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Alexander Poster's article, "The Gentle War: Famine Relief, Politics, and Privatization in Ethiopia-1983-1986" examines the Reagan administration's efforts to resolve Cold War disputes through humanitarian assistance. With the Vietnam War fresh in minds of both Congress and the American public, Reagan officials dealt with hesitancy when they pressed for military and developmental grants for foreign nations. M. Peter McPherson, administrator for the Agency for International Development, discovered a solution to the Reagan administration's problem. McPherson noted that Americans still supported humanitarian objectives abroad and sought to incorporate humanitarian relief into President Reagan's foreign policy strategy. The Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s resulted in the largest mobilization of relief resources in U.S. history. The American response was both a humanitarian effort and a targeted attempt to discredit socialist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. American policymakers drew up their policy with the intent to strengthen rebel areas, discourage collectivization of land, and take credit for most of the relief effort. Thus, disaster relief in Ethiopia served a dual purpose: to provide humanitarian aid and to further American security interests. Adapted from the source document.

This book is intended as a set of essays examining the value of the recent works of Michel Foucault for social theory and social history. Foucault's works written since 1968 (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality and numerous shorter pieces) contain some important advances in social theory and in the writing of social history. My purpose is to separate out those advances from other features of Foucault's thought which I find less beneficial. I am not attempting to give an assessment of Foucault's work as a whole but to focus on and analyze certain features of it.