As Hoover toured the devastated lands of Europe and Asia, Truman described the steps that America was taking to address the crisis, sending one million tons of wheat each month to Europe and Asia. It was drawing down its reserves of wheat still further. He urged every American to reduce their own consumption of food, particularly bread, fats, and oils, as these were essential to the effort. He asserted that we would all be better off, not just physically, but spiritually as well, if we ate less. And in a show of solidarity with the suffering peoples around the world, he asked Americans for just two days a week to reduce their consumption to the level of the average person in the famine-stricken lands. Chapter 13 recounts America’s initial measures to sacrifice on behalf of strangers overseas.

Chapter 3 examines the various regulatory activities in which transnational regulatory regimes commonly engage. These include standard setting, dispute resolution, technical assistance, humanitarian aid, and transnational deliberation. It also explores how each of these particular activities can be devoted to one of two distinct regulatory ‘function’. One such function looks to promote ‘efficacy’ – the regime’s ability to achieve its desired regulatory outcomes. The other looks to promote ‘interest balancing’ – balancing the competing interests of different stakeholders in a way that nevertheless retains the allegiance of all stakeholders despite their disagreements. A regime’s choice as to whether to focus on efficacy or on interest balancing effects how its regulatory activities are structured and implemented. In addition, a regime’s regulatory function can be a matter of contestation, which gives rise to issues of what this volume calls ‘operational legitimacy’ – the degree to which the regime’s stakeholders support the particular regulatory function that regime seeks to promote.

This book presents a comparative study of the historical experiences of Britons who entered the international civil service between 1945 and 1970 with those who worked and volunteered in international non-governmental and civil society organizations. International service assumed two forms after the Second World War. One was the international civil service, much of which was concentrated in the United Nations (UN) family of international organizations. The other was international civil society, comprised of older voluntary organizations that expanded their activities after the war, and new transnational civil society organizations created between the 1940s and the 1970s. The book assesses the respective influence of Britons in these sectors on the post-1945 development of international public policy and on Britain’s transition from a great power to one that sought to position itself as a leading contributor to international governance and voluntary activism. It presents a comparative analysis of the personal histories of hundreds of Britons who represented Britain at the UN and worked in the UN Secretariat; served in UN humanitarian, development, and social governance institutions and missions; participated in the world government movement; volunteered in the Friends Postwar International Service; and lobbied for decolonization and anti-racism through the Movement for Colonial Freedom.

This chapter assesses the contributions of British UN staff to the organization's innovative global social governance initiatives between 1945 and 1970. The transnational governance of welfare, health, education, and other social issues of traditional domestic jurisdiction was a revolutionary element of postwar international governance. Colonial and imperial service in Africa and India, as well as Home Civil Service experiences, led many other Britons into UN agencies that worked in global social governance fields. These included child welfare, agricultural and educational aid, humanitarian aid, migrant and refugee relief, and freedom of expression. The British government’s Overseas Service Aid Scheme subsidized former colonial staff who wished to stay on in positions with new postcolonial state governments. This chapter evaluates the personal histories and contributions to global social governance of Britons who worked in postwar UN global social governance organizations and demonstrates how this work both contributed to postcolonial state-building and continued long-standing racial divisions.

This book presents a comparative study of the historical experiences of Britons who entered the international civil service between 1945 and 1970 with those who worked and volunteered in international non-governmental and civil society organizations. International service assumed two forms after the Second World War. One was the international civil service, much of which was concentrated in the United Nations (UN) family of international organizations. The other was international civil society, comprised of older voluntary organizations that expanded their activities after the war, and new transnational civil society organizations created between the 1940s and the 1970s. The book assesses the respective influence of Britons in these sectors on the post-1945 development of international public policy and on Britain’s transition from a great power to one that sought to position itself as a leading contributor to international governance and voluntary activism. It presents a comparative analysis of the personal histories of hundreds of Britons who represented Britain at the UN and worked in the UN Secretariat; served in UN humanitarian, development, and social governance institutions and missions; participated in the world government movement; volunteered in the Friends Postwar International Service; and lobbied for decolonization and anti-racism through the Movement for Colonial Freedom.

This chapter addresses the contention that ICL practice focuses myopically on horrific spectacles because all, or at least the most serious, international crimes necessarily involve the production of such spectacles. It does so by demonstrating that ICL, in its current form, appears capable of addressing forms of harm causation significantly different in nature and aesthetic familiarity than those it has overwhelmingly been applied to in the past. It does so in two parts. First, it considers scholarship that examines how genocide, atrocity, and mass violence actually manifest themselves and unfold. This scholarship highlights the dynamic, causally multifaceted nature of most atrocity commission processes. Second, it examines the degree to which the doctrinal substance of ICL could account for the causal heterogeneity and complexity of atrocities. Through this analysis, this chapter demonstrates that, in theory, ICL could be applied to a variety of harm causation modalities failing to conform to the atrocity aesthetic.

All across Africa, local transporters ferry humanitarian shipments, beer, powdered milk, mobile phones, soft drinks, and other ‘global’ commodities all the way into the interior of the continent. On their return journey, they feed local products like tropical hardwood, minerals and peanuts back into global supply chains. Through these logistical connections, whatever conspires in the dense forests of Central Africa is linked to the rest of the world. Whether it is to export timber from the Central African Republic, deliver food aid in South Sudan, or access consumer goods markets in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for logistical entrepreneurs, Central Africa is a ‘supply chain frontier’ where vast profits are made. But these expanding supply chains are also the engine behind new patterns of predation on the continent. To explore this hidden side of the global economy, Chapter 6 asks, how does a multinational corporation navigate roadblock politics? Or, put differently, how come today’s panoply of Central African roadblocks doesn’t disrupt global supply chains? Chapter 6 makes the case that transnational circulation is not somehow detached from the terrain through which it transacts; global supply chains come to life by empowering and sustaining a host of actors along their routes.

The introduction argues that postwar international humanitarianism encompasses continuities and profound changes with respect to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Western humanitarianism. In the Near East and more broadly speaking in the Balkans and ex-Ottoman lands, international humanitarianism was arrogant, provincial, and Promethean. Western humanitarianism was redemptive and built upon colonial and civilizational postures. The book claims that the First World War was a foundational moment for postwar humanitarianism, but the latter, at least in the Near East, connected with missionaries and protodevelopment projects.

Intuitively, much research in commons research focuses on collaborative governance of environmental resources. At the same time, due to the pressures of climate change, the number of natural disasters will only increase, and humanitarian crises are already on an uptake. As a result, I aim to extend this line of inquiry in my discussion of humanitarian aid as a shared and contested common resource. I take the example of the 2013–2016 West Africa Ebola Epidemic, which occurred along the border of three countries with different institutional histories.Drawing on interviews with 100 civil society organizations and domestic NGOs, I illustrate how top-down management of the 2013–2016 Ebola Response by governmental and international organizations led to policy failure, only until local organizations were involved. Ebola unveils the inefficiency of neglecting local actors, typical in international humanitarian response. In addition, contestation of humanitarian aid resources viewed as “commons” by recipients and “private” by international aid organizations fuels tensions in the aid relationship, and particularly during a crisis where local buy-in is essential.

By examining the forgotten history of refugee relief in the French zone, this book reveals that ‘caring’ for DPs became a political and moral project, overseen by the French state, international organisations, and occupation authorities. It demonstrates that French practices towards DPs were deeply implicated in the mixed record of the French zone: DP camps were both sites of violent discipline, but also spaces of valuable educational opportunities and exchange across cultures. Not only were French occupation officials and relief workers concerned about the image of France circulating in DP camps, but they also drew a number of DP artists into the orbit of French cultural diplomacy in Germany. For French occupiers and relief workers, exhibiting French cultural richness and selling the ‘French way of life’ was considered as a tool to express and project French political power. Fundamentally, this book nuances the view that the Second World War was a radically ‘modernising’ and ‘internationalising’ moment in the history of humanitarianism. French approaches to relief work were underpinned by gendered assumptions, racial prejudices and the received wisdom of the superiority of certain ethnic groups over others.

This chapter examines one of Ireland’s longest-lasting sources of engagement with the global South, namely the set of ethical dispositions and embedded practices that we traditionally call “humanitarian aid.” For much of the twentieth century, Ireland’s sense of itself as both a postcolonial nation and an advanced Western democracy found expression in an intense preoccupation with humanitarian aid for newly independent African countries. Over the last two decades, this history of humanitarian action has become a prominent motif in Irish fiction, featuring centrally in fiction by Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, and J. M. O’Neill. In the hands of these authors, humanitarianism has emerged as a vehicle for reflecting on Ireland’s place in the world – from the ethical attunement to suffering bodies that has dominated Irish representations of the global South to the political stakes involved in refracting such sentimentalized images through the language of anticolonial nationalism.

This chapter examines the formation of a new anti-impunity Transnational Legal Order (TLO), its institutionalization, and its consequences. Socio-legal scholarship and recent research on responses to the mass violence unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan, beginning in 2003, provide insights into strengths and limits of the new anti-impunity TLO. Based on a comparative eight-country study, involving in depth interviews in four social fields (human rights, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, media) and an analysis of 3,387 media reports, I review judicial steps taken on Darfur, conditions supporting them, and their consequences, interpreting them in terms of the transnational legal ordering approach. The case of Darfur shows the anti-impunity TLO at work, displaying it as a force that delegitimizes mass violence. Yet, it also shows impediments to institutionalization in the form of hostile state actors, fields with potentially competing agendas, including diplomacy and humanitarian aid, internal contradictions, and lack of enforcement power. Nation-level forces filter cultural effects of intervention, resulting in diminished concordance between the international and the global realms and across nation states.