In this post, we explore some of the archival materials that were used by our research team when writing our recent article: Oppenheimer, Melanie, Schech, Susanne, Fathi, Romain, Wylie, Neville, and Cresswell, Rosemary. ‘Resilient Humanitarianism? Using Assemblage to Re-evaluate the History of the League of Red Cross Societies.’ International History Review (Open Access: Ahead-of-print)

The League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) was established in Paris on 5 May 1919 by the national Red Cross societies of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan. The LRCS – known as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) since 1991 – has received little historical attention despite representing the world’s largest volunteer network and being an integral part of the Red Cross Movement. Our project seeks to explore the longevity and resilience of the LRCS. Our 2020 article ‘Resilient Humanitarianism? Using Assemblage to re-evaluate the history of the League of Red Cross Societies’ establishes our early thinking on one way to analyse the origins and history of the LRCS.

As a research team, we crossed interdisciplinary boundaries in search of a concept that might assist in explaining the longevity and resilient humanitarianism of the LRCS. In order to grasp the fluidity and changing dynamics between humanitarian actors at international, regional, national and local levels, we conceptualised the LRCS as a transnational assemblage, using a concept from political geographers’ adaptation of ideas originally developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Through the lens of assemblage thinking and the five assemblage elements of exteriority, capacity to evolve, internal machinery, open systems, and desire, our paper provides a new conceptualisation of the LRCS that helps to explain how it survived in the rapidly changing and increasingly contested international humanitarian environment of the twentieth century.

To explore the five assemblage elements, we looked for archival materials that captured the LRCS at particular moments in time and in particular places around the globe.

1956 – Austrian Red Cross volunteers providing assistance to Hungarian refugees. Nearly a quarter of a million people left the country during the time that the borders were open in 1956. Used with permission of the IFRC.

Papers from the various LRCS conferences provided important insights into LRCS plans and to how the Secretariat operated during different periods. The LRCS created an innovative series of ‘Regional Conferences’ in the 1920s. Pan-American Conferences were held in Buenos Aires (1923) and Washington (1926); Central and Eastern Europe Conference in Warsaw (1923) and Vienna (1925); and Oriental Conferences were held in Bangkok (1922) and Tokyo (1926). The Oriental Red Cross Conferences in Bangkok and Tokyo were particularly significant as they were the first to be held outside Europe and America. As we pointed out in our article, the Regional Conferences were an innovation that the League’s Secretariat considered ‘essential to an adequate realization of the ideal for which the League was founded’.

We used a variety of Red Cross publicity brochures, in both French and English, that provided information about the LRCS’s response to disasters and set out information about LRCS programs pertaining to road safety, disaster preparedness, and how to involve youth in Red Cross activities.

World Disasters Report, published 1998 by the IFRC.

 

 

 

 

Documents from the IFRC archives including the papers from meetings of the Board of Governors, general reports of the LRCS Secretariat, and the IFRC World Disasters Report (1998) all proved useful.

We also made good use of the various editions of the Bulletin of the League of Red Cross Societies. Manager, Library and Archive Services at the IFRC, Grant Mitchell drew our attention to the complicated history of the Bulletin, which was published in English, French and Spanish.

Information provided by Grant might be of interest to other historians who wish to work with the LRCS materials in the IFRC collection.

Grant writes:

“Between 1919 and 1939 it was sometimes titled ‘Information Circular’ and there were also ‘Supplements’. In 1947 there were two publications, The Red Cross World and the Monthly Report, then in addition from 1953 the News of the Month.

The Monthly Report and the News of the Month were combined in 1958 as the Monthly News and Report, which became Panorama in 1963. The sequence of titles and publications may be clearer when laid out in a list:

  • Bullen of the League (+ Information Circulars and Supplements) 1919 to 1946 (English, French, Spanish)
  • The Red Cross World 1947 to 1966 (English, French, Spanish, Arabic 1960-1966, German 1960-1966)

    League of Red Cross Societies, Information Circular, 1923.
  • Monthly Report 1947 to 1958 (English, French, Spanish)
  • News of the Month 1953 to 1958 (English, French, Spanish)
  • Monthly News and Report 1959 to 1963 (English, French, Spanish)
  • Panorama 1963 to 1983 (English, French, Spanish).”

For more information about the various League publications that we used in our research, please contact us via our project email address (resilienthum@flinders.edu.au) or refer to the extensive notes provided in the article.

The archives of the LRCS are voluminous and extraordinarily rich yet underutilised when compared with the ICRC archives. Through the various publications and outcomes of our project, we aim to bring to light the diversity and depth of archives and the many ways historians and other researchers can benefit from working with the records in order to shine new light on the broader history of the Red Cross Movement.