Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart tells of a well-meaning foreign policy establishment deaf to the voices of everyday people. Its focus is the Bosnian War, but its implications extend to any situation that prompts the consideration of military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Ambassador Swanee Hunt served in Vienna during the Bosnian War and was intimately involved in American policy toward the Balkans. She traveled to Bosnia twenty times during her tenure as ambassador and has made another twenty trips since then. Attempting to understand the costly delays in foreign military intervention, she had hundreds of conversations with policymakers, refugees, journalists, clergy, aid workers, and soldiers. In Worlds Apart, Hunt presents eighty vignettes, alternating between the perspectives of those who survived the war and its aftermath, and the international policymakers deciding whether to intervene. From these vignettes, she draws lessons that can be applied to other conflicts throughout the world. These lessons cannot be learned from afar, Hunt says, with insiders and outsiders working apart. Only bridging those worlds will show us where we went wrong in Bosnia—and point the way to a better paradigm of international security.

Swanee Hunt is the founder and chair of Women Waging Peace, a global policy-oriented initiative working to integrate women into peace processes. During her tenure as US ambassador to Austria (1993–97), she hosted negotiations and several international symposia to focus efforts on securing the peace in the neighboring Balkan states. She is a member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and president of the Hunt Alternatives Fund. She has written hundreds of articles for American and international newspapers and professional journals, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the International Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the Denver Post. She is the author of Half-Life of a Zealot and This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, both also published by Duke University Press.