The world around us
From the NYT review of The Best Intentions:
This is the hard-core problem of all collective action. Nations act not to do good for others, but to do well for themselves — and no wonder. It is their blood and treasure that must be spent. And when it comes to “peace-keeping” or “peace-enforcement,” the United Nations has yet another problem. All humanitarian tragedies — Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur — are also power struggles between tribes, governments and insurgents. So what are the Blue Helmets supposed to do?
James Campbell of Guardian describes a passage from Philip Gourevitch's book on Rwanda
At one point, the blue-helmeted soldiers began shooting dogs which were roaming the streets and feasting on corpses. Gourevitch writes: "After months during which Rwandans had been left to wonder whether the UN troops knew how to shoot, because they never used their excellent weapons to stop the extermination of civilians, it turned out that the peacekeepers were very good shots ... The UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem."