18 - Humanitarian politics and governance

Summary

The human toll of the Second World War dwarfed the combined efforts of states and civil society entities to ameliorate that suffering. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the massive humanitarian operations directed by Herbert Hoover during the First World War and its aftermath had become mythologized in large reservoirs of popular memory. The transition of international refugee management responsibilities to the International Refugee Organization opens a window onto some wider geopolitical and institutional legacies that United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) bequeathed to the post-war international order. The massive state-directed aid programmes of the Second World War created unprecedentedly vast opportunities for civil society organizations to engage in international humanitarian endeavours, even as the nature of those opportunities were regulated by governments. The issue of human rights and its ideological cousin, humanitarianism, invites a concluding reflection on that blend of compassion and cold calculation that produced the moral economy of the Second World War.