ITS Workshop (Book Talk) - "Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector"

Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations routinely present themselves as servants of the most longstanding and universal human values. Yet, while their values—impartiality, neutrality, universality—are certainly ageless, their social organizations are a much more recent phenomenon. In fact, the idea that humanitarian organizations like the ones we know today should provide emergency aid did not emerge until the nineteenth-century, and was surprisingly controversial when initially proposed by the Red Cross movement. In this talk, I examine the origins of the organizational cultural framework that first enabled humanitarian NGOs and has supported their work for the past 150 years. Drawing on archival research, I trace its origins to an orthodox Calvinist movement that thrived in Geneva in the mid-nineteenth-century. The specific religious principles of the movement directly shaped the principles of the early Red Cross and, in turn, the 1864 Geneva Convention, which has become the ethical standards for humane conduct on the battlefield. I outline the ways the Red Cross program disseminated internationally, and draw implications for the sociology of development as well as for the study of social fields.