Humanitarians on Different Shores: The Rise of Global Humanitarianism in Twentieth-Century Asia and Africa

Paper Abstract: This paper explores the emergence of global humanitarianism through a long-term historical analysis of the international Red Cross movement in Asia and Africa in the twentieth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ideas of humanitarianism initially developed in Europe through antislavery movements and protection of indigenous natives in remote colonies. At the core of these earlier versions of humanitarianism lay the “empathy” to the other in suffering as the same human beings. Humanitarians explained their act of benevolence by the language of empathy with an assumption that “we” and “they” were the same human beings beyond the difference of race, class, gender, nationality, and other social attributions. But when transplanted into the Asia Pacific in the early twentieth century, and incorporated into colonial institutions more closely than ever, humanitarian ventures came to work on the ground of “difference” among various groups hierarchically ordered in colonial society. This could be seen as an ideological watershed in the history of humanitarianism and also could be seen as a hidden origin of the developmentalist humanitarian regimes that hierarchically structured the unequal power relations between the former colonial power as benefactor and the newly independent countries as beneficiaries in post-World War II Africa. By focusing on the growth of the international Red Cross movement outside of Europe, this paper illuminates ideological trajectories through which the contemporary notion of global humanitarianism developed in historical entanglement of Asia and Africa in the twentieth century.