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golden opportunity to enshrine the ‘founding spirit’ of voluntary aid in war. Those at the NAS disagreed. But, as the brio of freelancers in earlier conflicts gave way to attempts at regulated and increasingly regimented civilian aid work – reflected in new provisions in the Geneva Convention – a watershed occurred in the management and organisation of the Red Cross movement
This volume aims to disclose the political, social and cultural factors that influenced the sanitary measures against epidemics developed in the Mediterranean during the long nineteenth century. The contributions to the book provide new interdisciplinary insights to the booming field of ‘quarantine studies’ through a systematic use of the analytic categories of space, identity and power. The ultimate goal is to show the multidimensional nature of quarantine, the intimate links that sanitary administrations and institutions had with the territorial organization of states, international trade, the construction of national, colonial, religious and professional identities or the configuration of political regimes. The circum-Mediterranean geographical spread of the case studies contained in this volume illuminates the similarities and differences around and across this sea, on the southern and northern shores, in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, English and French-speaking domains. At the same time, it is highly interested in engaging in the global English-speaking community, offering a wide range of terms, sources, bibliography, interpretative tools and views produced and elaborated in various Mediterranean countries. The historical approach will be useful to recognize the secular tensions that still lie behind present-day issues such as the return of epidemics or the global flows of migrants and refugees.
Battle of Solferino and launched an appeal for wounded soldiers to be cared for independently of their uniforms; his pamphlet had at its core the neutrality of relief but it did not contain any references to pacifism. In their La guerre e la charité – published in 1867 with the idea of giving a theoretical and programmed vision to the emerging Red Cross movement – Gustave Moynier and Luis Appia argued for the need to oppose the cruelty of war but did not explicitly condemn it. The two authors believed that the atrocities committed during military interventions were
. Emblazoned on armbands and ambulance wagons, it symbolised the neutral status that medical staff and their patients were granted by the 1864 Geneva Convention. As will be seen, not all of those delivering aid were convinced that the flourishing Red Cross movement represented an unqualified good, or were agreed as to its purpose. At home, meanwhile, impromptu warehouses overflowed with a miscellany of
the Red Cross movement, outflanking the ambitions of the League of Red Cross Societies to lay claim to its ‘real’ spirit. As ever, such a position of principled neutrality was also a necessary one: its existence and its authority depended upon its claim to represent all of the signatories of the Geneva Convention. It refused to jeopardise this claim by alienating any one nation
major cause of concern for observers and evaluators was the lack of appropriate coordination mechanisms. Indeed, neither the aid recipient and donor countries, nor the UN agencies (DHA, HCR, WFP, UNICEF and WHO), nor the Red Cross movement, nor the NGOs had succeeded in setting up coordination platforms with the necessary authority to apply their decisions. Donors and aid agencies alike singled out the
’, wrote A. J. P. Taylor, ‘the Franco-German war became the first war of nations; the rules of civilized warfare broke down, and the pattern of twentieth-century warfare was created.’ 5 That the inauguration of the Red Cross movement coincided with the extremes of this first total ‘war’ was more than a regrettable irony. As Bertrand Taithe and Jean H. Quataert have shown
the civilian volunteer. All this, of course, left cold many of those Quakers explicitly opposed to the principle of providing relief to soldiers. It was no coincidence that 1870 saw the intensification of Quakers’ previous efforts in war relief. The FWVRF was conceived as a sally at the Red Cross movement, but it also came at a time when Quakers were publicly accused of
International Red Cross movement in Spain and as a relentless promoter of the cause of war humanitarianism in both national and international medical and legal forums. Yet, the professional activities related to the causes and prevention of epidemics which he mostly undertook in the early stage of his career – between 1854 and 1864 – make him a suggestive case study to illustrate the controversies on contagion and quarantine in Spain and Europe at the time. These were mostly focused on cholera and yellow fever, regarding epidemics involving civil or military populations, in
country of some seven million inhabitants, according to the Crisis Committee’s Permanent Secretariat. Map 1.2 Humanitarian issues in Rwanda The Rwandan authorities, UN agencies (UNHCR, World Food Programme (WFP)), the Red Cross movement (Rwandan Red