Professor Bertrand Taithe of the University of Manchester, currently a Visiting Professor in the International History Department at the Graduate Institute, reflects on the evolution of humanitarianism and its historiography.

It is impossible to summarise a very vibrant history of humanitarianism, which has gathered pace over the last ten years in particular. Allow me instead to give some thoughts on the relationship that history has had and will have with humanitarian practice and how it might relate to the challenges of humanitarian work today. Humanitarian work has long been thought of as relief work in times of emergency. A swift response to an acute crisis defines what humanitarians claim to have engaged with throughout their long history. In the 1970s but more particularly in the 1980s, Médecins sans Frontières’ founder, Bernard Kouchner, defined it afresh, as urgence and as a moral imperative. The present tense of urgence defined a kind of a-historicity and also a certain type of response – pragmatic and utilitarian – yet principled and overriding obsolete notions of sovereignty (if only to replace them with new ones).

In the context of the late 1980s and 1990s, developing the concept of urgence was literally to boost the significance of humanitarian aid and promote it to the forefront of political decision-making and resourcing – but it was also to create a dynamic which might serve humanitarian movements and propel them. In some respect the notion that ‘new humanitarian actors’ to use the terminology they embraced themselves (and many were new, for instance Handicap International which emerged in the mid-1980s) was one of a break with the past (though the past was largely very recent and not a historical worldview).

Locating humanitarianism outside of history was thus a political act and a challenge to an established order. That order had been written up as a kind of history before. Even very early humanitarians had often expressed the desire of telling their story quite early on. They meant to raise their profile and that of their cause but also to define the terms of humanitarian law. The first Universal exhibition which involved the Red Cross took place in Paris in 1867, three years after the Geneva convention, three years after the first very limited use of the emblem and at a time when the Genevan movement had very little to exhibit compared with the full technical display originating from the American civil war imported by Napoleon III’s dentist, Dr. Evans. Humanitarians began a long tradition of writing detailed accounts from the Franco-Prussian war onwards. Most emulated travel narratives or adventure stories, but some sought to establish the historical significance of relief work in times of war.

These narratives formed a solid factual basis from which the Red Cross could invite a historical account, through a competition from which dogmatic lessons to be taken. The result was a stern document, rewarded by a prize funded by the Empress of Germany, authored by a lawyer, Carl Lueder which established the dogmatic certainties drawn from historical practice and rebuked some of the wider claims made by volunteers in the name of urgency: La convention de Genève au point de vue historique, critique et dogmatique. Most of the large organisations of humanitarian aid followed and developed historical accounts which aimed to ground their legitimacy in history. The obvious limitation of a Western-centric historiography, which tended to focus on the Red Cross first and foremost, Save the Children (for which an anniversary is soon upon us), MSF, Oxfam and other large international NGOs was that it tended to favour the institutional narratives over more contextualised accounts.
 
To contest this approach, either by negating the importance of venerable historical legitimacy in the name of reform or by presenting a ‘revisionist’ account was a difficult task which took a surprisingly long time. One had to wait until the 1990s to find historians some of these difficulties. The earliest attempts were revisionist. But humanitarian organisations were slow to open their archives. Historians of the Red Cross like John Hutchinson complained as recently as the 1990s that the ICRC archives were closed to them. Today, most archives are more open, even though, as the DANGO project demonstrated, many NGO archives are in physical danger of destruction by neglect. On the one hand historians have moved on from a purely confrontational approach to one that seeks to contextualise and understand organisations and people. On the other, and this is much more recent, accelerating over the last ten years, humanitarian practitioners have been actively seeking historical accounts which went beyond storytelling.

The think tank Humanitarian Policy Group developed a synthesis of existing research which itself pushed the historiography. The project put particular emphasis on the cultural bind that shape local understanding of humanitarian aid. Though the bulk of the historiography is still predominantly Western, new scholars (in Aarhus, Exeter, Geneva, Galway, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Mainz, Milan, Oslo and Sheffield notably) have all begun to offer new perspectives on a wider range of events and organisations of relief (many of which did not survive beyond the emergency they intended to address). The concept of humanitarianism has also been analysed from a wider range of perspectives beyond the original Genevan matrix. A less Western-centric historiography is emerging on the one hand and also one that is more open to a wider range of actors (demotic groups, partisan actors) and to a wider range of historical methods to explore these people, events and issues (for instance the history of emotion or gender perspectives on humanitarian aid).
 
This historical development is thus responding to the normal maturing of a new sub-discipline but also to new political demands from a sector in need of reform. It is this particular aspect that binds, it seems, historiographical developments with the challenges of humanitarian aid.

The World Humanitarian Summit of 2016 in Istanbul which followed a range of preliminary events in New York and Geneva brought together a wide range of intellectuals to the table. Many of the more traditional ‘allied’ social sciences were represented but history featured quite considerably in the think-tank papers produced by leading INGOs such as Save the Children. At a time when sovereignty is being reasserted aggressively by increasingly authoritarian governments, when crises seem to reach ‘unprecedented’ dimensions, humanitarians turn to history to understand both sovereignty and… precedents. Historians have a minor role in shaping the future of humanitarian aid. Apart from stressing the fact that the ‘humanitarian system’ that has emerged since 1989 may not survive in a less stable international world order, international historians can also bring a sense of perspective on the scale of the challenges humanitarian face today.

Humanitarians face many challenges but only some of them are new. In terms of scale the refugee crisis of today cannot match the one that followed World War Two – in terms of resources, humanitarian organisations (and here statistics favour the large ones rather than the unknown masses of smaller initiatives) have yet to raise as much money as they have done in the past. However, new challenges also abound when they face a more critical and vocal public of beneficiaries who can compare and contrast what they are getting with what is promised – who can engage legally and politically with organisations and make accountability a reality (if not a liability) for organisations. Transferring the decision-making for the billions that INGOs currently spend closer to where they should be spent was one of the laudable aims of the world humanitarian summit. Yet these billions are the tip of a humanitarian iceberg. We know still very little of the contribution of transient and modest organisations and how they mesh with churches, associations and local forms of international solidarity. Historians can show that Manichean representations of humanitarian power also needs some qualifying. Humanitarians could never respond to the full needs of any era. That they might ever have believed it betrayed their sense of hubris rather than their understanding of history. At a time of self-doubt and renewed public contestation, historians offer a small understanding of complexity and lessons in humility at a time when both will be much needed.