Europe’s wartime humanitarian response did not begin with Ukraine—it has a forgotten European history from the First World War, and this project will dig it out of the archives. Most scholarship on First World War relief focuses on American aid, leaving a gap in understanding how Southern, Central, and Northern European networks operated and shaped international humanitarian law. The researcher will examine multilingual, multinational archives to recover these overlooked relief efforts, including the roles of women and fronts in Africa and the Middle East. If successful, the project could shift public and policy narratives away from a US-centric view of humanitarianism, grounding EU humanitarian strategy in its own historical precedents. The researcher will also train in international humanitarian law and digital humanities, and spend three months at a Brussels think tank to bridge the gap between historical research and EU policy-making. This is fundamental historical research with direct relevance to current European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations—not a blueprint for action, but a deeper, evidence-based understanding of Europe’s own humanitarian lineage.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the return of war in Europe are a stark reminder that EU non-belligerence does not mean humanitarian non-involvement. There are antecedents of European relief aid that hark back to the First World War (WWI), a conflict that marked a point of inflexion because of its unprecedented destruction and violence, and its global impact. However, the literature on WWI humanitarianism - a relatively recent subject of research - is dominated by a focus on American aid action. The project EUHUMAN+ aims to Europeanise the scholarship and public narrative on this topic. Based on underexplored multilingual and multinational archival material, it will unearth understudied and little-remembered Southern, Central, and Northern European instances of humanitarian relief, trace their interconnection, and study their impact on the early development of international humanitarian law (IHL). EUHUMAN+ published output will comprise two peer-reviewed journal articles and a scholarly monograph, which will also explore the role of women and investigate understudied fronts such as Africa and the Middle East. The project will enable the researcher, an interdisciplinary international historian and winner of the Elizabeth Greenhalgh Award for Outstanding Emerging Female Scholar in First World War, to train in IHL, as well as gain skills in Digital Humanities. She will work under Professor Heather Jones at University College London and Professor Samuel Moyn at Yale University. A three-month placement in the Centre for European Policy Studies, an independent think tank in Brussels specialising in EU affairs, will support her in acquiring policy skills and help bridge the frequent disconnect between historical research and policy-making. As an interdisciplinary project on the history of humanitarianism and IHL, EUHUMAN+ aligns with the European Commission's current European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations effort in war-stricken Europe.
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