Humanitarian Mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe - (Humanitarianism: Key Debates and New Approaches) by Doina Anca Cretu & Michal Frankl

About the Book

This volume examines humanitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. It challenges the often Western-focused history of humanitarianism by bringing together local, "private", national, "socialist," and international humanitarian actors.

Book Synopsis

This volume examines humanitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. It challenges the often Western-focused history of humanitarianism by bringing together local, "private", national, "socialist," and international humanitarian actors.

From the Back Cover

This volume explores actors, practices and meanings of humanitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. It brings together a diverse range of scholars and case studies as it offers a cutting-edge perspective on how wars and conflict, state-building projects, nationalist activism and policies, socialist politics or regime changes influenced the emergence and trajectories of humanitarian aid at various historical junctures in this region.

Through its geographic focus, this volume aims to decentre research on the history of humanitarianism. Building on an ever-growing scholarship that has predominantly focused on aid organizations, their architects and their workers, the contributors reconstruct ideas and acts of help from and within a region traditionally treated as a passive space of reception. At its core, the volume helps to consider and conceptualize the diversity of humanitarian thought, action and actors. The authors thus analyse local and transnational private aid associations and their works, 'socialist humanitarians', or, indeed, Western organizations and their local projects. Challenging conventional narratives of unidirectional international and predominantly Western-centric humanitarianism, the volume therefore highlights the multifaceted interactions between foreign aid workers, those who mainly operated on the national level and activists whose help drew on local ideas and resources.

About the Author

Doina Anca Cretu is Assistant Professor in Modern European History at University of Warwick

Michal Frankl was Senior Researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project "Unlikely Refuge?". Currently, he is the head of the Prague Department "Knowledge and Participation" of the Leibniz-Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe.