Michael Ignatieff has made his mark as a public intellectual primarily in the fields of history, public and foreign policy analysis, cultural journalism, and media broadcasting. He has held important academic administrative and teaching positions, written critically acclaimed books on social ethics and modern warfare, contributed to several motion-picture projects, served on international commissions dedicated to the resolution of ethnic conflicts, and written two novels. A key feature of many of Ignatieff's intellectual and artistic achievements is his personal involvement as an eyewitness in the developments he recounts and upon which he reflects.

Ignatieff is interested in human dignity and in human pain and, accordingly, in an array of liberal humanitarian endeavors--including those to develop ethical designs for social welfare, to defuse the volatile dynamics of multigenerational ethnic conflicts, and to comprehend the psychologies of national and tribal loyalty, of human abandonment and betrayal. His nonfictional books on...