Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 90

This section examines U.S. humanitarian interventions and the activity of religious nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) in Muslim domains against
the backdrop of the recent worldwide resurgence of
Islam and Christianity in global politics. As this section
details, the twenty-first century strategic planner and
military officer stands at the crossroads, both internationally and domestically, of balancing the City (and
laws) of Man with the City of God.
The complexity of this balancing act is magnified in U.S. foreign policy, especially in terms of
America’s fitful relationship with supporting missionaries abroad. Missionaries are often champions of a
Wilsonian foreign policy that seeks an international
order based on self-determination and the protection
of human rights. Missionaries petition the U.S. government for right of entry into other countries and,
once there, the protection of their property abroad.
Under such circumstances, they are also positioned
to pressure the U.S. government to use its influence
to promote human rights in countries in which they
are proselytizing.33 This situation has become more
complex recently as there has been a dramatic growth
of religiously affiliated NGOs into the humanitarian
and development sectors that assume responsibility for
providing aid and reconstruction during times of war.
Many such NGOs view this development as providing
a new vehicle for the faithful to increase influence on
U.S. foreign policy.34
In parallel with this rise of religious NGOs, intrastate conflicts have both increased and internationalized, resulting in U.S. military forces becoming
involved in the burgeoning field of international
humanitarian intervention. This development has
unavoidably brought them into contact with religiously affiliated NGOs operating in the same areas.35
Concurrently, U.S. involvement in these conflicts has
been accompanied by transformations in the norms
and rationales that nations have used for legitimizing
intervention, with the violation of a state’s territorial
sovereignty no longer understood to be a necessary
precondition for the legitimate use of military force.
Instead, Western militaries are increasingly permitted, if not expected, to intervene in conflicts defined
by internal political, ethnic, and cultural cleavages.36
From a U.S. policy standpoint, intervention in such
internal conflicts is said to be warranted as a bulwark
88

against state failure, which is itself seen as an underlying precondition for internal strife and the emergence
of extremist movements that could pose threats to U.S.
interests.37 Thus, with the development, reconstruction, and stabilization of states being identified as a security objective, the role of the military has expanded
beyond combat to increasingly include operations that
historically were regarded as the exclusive province of
the private humanitarian sector.
Although religion’s involvement in the delivery
of aid is nothing new, this growth has coincided with
two recent changes in U.S. foreign policy that, taken
together, have the potential to transform the meaning
and impact of religious participation in humanitarian affairs. One of those changes is the International
Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), which designates religious freedom as an issue to be addressed through U.S.
intervention—including punitive sanctions.38 While
the IRFA officially “targets no particular country or
region, and seeks to promote no religion over another,”
several religious and human rights organizations have
raised concerns that it will be used as a “tool of intrusive evangelism” wielded predominantly by conservative Christians wishing to protect their own foreign
missionaries.39
Whether or not these concerns are founded, the
IRFA gives religious organizations new and extended
forms of U.S. government resources to expand their
organizational infrastructures and, secondarily, their
access to potential converts.40 The second change is
that the predominant organizational forum through
which evangelists organize is now the development or
humanitarian NGO. Given these two changes to U.S.
foreign policy, it is clear that the boundary between aid
and evangelism has been compromised.
What we have is the simultaneous movement of
the military and evangelists into a shared organizational field, the field of humanitarian action. This simultaneous movement and overlap raises critical questions
about how these different types of organizations and
actors—military, humanitarian, and religious—influence each others’ goals, operations, and outcomes.
With regard to this emerging overlap of interests, researchers have begun to look critically at the
implications of military involvement in humanitarian missions. For instance, experts at the Feinstein
International Famine Center identified the military as
March-April 2015  MILITARY REVIEW