The Resilient Humanitarianism Project aims to advance the concept of ‘resilient humanitarianism’ through an historical investigation of one humanitarian body, the League of Red Cross Societies, from its inception in May 1919 to the end of the Cold War era in 1991. It was launched in Geneva at the Histories of the Red Cross Since 1919 Conference in 2019.

Naturally, the project was designed to draw upon the extensive archival records of the League of Red Cross Societies, currently held by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva. Plans were drawn up for several trips to Geneva across the life of the project by Australian and British researchers, our doctoral candidate, and Honours students aligned to our project.

With the news that international travel is off the cards for the foreseeable future, Australian researchers in the Resilient Humanitarianism project have had to rely on digital archive and library collections, and on the goodwill of the many librarians and archivists who have photographed, scanned and uploaded documents for our use.

Thanks to Grant Mitchell and Mélanie Blondin at the IFRC, our team has been able to access important bulletins, reports, circulars, and letters needed for our research. Plans are underway to digitise a further selection of IFRC archival files, with Project travel funds being redirected to cover the cost of digitisation by Arkhênum, under the supervision of IFRC staff. In the near future, the archives we digitise for our project will be made publicly available online by the IFRC.

Via this site, we will share with you several examples of archival documents that we are using to inform our research.

For more information about which digital collections we have found to be particularly useful, please see this News article on our project website. We are always happy to answer queries and share information on digitised material. Please get in touch!