History of Humanitarianism

The contemporary notion of global citizenship, in its contested and multiple manifestations, has developed out of the idea of cosmopolitanism, which dates back to the Stoics, and more recent formulations of world citizenship and the ideal of world governance. In the past decade, the concept of global citizenship, as a concept which signifies the way in which one’s identity and ethical responsibility is not limited to their “local” community (i.e. family, nation), has increasingly become a conceptual mantra for international development and humanitarian agencies, and a primary mandate of the institution of the North American university. In this article I argue that theories of global ethics, such as that presented by Dower, echo in their rhetoric the imperial project of civilization, and, more importantly, the discourse of global citizenship, while it represents the idea of universal inclusivity, produces insiders and outsiders: not everyone is a global citizen. In contrast, cultural theorists and philosophers such as Butler (2004), Mohanty (2003), and Appiah (2005, 2006) have sought to interrogate the ethical framework for a global community or transnational solidarity. The work of these critics, however, is informed by specifically feminist and/or postcolonial approaches to understanding global relations of power. In this essay I critically examine the discourse of global citizenship specifically as theorized by Dower (2003) and Appiah (2006), and I draw upon the example of the university where I teach, the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan, for which fostering global citizenship has become a primary mandate of the academic plan. While I am sympathetic to the desire for a way of imagining community that transcends the legacy of European colonialism and hence transcends the material and symbolic borders of nation, race, religion, etc., I believe that the unselfconsciously celebratory appeals to global citizenship that currently circulate in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) states are indebted to earlier European, and specifically Eurocentric, formulations of humanity, civilization, and peace. While global citizenship purports simply to identify an ethical philosophy and a politics of identity, the discourse produces the global citizen as a specifically positioned subject that is constituted by the ability to act, and specifically to “make a better world” for, rather than with, Others.

The story of the modern feminist and humanitarian is a relatively short one, at least according to popular knowledge. The timeline tends to begin in 1948, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then come moments in the 1960s and 1970s, like the adoption of CEDAW in 1979. From more recent years, we cite the UN Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, or #MeToo’s viral moment in 2017.

My research expands this narrative by tracing the history of the “modern feminist humanitarian” to the late nineteenth century. I question the idea that feminism and humanitarianism were modern inventions of the post-World War Two era by turning to an exceptional historical case study: policy, research, and advocacy on female prostitution in Cambodia during the period of the French protectorate (1863-1954). I pose the following questions about past history and present practice: first, how do ideas about oppressed/emancipated female gender and sexuality shape the humanitarian mandates of states and institutions? And second, how can women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, framed by histories of imperial and colonial processes, move scholarship and activism to think about the ethics of being a feminist humanitarian?

As historians of gender and empire have demonstrated, the lives of women can often be traced by following what were the protectionist enterprises of imperial and colonial processes, and such projects often had nebulous or dangerous consequences for women. My research on projects that the French implemented in Cambodia corroborates this. This notion echoes scholarship pointing out that humanitarianism and human rights are not mutually dependent, leaving us with an unsettling thought: humanitarian interventions, even those designed to be gender-responsive, can be disempowering in its attempt to empower. Awareness of a historical tradition of gender-based interventions should alert development scholars and practitioners to critical examination of their own feminist research and gender mainstreaming programs. By interrogating the modern feminist and humanitarian claims made in the context of protecting women in colonial Cambodia, I challenge present policymakers and activists who claim to practice gender-sensitive and human-centered approaches in humanitarian and development programs across the Global South.

East Africa and Pakistan are currently suffering from the worst invasion of desert locusts in decades. Threatening agricultural production in East Africa, the assault increases the danger of famine in a region where 19 million people already face food insecurity. When locust invasions such as the current ones occur, journalists like to refer to them as "biblical" implying that these disasters are analogous to the ones described in the Bible or by classical writers. However, as this article will illustrate, locust invasions are neither acts of providence nor ancient disasters. In fact, they result from the interplay between natural and human factors and they have been of great concern to western governments in the 19th and 20th centuries, first within the scope of colonial empires, then as a consideration of international development policies.

This is the written version of a paper given to the Slavic Research Centre, Hokkaido University on 12 January 2011. For a much fuller elaboration of the argument and supporting evidence, see Peter Gatrell Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956-1963 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

The Syrian Civil War is entering its sixth year and has caused tremendous suffering and destruction to the Syrian population. The continuation of the conflict has led roughly 4.8 million of Syrians to seek refuge in the neighbouring countries (mostly Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan) and more than a million in Europe, while at least 6.5 million of Syrians are internally displaced (900,000 Syrians became IDPs in the first 6 months of 2016). The hypothesis of this research is that all the apparatus set up to reduce the impact of the crisis is merely postponing the bigger issues (e.g. Syrian integration, durable and sustainable solutions to the Syrian livelihoods and food security, avoid too much dependence on International aid and prevent an escalation of the friction between Syrians and Lebanese). The Lebanese humanitarian response for the Syrian crisis requested for 2017 2.8 billion dollars of funding. This is the highest amount ever requested for a Country and it is higher than the amount requested for Syria (that has higher amount of people in need and bigger needs). Are these high funds really needed for the crisis or is it a way to keep Lebanon stable and prevent a spill-over effect of the Syrian war into the Lebanese society?

As a result of the destruction of the First World War, the Esperantists from the Austrian
area of Styria made a desperate appeal to their co-thinkers from other countries
to temporarily take in their children, who were suffering all kinds of deprivation.
The most positive show of solidarity came from the Esperantists from the lands of the
old Crown of Aragon, where Esperanto was widespread. A total of three-hundred and
thirty children were taken in, of which fifteen came to Osona.

The “Genocide of Rwandan Tutsis 1994” case study is describing the difficulties and dilemmas met by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) during the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in April, May and June 1994. The killings occurred in spite of the presence of UN troops in Rwanda, and the members of the UN Security Council were slow to call the Tutsi extermination ‘genocide’, hence evading the obligation to intervene and stop the slaughter, as stipulated by international law.
MSF met with government officials and issued public statements to try to mobilise governments out of their inertia, eventually calling to an international armed intervention.
These statements and actions resulted from numerous debates, conflicts and contradictory interpretations of the Rwandan situation and of MSF’s role addressing the following dilemmas: Was it acceptable for a humanitarian organisation, to remain silent when confronted with genocide or, on the contrary, to call for armed intervention, an action that would lead to loss of human life? Could MSF call on UN member states to pursue other means of action, thereby risking giving legitimacy to ineffective responses, given the nature of genocide? Launched just as France proposed to intervene in Rwanda, was there a risk that MSF’s appeal for armed intervention would be appropriated for political gain?

This thesis examines the ways in which the African Medical and Research Foundation may be considered a ‘mutation’ of medical humanitarianism, across both time (through the course of the organization’s history) and space (from humanitarianism’s birthplace in Europe to its headquarters in East Africa). To this end, the author conducted field research with staff at the Kenya Country Office between June and September, 2012, involving participant observation, field visits, and archival research. In Chapter 1, the Foundation’s commitment to projects of medical, technical and bureaucratic modernity in East Africa is explored, which complicates analyses of humanitarian minimalism. In Chapter 2, the organization’s history is discussed as a reference point for understanding its unique characteristics. In Chapter 3, the organization's research activities are unpacked as additions to, and transgressions of, boundaries between medical humanitarianism and global health.

From autumn 2015, Drs Rebecca Wynter and Sian Roberts, on behalf of Central England Quakers and the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, ran a collaborative project to research Quaker experiences of the First World War and its legacy. 'Quakers & the First World War: Lives & Legacies' worked with a group of volunteers to co-produce four booklets; 'The Friends' War Victims' Relief Committee' is one of the four. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Voices of War and Peace First World War Engagement Centre, the project built on the research undertaken for the exhibition Faith & Action: Quakers & the First World War held at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (January-June 2015).

A number of recent works have described the Congo Reform Association (CRA), formed in 1904 to protest the abuses in the Congo Free State, as a human rights organisation. Following Samuel Moyn’s critique of recent histories of human rights, I argue this characterisation is anachronistic and obscures the actual goals of the CRA. The article will draw primarily upon the writings of E.D. Morel, the chief ideologue of the CRA, to explain the organisation’s understanding of rights and their solutions for the Congo. Morel believed that the Congo natives were racially distinct from and at a lower stage of civilisation than Europeans. Because of this, the most important right the CRA was prepared to grant the natives was their right to trade freely, a right that encouraged the development of commercial society and therefore one that played an essential role in the civilising mission. The ideal colony for Morel was a trusteeship, run for the benefit of the natives by protecting their institutions, developing their economy, and raising them to a higher level of civilisation. For these reasons, it is anachronistic and misleading to describe the CRA as a human rights organisation.

Humanitarian aid is in many ways a malleable concept. It covers a broad range of activities, including emergency relief delivered to people struck by natural or manmade disasters; longer-term efforts to prevent suffering from famine, ill-health, or poverty; and schemes such as international adoption, specific campaigns against human rights abuses, and humanitarian intervention by armed forces. This essay
focuses primarily on emergency relief. After a brief overview of the different terms and concepts of humanitarian aid, I discuss existing narratives of international humanitarian aid and identify crucial historical conjunctures during the twentieth century.

This introductory chapter surveys the revisionist historiography on the history of human rights. It asks whether postcolonial actors were in fact engaged in human rights activity in their embryonic efforts to establish welfare states; in initiatives to ensure oversight and some means of remedy for citizens; and in land redistribution plans and women’s advancement. In doing so, they commonly invoked other rights traditions and languages – national rights, indigenous rights, treaty rights, civil and political rights, and so on—in justifying political reform. Rather than assume a stable meaning of human rights and “discover” these phenomena decades later, we ask: how did various rights languages intersect and morph through social and political contests and transitions? When, and how, did human rights language find form in the substance of policy, advocacy, or political transformation? Recent research has been largely confined to the Atlantic world with diffusionist assumptions of non-Europeans learning human rights from their colonial administrators or the UN; this book is a contribution to globalizing the history of human rights in the age of decolonization.

This article examines the gendered politics of public health initiatives among Jews in interwar Poland by focusing on the establishment and activity of the Warsaw School of Nursing (Szkoła Pielęgniarstwa przy Szypitalu Starozakonnych w Warszawie). Founded in 1923 and funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the school’s staff be- lieved that they could shape the attitudes and behaviors of Polish Jewish women and use them as a conduit to advance their vision for a Polish state committed to the protection of Jews and their equality before the law. Drawing upon the voices of JDC officials, local Jewish health activists, Polish government officials, and young Jewish women in the Second Polish Repub- lic, the article highlights the multiple and frequently conflicting ways in which gender figured in their political imagination. It also sheds light on the efforts of American Jewish humanitar- ian activists and Polish Jewish women alike—much like their counterparts throughout Europe and North America—to reframe traditional gendered expectations for women in order to ex- pand their range of professional choices and the roles they could play in public life. The final section of this article recounts the school’s decline and compares its fate to a Jewish nursing school initiative in the city of Vilna. In doing so, it assesses the limits of the Joint Distribution Committee’s interethnic bridge-building initiatives in interwar Poland.

The emotional dimensions of witnessing human hardship and suffering through images are key to ensuing humanitarianism.  Yet while images of suffering have historically evoked a range of ‘humanitarian emotions’, contemporary commentators lament that a ‘politics of pity’ now commonly fuels western humanitarian practices.  While this is often highlighted as a more recent phenomenon, emotions evoked in response to suffering have deeply historical origins.  Scholars speak, for instance, of the guilt, sympathy, ‘irresistible compassion’ and again pity, which so moved people in the 17-18th century to act and alleviate other’s pain.  This chapter therefore seeks to explore these historical linkages.  It examines the historical emergence of humanitarian emotions and sensibilities through tracing how early humanitarian representations bear out in those in the present day.  Analyzing early modern and contemporary media images of suffering, the chapter focuses on how the history of representing distant suffering has contributed the proliferation of a ‘politics of pity’ through which humanitarian actions are performed and practiced.  Exposing the historical and cultural contingency of such emotions, the chapter concludes by emphasizing how bodily feelings and affects hold immanent possibilities for political - and humanitarian - transformations.

ABSTRACT

Context. Humanitarian Aid and Politics
Humanitarian aid has incredibly inreased from $ 2 billions in 1992  to  $ 27,3 billions in 2016 as an expenditure (Global-humanitarian-assistance, 2017). This rise is showing of growing needs of emergency and recovery aid in areas where war or figthing is ongoing on. At the same time, huge growth of financial, funding, govermental and nongovermental, national, international organisation numbers in humanitarian aid context made it another question whether growing of aid conception and fields resulted in more harm than benefit? Has it caused the lost of efficacy of humanitarian aid?
The subject of the thesis was chosen as a result of growing importance of humanitarian aid in the socio-political area of Turkey that stand out with fastly increased humanitarian aid from Thailand to Haiti (it became a second country globally in 2016 with 6 billion US$ (Global-humanitarian-assistance, 2017). Therefore, debates related humanitarian aid and aid operations besides benefits and gains coming from its politico-economic power have become problems to be studied for Turkey too.
Objectives: To evaluate the subject of humanitarian aid in historical course, philosophical, political development and to question its problems and complications  and to confront with current approaches and  practices on the scale of the world.
Keywords: Humanitarian aid, international politics&history, humanitarian philosophy

ÖZ
  Konu/problem. İnsani yardım ve politika.   
İnsani yardım için yapılan harcamalar, son 20 yılda hızla artarak 1992’de 2 milyar dolardan 2016’de 27,5 milyar dolara çıktı. Bu artış, devam eden savaş ve çatışma ortamlarında acil ve kurtarma yardımlarına olan ihtiyacın da arttığının göstergesi olmuştur. Aynı zamanda, insani yardım konusundaki bütçe, fon toplama, devlet ve sivil toplum kuruluşları, ulusal ve uluslararası kuruluşlardaki bu muazzam artış başka bir soruyu da gündeme getirmektedir; insani yardımın afet ve ilk yardım konseptinden çıkıp uzun vadeli yatırımları da içine alması, ulus devletlerle ve uluslararası politika ile bu kadar iç içe geçmesi yarardan çok zarar mı getirmiştir? Yardımların etkinliğinin kaybına neden olmuş mudur?
Bu tez konusunun seçilmesinde Türkiye’nin son yıllarda, birçok Batı ülkesi gibi, Taylan’dan Haiti’ye kadar insani yardım konusunda öne çıkan ülkelerden biri haline gelmesi ve buna paralel olarak insani yardım konusunun hem politik hem de sosyal alanda ülke gündemine oturmuş olması etkili olmuştur. Son 2016 yılı rakamlarında, Türkiye küresel ölçekte 6 milyar dolar ile insani yardım konusunda dünyada ikinci ülke olarak görülmüştür. Yardımların siyasi, ekonomik, moral getirileri yanında handikapları ve sonuçları da oldukça önemlidir ve çalışılması gereken ciddi konulardan biri haline gelmiştir. 
Tezin amacı insani yardım konusunu dünya ölçeğinde ele alarak, tarihsel sürecini, felsefi ve siyasi gelişimini eleştirel bir metotla analiz ederek, ortaya çıkardığı sorunları ele almak ve sahadaki alternatif yaklaşımlar ile karşılaştırmalar yapmaya çalışmaktır.

Anahtar kavramlar: İnsani yardım, uluslararası siyaset, insancıllık felsefesi

In 1832, British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled ‘under concern’ on a trans-imperial journey that took nine years and spanned the Australian colonies of Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales and Swan River in Western Aus-tralia, Mauritius and South Africa’s Cape Colony. Backhouse and Walker were fundamental to the creation and expansion of humanitarian networks in the antipodes,where they made major humanitarian interventions in matters concerning Aboriginal  peoples, penal reform, slavery and education. This paper first traces the genesis and historical dimensions of their journey to contextualise it within a long transnational tradition of Quakers travelling ‘under concern’. The paper considers the tour through diverse interpretative approaches such as transnationalism and new work on transnational social movements, humanitarian travel writing and textuality, and argues that Backhouse and Walker were not imperial agents, nor were they agitators operating outside empire, but rather occupied a complex position as ‘institutional opponents’ working within imperial  political circuits to broker various humanitarian reforms at multiple levels in the further-ance of their particular moral empire.

This paper explores the foundational role of race in humanitarianism, its historical geographies, genealogy, and contemporary practice. I pay particular attention to the work of Sylvia Wynter on the overrepresentation of (white bourgeois) Man in modernist understandings of the human that form the basis of humanitarianism in the present. Building on Wynter I offer an alter-historical geography of humanitarianism, locating its genus in the voyages of 1441 and 1492 that unsettles other critical work on the colonial origins of humanitarianism as both a normative and instrumental form of governance and their geographies. In following what Wynter terms a “human view”, I explore the racist orderings of Rational Man and his irrational, racialised ‘others’ that work to structure humanitarianism’s subjects. Alongside this I consider the parasitic relations of humanitarianism to the negation of life enacted through the genocide of Black and Indigenous peoples, arguing humanitarianism’s claims to save lives and relieve suffering cannot be divorced from conquistador violence. I argue that grappling with what Wynter calls “category problems” is necessary as humanitarianism — or huManitarianism — faces the contemporary challenges raised by Black Lives Matter that undermine and question its universalist legitimacy.

Durant la Guerre d'Algérie (1954-1962), plus de 200'000 civils algériens quittent leur pays pour trouver refuge en Tunisie et au Maroc. Bien que le Haut Commissariat pour les Réfugiés de l'ONU (HCR) ne soit a priori pas compétent pour les prendre en charge et que le gouvernement français refusent de les considérer comme des réfugiés à part entière, un élan de solidarité transnational va se mettre en place et permettre l'accueil, l'hébergement et enfin le retour des réfugiés. Le HCR va finalement s'impliquer dans cette vaste opération de secours qui constitue sa première mission hors d'Europe et le début d'une extension de son champ d'activité vers les pays du "Sud". Le Front de Libération National Algérien, la Croix-Rouge et de nombreuses autres ONG participent aussi à l'aide aux Algériens déplacés.
Encore peu documentée, cette histoire des réfugiés algériens permet d'éclairer l'épisode de la Guerre d'Algérie et la décolonisation en général à travers le prisme de la diplomatie humanitaire. Cette approche rend bien compte de la dimension profondément internationale, voire transnationale, du processus de décolonisation. Elle permet aussi de documenter l'impact de la question des droits de l'homme, des enjeux humanitaires et de la représentation des réfugiés sur le déroulement de la décolonisation.

Humanitarian intervention has increasingly become the prevalent means of providing protection and aid at a global level. Yet alongside its success concerns have been raised that humanitarianism has increasingly become an economic enterprise and a political tool for controlling territories and governing international relations. In The Politics of Humanitarianism authors from a variety of disciplines provide a comprehensive critique of the humanitarian enterprise. How are those on the end of humanitarian action influenced by different epistemologies and applications of international law? What is the complex relationship between values - what humanitarian action is intended to be - and practice - what happens on the ground? Combining international case studies with critical theoretical evaluations, and including chapters on international aid, refugees, childhood and women's rights, The Politics of Humanitarianism offers a timely and critical analysis of the contemporary humanitarian system.

Améliorer l’accès à l’aide humanitaire dans les conflits et dans les situations d’urgence complexes a toujours été la plus grande préoccupation pour les acteurs humanitaires. Historiquement l’humanitarisme a été conduit dans des situations d’extrême insécurité et dans des conditions politiques instables pour garantir l’accès, l’assistance et la protection des civils. La diplomatie humanitaire est apparue comme concept au début des années 2000. On peut définir ce concept comme la tentative de persuader les décideurs politiques à agir, à tout moment et en toutes circonstances, dans l’intérêt des personnes vulnérables et dans le plein respect des principes humanitaires fondamentaux.

In 1918, some 500,000 Ottoman Armenians found themselves displaced from their homes or living in Muslim households in the Eastern Mediterranean and the South Caucasus. For most, life did not return to normal after WWI. Rather, new wars, war scares, political manoeuvrings, economic policies, famines, and epidemics during 1918–1930 resulted in a long-term refugee crisis that was responded to by a large number of Armenian and non-Armenian organizations. This article looks at one such response: the humanitarian relocation to Canada of 110 boys and 39 girls and women—all genocide refugees and most of them orphans. It traces how this relocation campaign was realized despite Canadian immigration authorities' long-standing efforts to keep Asians, the impoverished, and the stateless from entering the country. Breaking with the often simplistic and celebratory tone of the literature on humanitarian aid to Ottoman Armenians, this article discusses how the preceding fundraising campaigns of 1880–1922 were a liability for this subsequent relocation project, and it pays special attention to the people and ideas that opposed it.

In this Introduction, I highlight some of the key insights
of the four contributions to the special issue while providing a broad overview of the context for an examination of the ‘white man’s burden’ in contemporary humanitarian and development practice.

This Microsoft Excel file is meant to serve as an appendix to my pieces "Sympathy and Exclusion: The Migration of Child and Women Survivors of the Armenian Genocide from the Eastern Mediterranean to Canada, 1923–1930" (https://www.academia.edu/36572903/) and "Notes on a Connected History of Canada and Ottoman Armenians through 1930" (https://www.academia.edu/35591903/).

Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have brought food, clothes, medicines , and numerous others forms of support to newly arrived refugees. While humanitarian action has always been subversive, I argue that the recent wave of civil actions has pushed its subversive effects one step further. Whereas more modest forms of humanitarian action tend to misrecognise recipients' social and political subjectivities, their more subversive counterparts can be better understood as enacting a particularis-tic form of solidarity that emphasises precisely those subjectivities. To explore the potential for political innovation in these civil initiatives, I argue that it can be useful to do so through the lens of "subversive humanitarianism". More concretely, I suggest the following seven dimensions with which the subversive character of any humanitarian action can be compared across time and space: acts of civil disobedience; the reconsti-tution of social subjects; contending symbolic spaces; the creation of social spaces and personal bonds; assuming equality; putting minds into motion; and the transformation of individuals' life-worlds. I support the argument by drawing upon the recent wave of empirical studies on civil initiatives across the continent as well as my own ethnograph-ic data on the Brussels-based Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés.

The ‘Somalia 1991-1993: Civil War, Famine Alert and a UN “Military-Humanitarian” Intervention‘ case study is describing the difficulties and dilemmas met by MSF during the first years that it was committed to helping the Somali people, after the civil war started in 1991: Should MSF employ armed guards? As the quasi-only source of information in the field, how far could MSF go in releasing information without favouring one party to the conflict or another? How to draw attention on the famine in Somalia, when all cameras were focused on the Gulf War? What position should MSF take about an armed intervention aiming to protect humanitarian aid convoys, with widespread support of the population, but raising MSF’s fears that it would worsen the insecurity? How should MSF react to the excesses and abuses of this intervention?

Two major famine crisis in China during the 1920s resulted in the response of the international community. The elevated compassion for the affected populations in Northern China materialized through famine relief action. This essay is focusing on how relief actors coordinated against the background of interwar international volatility and the general troubled fragmentation of Republican China. The international famine relief in 1920s China operated under a loose defined humanitarian hegemony. British, the US and Chinese historical actors
were its main humanitarian stakeholders with each one carrying own distinctive relief traditions, ideas and practices. The China International Famine Relief Commission (CIFRC) and the American Red Cross(ARC) were the two of the main and most influential providers of
famine relief in synergy with other non-state actors, US, British and Chinese official authorities. During the first famine (1920-1921) the relief was relatively successful based on consensus and compromise of interests and humanitarian principles. However, during the
second largest in scale famine(1928-1930), the ARC decided to stop providing relief breaking the fragile hegemonic humanitarian alliance mostly due to its differentiated perception of the nature of the famine relief and against a destabilizing international environment.

download full text: https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666101458.231

Freemasons often referred to an ideal of “humanité” (Humanität, umanità, humanity) in order to bridge all differences separating mankind. In doing so, they rendered these differences all the more visible, especially in the international arenas. This was definitely the case when freemasons tried to deduce from this ideal “universal” standards and norms for masonic practice. In the national masonic bodies, the virtue of (brotherly) love as an emanation of “pure humanity” was applied to diverging fields of action. They encompassed relief for needy fellow-masons and their families, aid and assistance for underprivileged groups in the service of social reform as well as solidarity with all forces in society that fought for peace, freedom (of conscience), and justice. Speaking “in the name of humanity” on an international level thus became a testing ground for negotiating religious, ideological, societal, and national differences.

The First and Second World Wars fostered the birth of the first children’s relief organizations, which were instrumental in safeguarding a whole generation of Europeans, as well as ultimately Europe itself.

These organizations contributed to shape new social recognition for children and children's rights. Henceforth, they established protocols and management models that still prevail nowadays. Such organizations turned philanthropy into a new economic field: humanitarianism.

Their performance favoured a general progress in nutritional and hygienic matters as well as a better understanding of the effects of war and the evacuation of children from wartorn areas. In addition, these organizations promoted the welfare state, international humanitarian and human rights law and support for developing countries.

The following essay examines five relevant organizations in the children’s relief sector, proving beyond a doubt that their activity was often strategic, determined largely by political and economic bias.

Humanitarianism: Keywords is a comprehensive dictionary designed as a compass for navigating the conceptual universe of humanitarianism. It is an intuitive toolkit to map contemporary humanitarianism and to explore its current and future articulations. The dictionary serves a broad readership of practitioners, students, and researchers by providing informed access to the extensive humanitarian vocabulary.

In this article, I analyze the figure of the humanitarian in Khalifeh’s novel, The End of Spring, which depicts events during the 2002 siege of the West Bank. Drawing upon Slaughter's theory of humanitarian reading, as well as Fassin and Mahrouse regarding the role of the humanitarian as witness, I critique the presumed responsibility of the Western humanitarian to represent the suffering of others, contrasting this with Khalifeh’s representation of Ahmad’s practice of photography. Further, I analyze the way in which Ahmad’s role as an ambulance driver troubles the presumption of humanitarian neutrality, as well as the ideal of transcending difference to honor human dignity. Conforming to neither a sentimental reading practice aimed at empathy or a practice of readerly identification with the savior-figure, this analysis provides lessons for thinking about the 2018 attacks on medics in Gaza during the Great March of Return demonstrations.

The ‘Hunting and killings of the Rwandan refugee in Zaire/Congo’ case study is describing the constraints and dilemmas faced by Médecins Sans Frontières’ teams in 1996 and 1997 when trying to bring assistance to the Rwandan refugees in Eastern Zaire, after their camps had been attacked by the rebel forces supported by the Rwandan army: could MSF extrapolate from the little known conditions of these refugees and their health needs to speak out about their presumed current plight, despite the fact that it had no access to them? Conversely, given lack of access, should MSF refrain from making predictions? Is it wise for a humanitarian organisation to predict the worst? Given that MSF was being used to lure refugees from hiding, should the organisation cease activities in the area or pursue them, condemning manipulation in the hope of preventing massacres – but at the risk of endangering its teams and other operations in the region? Should MSF call for the refugees to remain in eastern Zaire, with its deadly dangers, or participate in their forced repatriation to Rwanda, where their security was not guaranteed either?

This article analyses humanitarian narratives that emerged in response to violence in New South Wales in the 1830s and argues that they make a revealing contribution to the antecedent history of human rights. The missionary Lancelot Threlkeld used his linguistic skills and access to Indigenous communities to collect and circulate testimony about violence and conflict. Threlkeld passed on such information in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes and through a diverse network of correspondence and print. This article analyses how such testimony was framed within the language of colonial violence into humanitarian narratives, how it was mobilised for specific local and international effects, and how print culture mobilised (or countered) evidence of colonial conflict as part of broader debates about the British Empire, Indigenous peoples and the law. It argues for a nuanced approach to legal sources which enables us to see the crucial role of the Australian settler colonies in nascent human rights discourses and legal practices. The Supreme Court in New South Wales (established 1823) was a vehicle through which evangelical humanitarianism was mediated and circulated in the 1820s to 1830s cases in which Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld became involved. This was neither uncontroversial nor uncontested at the time; yet, crucially, the tension between humanitarian sensibilities and settler interests was fully present in the court room and in the court records, published at the time in the newspapers. Colonial law had only recently moved away from the preceding military system and, as a consequence, was open to debate and influence by a range of sectional interests. So, too, the English common law that had been brought to the colonies was a dynamic and contested discourse. Natural law, common law and public law was already a complex mix, which then took on new meanings in the context of what Ian Hunter terms the 'volatile tripartite relations' between settlers, governmental officials and Indigenous peoples. 1 Settlers and their lawyers, colonial governors working both independently and as conduits for the British Colonial Office, humanitarian agitators and the diverse polyglot of a mobile multicultural colonial world (including Indigenous people) used the law courts as crucial social institutions within which they tested their rights and responsibilities. This is particularly evident in the early foundational criminal law cases, in many of which Threlkeld and his Aboriginal collaborator Biraban played a role. They appeared at ten cases between 1827 and 1838 and were present at eight of the twenty-one NSW Supreme Court cases between 1827 and 1836 in which Aboriginal people were tried, convicted and executed. Their presence was usually solicited because of recognised problems with Aboriginal witness testimony and trying Aboriginal defendants in a system of which they had little knowledge and to which it had not yet been established they were subject. Threlkeld and Biraban assisted by translating and explaining legal procedures. 2 Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane rightly emphasise the distinctiveness of Australian colonial debates about law and sovereignty. 3 Yet comparisons with other colonial

We do not consider it presumptuous to write about the ineffable nature of God nor the strategy for engaging in the War in Heaven.  In point of fact the “War” can be discussed in scientific terms with an admixture of correlated so-called “mystical” terms.  During the “End Times”—sometimes called the “Paradigm Shift”—this Cosmic battle is being projected into Earth’s fractal-microcosmic Media-sphere where the signs of conflict between forces of “harmony” and of “disharmony” are abundantly evident. These signs can be interpreted in the same way that Jungian dream symbols are interpreted in order to foster coherent states of Psyche for the purpose of healing (making whole or coherent) the humanitarian persona. This healing or “making whole” must be understood in terms of Heart-Mind coherence which is now measurable in terms of mediated images in the dreamscape of the Media-sphere. (Schafer, Stephen Brock, all; McCraty, Rollin/HeartMath, all) During this time of paradigm shift in scientific parameters in which a “fractally structured Trinitarian” Cosmos exhibits an emergent holographic ontology, a new scientific language for “Divinity” must be established in order to optimize benign humanitarian strategies for opposing the existential forces of chaos.  From ancient times, prophets and heretics throughout the world have spoken about the scientific nature of the War in Heaven.

Humanitarian aid faces a crisis of legitimacy in many conflicts as a result of a close relationship with Western power, which can result in both its failure and rejection. The rise of institutional humanitarian aid has been a part of the rise of Western power. Humanitarian aid has been used as a tool to advance hegemonic power and as rhetoric to justify intervention. However, power is changing. Western norms and institutions are being contested in an emerging global multi-polarity and diffusion of power, often misconceived as shrinking humanitarian space. Institutional humanitarian aid has been so intertwined with Western power that as the West declines humanitarian organisations are either retreating with the tide or being left exposed. The relationship between humanitarian aid and Western power means humanitarian space is actually a Western space. In the places where aid can be deployed – within the realms of the West's influence - its effectiveness is in question due to its incorporation into longer-term processes of liberal democratic state-building that overlooks the basics of emergency response. This is demonstrated in the findings of this qualitative doctoral thesis. Case-study research took place in South Sudan and Syria. In South Sudan, a breakdown of emergency-response capacity as a result of the incorporation of aid into a state-building agenda is demonstrated. In Syria, the relationship between humanitarian aid and Western power is a key justification for the Syrian government to limit emergency-response access. However, changing global power is challenging the conceptualisation and practice of humanitarian aid. If liberal democracy underpins current approaches to humanitarian aid, in emerging states like Brazil and South Africa – where interviews were conducted – the politics of aid are linked more to counter-hegemony, both from the state and diffused forms of power. Changes in global power may not present solutions to the challenges of humanitarian effectiveness and access, but the ongoing affiliation between humanitarian aid and Western power hampers its ability to negotiate a dynamic landscape. This research demonstrates that institutional humanitarianism must disentangle itself from Western power to remain effective and to access the most vulnerable.