In September, Professor Neville Wylie attended the ‘Humanitarianism & The Greater War Conference’ at the Centre for War Studies, University College Dublin.
This 2-day conference (5-6 September) provided an opportunity to debate the ideas, developments and legacy of humanitarianism in the era of the Great War, 1912-1923. The conference sits at the intersection of two burgeoning fields of historical inquiry, the history of humanitarianism and the history of the Great War. Recent years have seen an outpouring of innovative research on humanitarian individuals and organizations, fields of action, and the construction and use of ‘humanitarian narratives.’ A rapidly growing number of scholars, too, have highlighted the unique role the First World War played in fostering a ‘humanitarian awakening’ (Irwin), shaping humanitarian norms, discourses and practices. At the same time, recent scholarship on the First World War has led us to understand that conflict as a geographically and temporally much ‘Greater War’, whose critical events extended far beyond the fighting on the Western front, and 1914-18.
The conference aimed to bring together scholars working on a wide variety of topics and employing different methodological approaches to showcase and debate current research trends. It discussed absences and contradictions in existing scholarship, and identified areas of particular interest for future research.
Last but not least, the conference sought to encourage a dialogue between the all too often isolated historiographies on humanitarianism and the ‘Greater War’: for example, how does the study of that period’s unprecedented suffering complicate the war’s accepted chronologies and geographies? And how might new notions of the global nature of the First World War inform our approach to the history of humanitarianism?
In all, the conference hoped to interrogate the significance of the era of the Great War for the emergence of modern humanitarianism, while also underlining the importance of humanitarian engagement to understanding the war and its aftermath.
(Text from the Conference CFP)
Professor Wylie’s paper was titled, ‘Dunant’s Diplomats – The US as Protecting Power, 1914-1917′.