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Mercenaries are fighters who operate under special conditions. Their presence, as shadow combatants, often tends to exacerbate the violence of their enemies. That’s why the analysis focuses on the singularity of the relationship to death and ‘procedures’ concerning the corpses of their fallen comrades. As a fighter identified and engaged in landlocked areas, the mercenary’s corpse is treated according to material constraints pertaining in the 1960s. After violence on their body, and evolution towards the secret war, mercenaries favour the repatriation of the body or its disappearance. These new, painful conditions for comrades and families give birth to a collective memory fostered by commemorations.
Heerten, 2018 ; Omaka, 2016 ]. The second strand to this narrative is that Biafra was a significant moment for the creation of the modern non-governmental organisation system. The period from around the late 1960s to the mid 1980s – from Biafra to Live Aid, if you like – brought about a transformation in scale and purpose of non-governmental aid. To put this in very simple terms, the number of NGOs increased considerably around the turn of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the
city of Heiden, Switzerland, where citizens commissioned a monument to Henry Dunant. 1 In Castiglione, Italy, meanwhile, local dignitaries revived the idea for a museum to commemorate Dunant’s relief activities within the city’s streets a hundred years before. Castiglione’s International Red Cross Museum opened in June 1959 and established itself as the central Red Cross museum in Europe through the 1960s and 1970s. The museum’s approach to display and
opposition to coloniality, even in the most ‘benign’ of research and policy areas, like international aid and humanitarianism. Coloniality can be understood as the perpetuation of colonial systems and technologies of domination into the present. As discussed by scholars such as Quijano, Grosfoguel, Dussel and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the concept of decoloniality encourages systemic and historical analysis of the organised (re)production of injustice and mass human suffering. Formal colonialism (which arguably existed from 1492 to the 1960s) and transatlantic
mind when analysing periods like the late 1960s and early 1970s when things were in flux. What it meant at that time to be a humanitarian organisation was changing right on the cusp of both a ‘breakthrough’ for human rights activism as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch entered the world stage ( Moyn, 2010 ) and the reinvention of humanitarianism by Doctors Without Borders ( Davey, 2015 ). A great virtue of Heerten’s book is the way he approaches this issue when
Shattered State ( London : Zed Books ). Hilton , M. ( 2018 ), ‘ Oxfam and the Problem of NGO Aid Appraisal in the 1960s ’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development , 9 : 1 , 1 – 18 , doi: 10.1353/hum.2018.0000 . Korff , V. P
Introduction Drawing its energy from the wave of New Left and counter-cultural radicalism of the 1960s ( Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005 ), an NGO-led direct humanitarian action pushed onto the international stage during the 1970s. The radicalism of this new anti-establishment sans frontières humanitarianism lay in its political challenge to the conventions of Cold War sovereignty. By being there on the ground it sought to hold sovereign power to account, witnessing its excesses while professing a face-to-face humanitarian
Development, 1940s–1960s ’, in Smith , A. W. M. and Jeppesen , C. (eds), Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect ? ( London : UCL Press ) pp. 43 – 61 . Riley , C. L. ( 2019 ), ‘ Labour’s International Development Policy
Affairs , 2 : 2 , 66 – 78 . Dolan , C. ( 1992 ), ‘ British Development NGOs and Advocacy in the 1990s ’, in Edwards , M. and Hulme , D. (eds), Making a Difference: NGOs and Development in a Changing World ( London : Earthscan ), pp. 203 – 10 . Edwards , M. ( 1993 ), ‘ Does the Doormat Influence the Boot? Critical Thoughts on UK NGOs and International Advocacy ’, Development in Practice , 3 : 3 , 163 – 75 . Gorin , V. ( 2018 ), ‘ Advocacy Strategies of Western Humanitarian NGOs from the 1960s to
. ( 2016 ), ‘ The CIDA Photography Collections: A Visual Perspective on Canadian International Aid ’, Active History , 9 December , http://activehistory.ca/2016/12/the-cida-photography-collections-a-visual-perspective-on-canadian-international-aid/ (accessed 21 January 2021 ). Ermisch , M-L. ( 2015 ), ‘ Children, Youth and Humanitarian Assistance: How the British Red Cross Society and Oxfam Engaged Young People in Britain and Its Empire with International Development Projects in the 1950s and 1960s ’, PhD dissertation , McGill