The Dialectic of Humanitarianism and Civil Wars

Humanitarian intervention in wars down to 1950 occurred mainly in Europe (but also in the prolonged revolutionary upheaval of China). The sources of such humanitarian intervention and humanitarianism more broadly before 1914 were varied and not always military. They were to be found in charity and philanthropy, often (but not only) religious. They involved campaigns, such as that against slavery and the protection of religious ‘minorities’, notably the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹ Natural disasters prompted international solidarity, especially when the victims were other ‘civilised’ people (the earthquakes of 1908 in Messina, Sicily, and 1923 in Tokyo). However, the status and fate of both soldiers and civilians in war constituted a central thread of this unfolding mantle of humanitarianism. Founded in 1863, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) propagated the principle of humane treatment for all soldiers wounded or taken prisoner (the Geneva conventions). A parallel endeavour, spearheaded by international lawyers, aimed to protect non-combatants in battle and under enemy occupation as well as to limit or ban particularly indiscriminate tactics and weaponry (the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907).Footnote ²

The combined effect of such measures was to encourage a belief – in liberal circles at least – that civilised norms should govern the treatment of all peoples, or at least all ‘civilised’ peoples. This was underwritten by the enactment of the issues limiting war in conventions ratified by the great powers. True, there was no international jurisdiction able to enforce these. They relied on mutual observance by the signatory states. But the ICRC (relayed by national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies) acted as a rudimentary international executive able to referee disputes, inspect the application of the conventions and intervene as a humanitarian go-between for states at war.

Several contrary developments qualified this optimism. The conventions only applied to the states that signed them and to inter-state wars, not to civil wars or colonial conflicts. Many people (generals and admirals included) were sceptical of quasi-legal limits placed on war. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 showed that European states were quite capable of committing brutal atrocities against other European civilians.Footnote ³ However, it was the Great War that, from its outset, delivered a profound shock to emerging humanitarianism. The ‘totalising logics’ of its violence eroded the distinction between soldiers and civilians.Footnote ⁴ They also encompassed issues associated with peacetime humanitarianism (hunger, disease, persecution). Refugees, triggered by military brutality against civilians during invasions and retreats, were an intrinsic feature. Hunger stalked the Central Powers, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The maritime war that pitted an Allied blockade against the submarine war of the Central Powers aimed in both cases to starve civilians, who were now integral to the enemy’s economic effort.Footnote ⁵ Physical destruction at the fronts equalled that of natural disasters like earthquakes. The inhumane treatment of soldiers, wounded in their tens of millions and of the more than eight million who became prisoners of war (POWs), plus civilians interned as ‘enemy aliens’, strained this central strand of wartime humanitarianism to its limit. In the case of the Young Turks, hatred of the ‘internal enemy’ led to the genocide of the Armenians.

Nonetheless, humanitarian initiatives proliferated in response to these dire effects of the war. If belligerent societies directed their powerful charitable and philanthropic energies to their own war efforts or those of their allies, non-belligerent states redefined neutrality to include active involvement in various humanitarian causes. These ranged from feeding occupied Belgium and northern France to helping survivors of the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. The ICRC expanded its role of aiding the wounded and POWs. The United States (before entering the conflict), Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Nordic states all mounted humanitarian efforts. Non-state and transnational organisations that claimed impartiality in the war, including the Vatican and the Society of Friends (Quakers), multiplied their interventions on behalf of victims on both sides.Footnote ⁶

In short, a dialectic developed between the escalating brutality of the war and the humanitarian responses it elicited. This dialectic intensified in the post-war period. For many of the wartime issues grew worse during the chaotic return to peace down to 1923. Crucially, the Russian civil war and other conflicts added their own transgressions of the ‘laws of war’ to those of the Great War while challenging the state sovereignty on which humanitarian norms depended. In these ‘wars after the war’ the distinction between soldiers and civilians eroded further as civilians became the main targets of military and political violence (with anti-Semitic pogroms, Red and White terror and paramilitary warfare). Hunger turned into famine in Soviet Russia. The influenza pandemic compounded other epidemics. Refugees surged as White Russians fled Bolshevism and as Greece and Turkey ‘exchanged’ Muslims for Orthodox Christians. POWs of the Central Powers remained trapped in Russia.

Yet all this prompted new initiatives in humanitarian aid drawing on the experiences of 1914–18. This entailed rethinking aid not as charity but as a right variously for refugees (including the stateless), victims of famine and disease, prisoners both military and civilian and the survivors of the Armenian genocide. New transnational actors intervened and campaigned for humanitarian relief alongside the ICRC. They included the League of Nations (also located in Geneva), with its High Commission for Refugees, charities like Save the Children and the Vatican under Pope Benedict XV. International lawyers began to argue in favour of humanitarian norms not just for particular categories of victims but (embryonically) as a universal human right.Footnote ⁷

The importance of the articles in this special issue comes from the light they throw on this dialectic. They draw our attention to the fact that 1918 to 1923 was as much a time of continued war – especially civil war – as of peace-making. They show that the dialectic between a new spirit of humanitarian intervention and the violence of the civil wars was an important feature of what many historians now see as the final phase of a ‘greater war’.Footnote ⁸ That is the subject of the articles by Kimberly Lowe, Lia Brazil and Anna Lively. How that dialectic intensified and was (or was not) resolved in the Spanish and Greek civil wars is explored by Nathan Rousselot, Alba Martínez and Mercedes Yusta, Loukianos Hassiotis and Panagiotis Karagkounis. All the articles show that civil wars, by their innate complexity, presented new problems for humanitarian intervention. For the state, which is the legal authority in inter-state wars and the interlocutor for humanitarian intervention (signatory of the conventions and responsible for their implementation), becomes the object of contention in civil wars. Opposed camps claim its authority and deny each other’s legitimacy, making external action to alleviate suffering more problematic. This was the issue addressed by the Tenth Congress of the ICRC in 1921, when it extended humanitarian norms to the civil wars that marked the post-war period in Russia, Ukraine, Finland, Hungary and Ireland and to ethnic and border conflicts from Upper Silesia to the Greco-Turkish war. Where the state was contested, humanitarianism was more fragile.

The outcome was determined by the stage of the conflict, the balance of forces and the kind of intervention involved. As Kimberly Lowe shows for the Russian civil war, this was easier earlier on when, despite the Bolsheviks rejecting the ‘bourgeois’ Red Cross of imperial Russia, each side’s strength meant that both benefited from compromise in allowing aid for children or contact with political prisoners. Confidence in victory reduced the willingness to grant such access because this conferred recognition on the enemy as a legitimate belligerent, not a rebel, traitor or class antagonist. Lia Brazil charts this trend in the Irish civil war, when the Free State repudiated intervention by the ICRC in what it considered a ‘rebellion’, despite protests by women’s organisations in Ireland and abroad against the execution of republican prisoners. Yet some kinds of humanitarian intervention were more acceptable than others. Even as the Bolsheviks rejected access by the ICRC to political prisoners, they accepted famine relief delivered by the American Relief Administration of Herbert Hoover and the British-originated Save the Children charity. Anna Lively shows that in the midst of Ireland’s own national revolution and despite the absence of a powerful left wing, there was support for Irish aid to Russian famine victims (and reciprocal Soviet aid for the west of Ireland some years later). This differentiated openness to humanitarian intervention, depending on its purpose and its recipients, would warrant more systematic comparison.

However, Bolshevik Russia was more than just another state, its civil war more than just another conflict. Its entangled civil and inter-state wars from 1918 to 1921 were the form taken by a revolution whose goal remained universal and whose language of world peace and class emancipation stirred imaginations across war-torn Europe and the wider globe. By the same token, it symbolised the spectre of social and political breakdown especially (but not solely) in states shaken by defeat in the Great War. This was also the case in Italy, rocked by post-war dissatisfaction and frustrated nationalist ambitions. Amplified by rising anti-Semitism and the counter-revolutionary myth of a ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ conspiracy, Soviet communism fractured ideas of a common humanity on the part of its protagonists and its opponents. Radical counter-revolutionary creeds, fired by renewed visions of war, formulated alternative, exclusionary visions of humanity, and thus humanitarianism, on the basis of ethnicity and race.Footnote ⁹ This was the case with Italian fascism (in power by 1923), the racial nationalism of the German far right, which prevailed as the Nazis seized power in 1933 and a spectrum of authoritarian nationalist movements that came to power in inter-war central and eastern Europe and Spain.

Liberal and religious versions of humanitarianism had their own hierarchies and limits, including paternalist views of ‘uncivilised’ peoples such as ‘indigenous’ colonial subjects. Aid in the form of famine relief, public health or the protection of minorities buttressed the operation of European powers in regions like the Middle East before and after the end of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁰ But the ideological and existential conflicts generated by the ‘greater war’, which culminated in the Second World War and Cold War, radicalised the humanitarian dialectic. Mass destruction, population displacement, famine and genocide became military tools on a scale far beyond that of the Great War. This was driven by a dehumanised vision of the enemy, especially in eastern Europe and Russia and in East Asia and the Pacific during the Second World War. Yet such extremes once more provoked a countervailing response that sought to protect the status of soldiers and civilians, to limit the most destructive forms of war and to help its victims. The revision of the Hague and Geneva conventions between the wars and the emergence of international human rights law from the Second World War testify as much.

The Spanish and Greek cases show how these ideological and ethical fractures shaped and magnified the humanitarian dialectic in civil wars. Both conflicts provoked dire crises for the civilian population due to massacres and persecution, bombardment, hunger, disease and displacement. This elicited strong humanitarian responses. Like the belligerent states in the Great War, it did so as part of each side’s mobilisation of its own war effort and ‘war culture’. However, international support of the kind that came from neutral powers and the ICRC to both camps in 1914–18 now divided on ideological lines, being associated with anti-communism or anti-fascism. This was especially clear in the case of the Spanish Civil War, which mobilised opinion and support for each side globally, foreshadowing the Second World War.

Examining the activity of the French consuls in Barcelona, Nathan Rousselot shows just how partisan this could become. Responding to revolutionary atrocities in Catalonia in the first year of the war, Jean Pingaud, who had experienced the Bolshevik revolution fifteen years before, helped 7,000 middle class and clerical enemies of the republic to escape. This anticipated the exclusion of political ‘undesirables’ from the left-wing refugees who fled into France from the defeated republic after 1939, that is, those, communists and others, who came to be seen as the internal enemy in France’s own emerging war effort in 1939–40, before the more radical exclusions operated by the Vichy regime after French defeat in 1940.

In short, humanitarianism did not die but split on ideological lines. Here, too, one would like to know more about types of aid and whether any action across the internal fronts of the civil wars occurred. Did the balance of power between antagonists who refused to recognise each other nonetheless permit external intervention of the limited kind charted by Kimberly Lowe for the Russian civil war regarding, for example, the treatment of enemy prisoners (visitations, lists of the missing, contact with families)? Or was the ‘humanitarian space’ between (as opposed to within) the two sides reduced to zero?

What does seem clear is that even the lowest common denominator of aid to those who had emerged during the ‘greater war’ as the iconic victims of war – refugees, women and children – was disrupted by the ideological bitterness and existential nature of the civil wars.Footnote ¹¹ Children, in particular, had become a focus of humanitarian mobilisation by neutral states during the Great War and by religious and non-state actors during the Russian civil war and other conflicts of the ‘greater war’. A general focus on children in terms of education, welfare and psychology conferred a distinct status on childhood, exemplified by the charter of children’s rights drafted by Eglantyne Jebb (founder of Save the Children) and endorsed by the League of Nations in 1924. Such an understanding implied an absolute entitlement by children to humanitarian protection in time of war. Yet children (and women) could equally be seen as the symbolic heart of the conflict, the embodiment of the cause being fought for, their safety and preservation the object of each side’s own philanthropic mobilisation. Sending children to refuge abroad, as the left did in both the Spanish and Greek cases (to France and Yugoslavia respectively) was denounced as a crime by the other side (with the addition of a religious concern for their spiritual future). The issue of the repatriation of refugee children from abroad was a tangible reminder of the humanitarian divide long after the wars ended.

Occurring in the aftermath of the Second World War, however, the Greek civil war exemplified the humanitarian dialectic in a particularly fractured form. For the panoply of aid mobilised to deal with the chaos of post-war Europe and its reconstruction was put to use by the royalist government and its American and British backers in Greece to defeat the communists. As Panagiotis Karagkounis argues, humanitarian aid became a weapon of war and populations were displaced, ostensibly for their own safety, so as to remove support for the enemy. Such tactics anticipated the tools of counter-insurgency used by the British in Kenya and the French in Algeria in the wars of decolonisation. The Greek government also resisted ICRC involvement in what they refused to designate a war (another feature of colonial powers faced with revolt by the colonised). Only in 1977 would the Geneva Convention of 1949 on combatant status in war be amended to cover colonial wars.Footnote ¹²

To return to the questions posed by the editors, the civil wars explored by the authors of these articles show that in the end, humanitarian principles depended on a measure of consensus between the warring parties if they were to result in effective action. This was true for the application of international conventions by each side to the enemy under its control (POWs, occupied civilians) as well as the intervention by other agents (the ICRC, neutral powers, transnational charities) to monitor the treatment and alleviate the sufferings of the victims of war. The civil wars in question (especially in Russia, Spain and Greece) exemplified the dialectic of humanitarianism. They escalated the violence of war evident in the Great War and carried to its apogee by the Second World War. Furthermore, a reluctance to confer recognition on the other side in a bitter struggle to win state power made it especially hard, and often impossible, to accept humanitarian mediation. The legal and executive weakness of actors such as the ICRC compounded the difficulty.

Yet the strength of the countervailing impulse is shown by the degree to which humanitarianism became an integral part of the civil wars. It would be good to know more about the treatment of those classic objects of wartime humanity – POWs and civilians in enemy occupied territory. But the Spanish and Greek cases suggest that women, children and refugees, faced with hunger and exposed to bombardment and battle, became the subject of concern, enlarging the field of humanitarian action. It was, however, fractured by the ideological conflict of which the civil wars were an emanation. For it occurred mainly within each camp and their equally polarised international backers. This is particularly clear in the article by Alba Martínez and Mercedes Yusta. They show how a strand of women’s internationalism, which originated in the Great War and was marked by pacifism, had, by the time of the Spanish civil war, turned into an impressive effort on behalf of women and children of the Republican camp, the Commission d’Aide aux Enfants Espagnols Refugiés en France, and one no doubt anathematised by Catholic and Nationalist Spain. Perhaps the apogee of the humanitarian paradox is implicit in Panagiotis Karagkounis’s article. For the ultimate weaponisation of humanitarian aid that he describes in the Greek civil war was contemporaneous with the United Nations’ conventions on war and genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The geographical focus of the articles in this special issue is Europe, but they invite reflection on the wider geography of the subject. By including ‘imperial’ conflicts (the Spanish and French war against Abd el-Krim in Morocco, 1917–26), Lia Brazil reminds us that colonial wars raised somewhat comparable issues to civil wars in terms of combatant status, the nature of the fighting and the ‘humanitarian’ quandaries they posed. Mapping international humanitarianism in war over time means identifying exclusion as well as inclusion – the conflicts denied or ignored – and how that changed. This would mean looking at the Middle East and China between the wars and at China, Indonesia and Indo-China after the Second World War. The Greek civil war marked the end of a European trajectory with regard to civil wars (at least until the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, and arguably with the exception of Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’) that emerged in the pivotal period of 1918–23. But the second post-war period, after 1945, was just as pivotal for the conflicts and civil wars that would wrack other parts of the world over the following decades and for a humanitarian dialectic that not only remains unresolved today but shows no sign of diminishing.

Civil Wars and the Historiography of Humanitarianism

What, then, is the specificity of civil wars in relation to humanitarianism? And to what extent can they indicate new ways to write the history of humanitarianism in the twentieth century? Two features of civil wars make them especially interesting in both regards.

First, in civil wars humanitarians operated within a relatively weak and flawed legal framework. Unlike in inter-state conflicts, where international agreements and customs often helped to create a ‘humanitarian space’, international involvement in internal conflicts was severely limited and remained so even after the Tenth International Conference of the Red Cross in 1921 adopted official guidelines to this effect. In fact, international involvement was significantly undermined by Red Cross insistence that international support must always be channelled through the one legitimate national Red Cross society. It should come as no surprise that, in an internal conflict, this principle regularly ended up favouring one side, usually the more entrenched one. Second, civil wars demonstrate the deep entanglement of domestic and international issues. Because the civil wars considered here involved distinct state-building visions – for example, of a future Bolshevik Russia or future Fascist Spain – they tended to highlight the interplay between internal welfare efforts and external humanitarian action.

These features of civil wars suggest how studying civil war humanitarianism might provide a new impetus to the history of humanitarianism more generally. First, while the articles in this special issue feature well-known humanitarian actors such as the Red Cross or the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA),Footnote ¹³ they also highlight two relatively neglected groups. The first is women. Although a number of prominent women, such as Eglantyne Jebb or Elsa Brändström, have received scholarly and popular attention, the history of humanitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century, and certainly the history of the celebrated ‘great humanitarians’ of the period (one thinks of Fridtjof Nansen or Herbert Hoover), is still very male.Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast, several articles in this special issue highlight the important role of women in both organising transnational relief campaigns and overseeing local and national relief programmes. In civil war Ireland in 1922, as Lia Brazil shows, it was Irish women who used their international contacts and a shared ‘language of maternalism’ to ask the International Red Cross to investigate prison conditions. In civil war Greece and Spain, conservative women became the primary builders of state welfare organisations – and helped to give meaning to the ‘new’ state that was to emerge after victory. Civil wars, it seems to us, blur and thus expose the arbitrary line we draw between international ‘humanitarians’ and local ‘welfare workers’. This sheds much-needed light on the humanitarian (but often local) roles of women.

Religious actors also receive more prominent treatment in this special issue than they have been accorded in studies on the history of humanitarianism in the era of the world wars. In fact, it is only recently that the critical role of religious humanitarianism in what was allegedly an increasingly secular humanitarian age has received greater attention.Footnote ¹⁵ In this collection of articles, the humanitarian commitment of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches stands out. Perhaps because these churches – and their extensive international networks – were clearly drawn on one side of the conflict in these internal (and often strongly communist-influenced) conflicts, their aid took on greater importance and visibility. Religious humanitarianism could activate long-standing transnational solidarities with fellow Christians – as when Irish Catholics issued appeals on behalf of Orthodox Russians – but could also draw new meaning in, or in opposition to, the ideologies of the day.

A second point that emerges clearly in all the articles is the strong politicisation of aid. Of course, historians of humanitarianism have long noted that aid has never been apolitical or neutral, and few contemporary actors ever claimed it to be so. Nevertheless, the focus on civil wars brings out the political and ideological dimensions in striking ways. In many of the civil wars studied, anti-communism was a major factor, driving, for example, US humanitarian aid to both Russia and Greece. Indeed, while the world wars leave relatively little room for studying the anti-communist intention of aid – after all, the Allied coalition against the Axis in the Second World War temporarily suppressed ideological differences – the civil wars that followed, whether in Greece or in China, show how attitudes towards communism were among the most decisive factors in determining why and how aid was given.

Civil wars also highlight the politics of aid in a broader, not just ideological, sense. At its core, aid was about sovereignty and power. For aid providers, this was true in two ways. On the one hand, giving aid was a powerful way of asserting sovereignty and demonstrating (and gaining) international status and prestige. As Anna Lively shows, for many in the nascent Irish state, giving aid to suffering Russia in 1922 was about showing that they belonged to the circle of generous and ‘civilised’ nations. Indeed, the humanitarian system has always been based on state authority, and membership in the Red Cross movement, in particular, conferred enormous legitimacy in the eyes of the world.Footnote ¹⁶ Seen in this light, the final recognition of the ‘Soviet’ Red Cross as the ‘Russian’ Red Cross in the 1920s was also a recognition that the Bolsheviks were there to stay; likewise, the Red Cross movement’s outright refusal to admit a Moroccan Red Crescent organisation in 1926 – because of its alleged lack of civilised status – shows humanitarian institutions’ support for the imperialist status quo. As Lia Brazil notes of the ICRC, ‘its claims to political neutrality were largely a mirage, shielding Eurocentric, racial and ideological biases in the direction of aid to prisoners and civilians’.

But humanitarian aid was never just about international status. Domestically, too, many of the opposing parties were able to use the promise and reality of food, shelter and medical care as a means, perhaps the means, of consolidating power. Alongside massive repression, of course, the promise of aid and welfare had a nearly unrivalled appeal in times of need; both Francoist Spain and government forces in Greece were able to use the promise (and reality) of welfare to promote and entrench their new visions of statehood and citizenship.

Moreover, the articles in this special issue can help us to recognise the power of the ‘beneficiary’. While historians of humanitarianism still struggle to uncover the agency of individual recipients, the interests and ambitions of recipient governments and parties are often readily apparent.Footnote ¹⁷ The authors highlight numerous examples of factions or intermediaries actively requesting aid or ICRC intervention. These included the Soviet government as well as agents of Abd el-Krim, the leader of the Rif Republic. The actual delivery of aid was, of course, a desired outcome, but it was not the only one. Indeed, these very different actors clearly used international humanitarian networks to disseminate their own version of events, to gain sympathy from a wider audience and/or to vilify the enemy. Accusing the other side of inhumanity – and having this accusation confirmed by an international humanitarian organisation – was a powerful piece of moral capital. As the case of Republican Spain shows, international aid could be used to rally international opinion to one’s cause and gain a serious advantage in the court of public opinion—even if it was no guarantee of military success.

Finally, greater attention to civil war humanitarianism can also help us write the history of a generation of humanitarians – a generation shaped as much by civil wars as by world wars. Indeed, it may be worthwhile for future research to follow the biographies of humanitarians from the First World War through the Russian civil war, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and all the way to the Greek civil war. While there may be relatively few individuals who were active in all of these wars – although they surely exist – many humanitarians were active in at least two or three of them.Footnote ¹⁸ Writing a group biography of these individuals and recording their collective experiences might shed light on whether and how contemporaries perceived the difference between world wars and civil wars; it would also bring us closer to writing an integrated history of the violent first half of the twentieth century in Europe.

The Politicisation of Humanitarianism

Running like a red thread through all the contributions to this special issue, as through our foregoing remarks, is the politicisation of humanitarianism. While scholars of the field have long recognised that like any other form of intervention, humanitarianism necessarily operated within the force-field of the conflict in question, civil wars demonstrate this in a particularly stark fashion. To the victor went the spoils in terms of deciding whom to punish, whom to assist and how resources should be allocated to each end. Significant also was the fact that each country rested on insecure economic foundations: poverty and backwardness as well as protracted mobilisation meant that internal resources for reconstruction were in short supply. For example, Greece at mid-century was still dealing with the consequences of the mass population exchange agreed at Lausanne in 1923. Further repression and bloodletting ensued. In each case, civil war was associated with population displacement, internal and external, but also with external intervention, including military intervention and humanitarian assistance. Not least, civil war culminated in the escape of defeated parties to the conflict to neighbouring states or distant locations in order to regroup with a view to continuing the armed struggle or at least sustain a propaganda war. In East Asia, the consequences remain visible even today in terms of the fractious diplomatic row between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.

What drove humanitarian assistance and what impact did it have? One thing is clear, namely that political, social and economic upheaval in Russia between 1917 and 1923 – revolution and civil war, the military victory of Bolsheviks over their opponents, mass population displacement and famine – had a profound effect in shaping the contours of inter-war humanitarian efforts. A key manifestation of humanitarian assistance was emergency famine relief in the devastated Volga region and support for refugees from Russia, including émigré scholars. These efforts disclosed different approaches to the Russian cockpit. In particular, Fridtjof Nansen’s engagement with the new Soviet authorities to assist relief and reconstruction in Armenia encountered opposition from forces opposed to the new regime. These efforts seem far removed from Lodyzhensky’s optimistic reference to ‘love and mercy’, quoted by Gerwarth and Piégais in the introduction, as the potential basis for assisting the victims of war.

As Kimberly Lowe points out, the Russian Revolution not only raised the stakes in terms of securing material support and engaging with issues such as the repatriation of prisoners and refugees; it also upended existing aid agencies, creating gaps in provision. One consequence was that the tsarist-era Red Cross followed Russian émigrés into exile and regarded itself as exercising state-like functions of protection. The Russian civil war was also decisive in the debates that emerged in the discussions at the crucial Tenth International Conference of the Red Cross in 1921 regarding the validity of humanitarian involvement in civil conflicts including the humane treatment of captured combatants. Although the delegates legitimised advocacy in support of political prisoners who languished in Soviet jails, practical measures were usually hampered by limitations of access; in other words they foundered on the rock of state sovereignty, as underlined by the ICRC’s inability to engage during other conflicts such as the Rif war in Spanish-occupied Morocco.

Political stakes were clearly involved in the humanitarian assistance on behalf of refugees who fled Republican Spain in 1936 with counter-revolutionary intent: ‘saving’ Spain from communism and anarchism. As Nathan Rousselot points out, the key French consular officials in Barcelona had personal experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war and this left a lasting impression when it came to taking sides. Like other authors and the editors, Rousselot rightly insists upon the need to attend to the biography and career trajectories of those whom we might broadly describe as humanitarian actors. In terms of the historiography, a full ‘humanitarian prosopography’ would be an elaborate but rewarding exercise, not least to trace the contribution made by women aid workers.Footnote ¹⁹

In his article, Panagiotis Karagkounis draws attention to mass internal population movement during the Greek civil war, including compulsory evacuation that designated several hundred thousand refugees as ‘bandit-stricken’. Humanitarian aid provided by UNRRA contributed to population displacement by distributing or withholding material assistance. American-led actors made no secret of the link between aid, rehabilitation and the defeat of communism. His remark about rival civil war groups that seized shipments of aid confirms the findings of other scholars such as Fiona Terry.Footnote ²⁰ There is an important point here about how a colonial mindset persisted in supposedly disinterested humanitarianism in different sites of conflict where political-imperial considerations became of paramount importance and the interests of refugees (for example) were subsumed in imperial and post-imperial projects.Footnote ²¹ Meanwhile, Martínez and Yusta show how International Red Aid promoted an anti-fascist humanitarianism. The international dimensions of Red Aid stretched across the Atlantic to Mexico where it supported refugees from elsewhere in Central America and in Latin America, helped in part by the active participation of refugees themselves, committed to the struggle against ‘capitalist repression’. Mexico City, in particular, became a significant hub for pro-communist exiles.Footnote ²²

Looking ahead, that is to future directions in the historiography, more research should be undertaken on self-reflection among humanitarian aid workers, including issues of access and accountability – to whom did aid workers see themselves as accountable: to a given voluntary agency, to donors or to those whom they sought to assist? More, too, on rivalries – a non-violent but nevertheless aggressive ‘civil war’ among humanitarian aid agencies with different profiles, constituencies, objectives – and claims to superiority in terms of effectiveness. In short, to what degree did humanitarian actors become, and see themselves becoming, agents in the conflicts to which they ostensibly ministered?

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The essays in this special issue on ‘humanitarianism in an age of civil wars’ have raised a number of important questions. Among the most notable is that of how the world wars and the European civil wars interacted to shape humanitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, the history of humanitarianism has been considered primarily from the perspective of the two world wars rather than from the perspective of the European civil wars. The fact that some of the most prominent of these civil wars followed closely on the heels of the world wars – the Russian and Greek civil wars come to mind – has also made them relatively less visible. Instead, these civil wars have often become subsumed under larger conceptual frameworks such as the ‘Greater War’ (1912–24) or the ‘long’ Second World War (1937–53).Footnote ²³ Although some humanitarian responses to individual civil wars are well documented, the specific impact of civil wars thus remains rarely acknowledged when it comes to the history of humanitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century.

All the essays engage in different ways, and focusing on different sites, with humanitarian actors and the interests they embodied, articulated and sustained in addressing the consequences of civil war in Europe. Each author connects humanitarian relief in specific locales to broad global events and processes: revolution, the dissolution of empires, state formation. While the geographical focus of this special issue is on Europe, it is worth keeping in mind that non-European countries such as Mexico and China also experienced civil wars in this period and that some aid organisations and their personnel moved between different sites in this ‘age of civil wars’. Refugees who escaped civil war in Russia and Spain included significant numbers who found their way to China and Mexico respectively, so there were global ramifications.

Civil wars in Russia, Spain and Greece, as well as in China in the same period, each had particular elements. But they shared a common confrontation between left and right (crude though these labels were and are), culminating in the eventual victory of communist forces in Russia and China, in contrast to Spain and Greece where right-wing governments emerged victorious.Footnote ²⁴ It is no doubt here, with this political and ideological polarisation, that humanitarianism faced some of its greatest challenges outside the two world wars – challenges that have lost none of their relevance in the recent and current conflicts of the post–Cold War era.