Humanitarian Mobilisation in Central and Eastern Europe

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.