scholarly journals Defensive Humanitarianism

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Holden Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Domestic Policy ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
Internment Camp ◽  
Domestic Security ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Swiss Government

During World War I, the Swiss state interned nearly 30,000 foreign soldiers who had previously been held in POW camps in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Austria, and Russia. The internment camp system that Switzerland implemented arose from the Swiss diplomatic platform of defensive humanitarianism. By offering good offices to the belligerent states of WWI, the Swiss state utilized humanitarian law both to secure Swiss neutrality and to alleviate, to a degree, the immense human suffering of the war. The Swiss government mixed domestic security concerns with international diplomacy and humanitarianism. They elevated a domestic policy platform to the international diplomatic level and succeeded in building enough trust between the party states to create an internment system that reconceptualized the treatment of foreign soldiers from the holding of prisoners to the healing of men.

The Protection of Women in International Humanitarian Law

1985 ◽  
Vol 25 (249) ◽  
pp. 337-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Françoise Krill
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Geneva Convention ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Special Protection

Since the number of women who actually participated in war was insignificant until the outbreak of World War I, the need for special protection for them was not felt prior to that time. This does not imply however that women had previously lacked any protection. From the birth of international humanitarian law, they had had the same general legal protection as men. If they were wounded, women were protected by the provisions of the 1864 Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field; if they became prisoners of war, they benefited from the Regulations annexed to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 on the Laws and Customs of War on Land.

Self-proclaimed diplomats: Catalan-Lithuanian cooperation during WWI

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 340-356
Author(s):  
Joan Esculies ◽  
Vytautas Petronis
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Cooperation ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
World War ◽  
National Movements ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The topic of international cooperation between national movements before the end of World War I (WWI) has still not received sufficient scholarly attention. It is common for national historiographies to concentrate on the case of their own nation. When it comes to international relations, however, connections with neighboring nations and national movements - chief adversaries in the achievement of national goals - are usually prioritized. Nevertheless, even before and especially during the war there was a vibrant scene where non-dominant nationalities could practice international diplomacy, conduct discussions, share experiences, build coalitions, and so on. This article explores one of such examples of international relations conducted between the representatives of two nations - the Catalans and the Lithuanians. They came in contact before the war at the Paris-basedUnion des Nationalités(the Union of Nationalities), an organization that was designed to unite and support non-dominant national movements. Despite being located on the opposite sides of Europe and having no apparent direct connections, the Lithuanians and the Catalans established common ground for cooperation, which especially peaked during WWI.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Goodall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
American Character ◽  
Mccarthy Era ◽  
Domestic Security ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter analyzes how conflicting impulses for loyalty and liberty shaped the politics of countersubversion between World War I and the McCarthy era. By examining the ways this intellectual problem manifested in various historical contexts, the chapter uncovers a history of fits and starts rather than simple, linear progression: waves of growth in political policing followed by undercurrents of reform. The contradictory effort to retain historic freedoms while simultaneously limiting them is what gave American countersubversion its distinctively American character: populist, legalistic, voluble, and partisan. The chapter also seeks to explain how a country with a long-standing hostility to the centralization of power, and a strong disposition to associate activist government with tyranny, gradually reconciled itself to a domestic security state.

Managing Disease

2018 ◽  
pp. 92-129
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Mosquito Species ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Medical Doctors ◽  
World War ◽  
Administrative Policy ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Medical Institutions

After World War I, colonial administrative policy, environmental necessity, and economic logic converged to promote Vietnamese migration to meet plantation demands for labor. Peasants from the Tonkin delta travelled by ship and by road to southern plantations, where they sometimes displaced previous inhabitants. These workers helped carry out the deforestation that created the limpid, sunny streams in which mosquito species associated with malaria in the region bred. Malaria, beriberi, and horrible living conditions resulted in the illness and deaths of thousands of plantation workers. These outbreaks, along with the more famous cases of abuse, provided much fodder for opponents of colonialism, French and Vietnamese alike. Even as medical doctors recognized the poor health of plantation workers, they found it more plausible to blame workers’ moral failings and culture rather than the colonial system. By placing the human suffering of laborers in the context of changing disease environments, chapter 3 further investigates the relationships among science, business, and government. Industry played a key role in creating medical institutions and knowledge in Indochina during the colonial period and, partly because of this role, economic concerns trumped humanitarian impulses.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Russell Crandall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Domestic Policy ◽  
World War ◽  
Drug War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Cost

This chapter presents a comprehensive reckoning of one of America's longest-standing, most controversial, and least successful efforts in foreign and domestic policy. It focuses on the history, impact, and logic behind America's war on drugs. It also considers the entirety of the evidence amid a deeply polarized and highly selective discourse of the policies, controversies, failures, and successes on the war on drugs of the past several years. The chapter talks about the cost of the drug war that reached more than a trillion taxpayer dollars, which is roughly ten times the price tag of the Gulf War or three times that of World War I. It emphasizes how drugs produced domestically and abroad continue to proliferate despite decades of effort to eradicate them.

Art and Death in French Photographs of Ruins, 1914-1918

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Nicole Hudgins
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Aesthetic Response ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Human Losses

The avalanche of ruin photography in the archives, albums, publications, and propaganda of World War I France challenges us to understand what functions such images fulfilled beyond their use as visual documentation. Did wartime images of ruin continue the European tradition of ruiniste art that went back hundreds of years? Or did their violence represent a break from the past? This article explores how ruin photography of the period fits into a larger aesthetic heritage in France, and how the depiction of ruins (religious, industrial, residential, etc.) on the French side of the Western Front provided means of expressing the shock and grief resulting from the unprecedented human losses of the war. Using official and commercial photographs of the period, the article resituates ruin photography as an aesthetic response to war, a symbol of human suffering, and a repository of rage.

The Evolving International Human Rights System

2006 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Buergenthal
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
International Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World War ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
International Human ◽  
American Society

Few, if any, branches of international law have undergone such dramatic growth and evolution as international human rights in the one hundred years since the founding of the American Society of International Law. This branch of international law did not really come into its own until after World War II. Before then, what today we would broadly characterize as human rights law consisted of diffuse or unrelated legal principles and institutional arrangements that were in one way or another designed to protect certain categories or groups of human beings. Included in this mix prior to World War I were state responsibility for injuries to aliens, international humanitarian law (as we know it today), the protection of minorities, and humanitarian intervention.

The Internment Camp at Terezín, 1919

1996 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 199-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Huebner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
World War ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Internment Camp ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
First Republic

Although the fortress at Terezín attained a dubious international distinction during World War II as the Nazi concentration camp. Theresienstadt, it already possessed a gloomy history as a place of imprisonment, having held Austrian political offenders since the first half of the nineteenth century. Gavrilo Princip had been confined there along with his fellow conspirators after assassinating Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo; the young man ultimately died in the garrison hospital. During World War I, Terezín became the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Bohemia, housing its mostly Russian prisoners in makeshift subcamps scattered outside the fortress. In 1919 the new Czechoslovak state employed some of these same facilities to intern various “suspicious elements” from Slovakia. Unfortunately the zeal with which the authorities took people into custody produced a flood of internees for which Terezín was ill prepared, and conditions in the debilitated Austrian camp soon threatened to provoke a public scandal. The circumstances of this rather unpleasant episode provide a revealing—though ambiguous—glimpse of the sterner side of the Czechoslovak First Republic, and by extension, post-Habsburg Central Europe.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document