Laboratories of Humanitarianism: Aid, Intervention, and the End of the Soviet Union, 1985-2000

Laboratories of Humanitarianism is a ground-breaking history of the Soviet collapse that explores the transformative impact of humanitarian crisis on the country’s disintegration and the reconfiguration of the post-Soviet world. To explore this impact, the project takes a panoramic approach and explores humanitarianism at multiple scales using case studies from across the vast territory of the Soviet Union. At the heart of the project is one fundamental question: What is the role of humanitarian action in contexts of state collapse and reconstitution? To answer this question, the project brings together a multilingual and dynamic research team to explore the impact of humanitarian intervention in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia. Laboratories of Humanitarianism provides a radical rethinking of the Soviet collapse—arguably the formative geopolitical moment for understanding modern Eurasia. It moves beyond the realm of high politics to place the chronically under-researched themes of health and welfare at the centre of the analysis and provides an innovative methodological framework for writing new, transnational histories of the Soviet disintegration that foreground the country’s linguistic, cultural, and environmental diversity and that respond to contemporary challenges associated with archival access. In focusing on the Soviet and post-Soviet world, this project will upend assumptions within the modern history of international humanitarianism, where the timelines, perspectives, frameworks, and ‘watershed moments’ of North America and Western Europe have tended to be taken as normative. The USSR and its successor states provide a unique vantage point for exploring the relationship between donor and recipient of aid, as well as role of the ‘Second World’ in the development of global humanitarian regimes and practices in the late twentieth century.