contrary to those who would cite Libya as a positive humanitarian intervention because of the ouster of Muammar el-Qaddafi, Coyne tells us to “Just ask the displaced Malians” who suffered as a result of the occupation of their land by supporters of Qaddafi who fled to Mali after the intervention and worsened the political situation there (p. 165). This is a premature comment, at best. The coup in Mali that followed the events that Coyne summarizes briefly was itself followed by another humanitarian intervention led by the French and other regional African forces that the majority of Malians supported and which has brought a sharp reduction in violence and the beginning of the creation of a more democratic government there. the author’s impulse to jump to conclusions about a complex political situation is indicative of the dismissive way in which he treats politics more generally.

While there are real weaknesses in the humanitarian assistance record—and Coyne reviews many of them—there is also a growing record of development assistance that is political in a positive sense. For the past two decades, socioeconomic assistance sometimes has been conditioned on “good governance” and democratic reforms and also sometimes supported by aid for these political reforms. This is still very much a work in progress, and funding for it has often lagged behind the rhetoric for it. However, as Thomas Carothers and Diane de Gramont have argued (Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution, 2013), there is more to the politics of humanitarian development assistance than bureaucratic competition and corruption.