Humanitarian Mobilisation 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

By focusing on aid in Central and Eastern Europe, this volume adds to the existent scholarly explorations of modern humanitarianism, its actors and practices. In the twentieth century, aid workers assisted victims of war and earthquakes, delivered food, supported health care, provided childcare, or sheltered refugees. The contributors not only reconstruct these diverse histories and their protagonists, but also bring international, national, and local actors together: from grassroots activists to private associations to state-driven "socialist humanitarians" to large Western aid organizations. In doing so, they challenge the often unidirectional, from West-to-East, and asymmetrical perspective on donor-recipient relationships in humanitarian processes.

From the Back Cover

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

Through its geographic focus, Humanitarian mobilisation in Central and Eastern Europe 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, 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 conceptualise the diversity of humanitarian thought, action and actors. It analyses 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, this book 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.