What is Humanitarianism ?

religious, spiritual, and philosophical commitments have inspired acts of compassion. If we equate humanitarianism with compassion, then humanitarianism is as old as history.

if we decide to limit the history of humanitarianism to when individuals started using the concept to characterize their actions and those of others, then humanitarianism is roughly two centuries old.

around the turn of the nineteenth centuryhumanitarianismslowly entered into everyday vocabulary.

In this way the revolution in compassion resembled the corresponding revolution in capitalism and the states system: there were pockets of long-distance trade and even wage labor prior to the seventeenth century,

FOR MANY students of humanitarianism and human rights, it all began with the antislavery movement.¹ Because of the volumes dedicated to its history, I need briefly mention only a few points that are critical to my argument

WORLD WAR II transformed the world of humanitarianism. Europe’s destruction catapulted the United States and the Soviet Union to Great Power status.

the world got serious about humanitarianism. Until then first responders to an emergency left the impression that this was the first time that they had ever responded to an emergency.

In most instances relief agencies popped up with the emergency, frequently organized by an immigrant, religious, or labor association, staffed by volunteers who rushed to the scene to do whatever they could. And because these organizationally challenged agencies were descending on the same emergency with little coordination among them, the level of activity was more impressive than the actual results.

THE NOVELTY of the postwar humanitarian emergencies has less to do with their objective features and more with the simple fact that they generated more attention from more people from greater distances than ever before.

Although the history of the nineteenth century demonstrates that the plight of those from the global South could, at times, capture the attention and sympathy of those in the West, by and large their suffering went unnoticed or even excused as part of progress.

the readiness of so many sober politicians and intellectuals to treat the end of the Cold War as a miracle that would usher in a more glorious world seems more than a little bit baffling.

VIOLENCE IS part of humanitarianism’s history. The violence we usually associate with humanitarianism is the violence that causes humanitarian action.

there also is the violence deployed in the name of humanitarianism. As famously observed by Hannah Arendt, the first signs that humanitarianism could legitimate bloodshed occurred with the French Revolution, when proclamations of humanity, fraternity, and liberty inspired beheadings, riotous behavior, and mass killings.

HUMANITY HAS come a long way in the last two centuries. Over two hundred years ago post-Enlightenment thinkers embraced the “man of feeling” because he was morally superior to, and truer to life than, the coldly mechanical and self-absorbed human imagined by earlier rationalists.

There has been an undeniable interest in recent years in the history of humanitarianism. It is a field that has grown quickly and, as a field of inquiry, it incorporates a vast spectrum of subjects

Emily Baughan is a lecturer in British history at the University of Sheffield working on internationalism and humanitarianism in the twentieth century, with a particular interest in child welfare.

Eleanor Davey is a historian of France working at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester and the author of Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988.

humanitarianism as a lens through which to examine a political ideology — liberal internationalism — rather than as the object of my research. I began my Ph.D. on the history of the international Save the Children movement in 2010 (now the basis of my forthcoming monograph) and saw it as part of the emerging literature on the intersections between internationalism and imperialism in the twentieth century

There are many things that define a person. These include your job, relationships, religion, style, hobbies, interests, personality, and more.

Similarly, humanitarianism is one of these aspects.

Empire of Humanity explores humanitarianism’s remarkable growth from its humble origins in the early nineteenth century to its current prominence in global life.

humanitarianism that concentrate on the last two decades, Michael Barnett ties the past to the present, connecting the antislavery and missionary movements of the nineteenth century to today’s peacebuilding missions, the Cold War interventions in places like Biafra and Cambodia to post

Most humanitarians do not enter the field because they want to make money.

many people who participate in the humanitarian sector are volunteers.

Many trace the aid sector back to Henri Dunant, who founded the Red Cross in 1859.