This chapter focuses on a contemporary Movement agreement summarized as Sevilla 2.0. This 2022 agreement tries to specify a division of labor along with increased cooperation within the Movement, both longstanding concerns. Sevilla 2.0 reflects a semantic emphasis on local humanitarian actors, with much rhetoric about the importance of National RC Societies. The agreement shows a certain fatigue with establishment and Western-based (and Western-funded) organizations such as the ICRC. However, in Sevilla 2.0 the ICRC was able to protect its traditional roles and functions, while agreeing to be more of a team player. How the ICRC and its partners functioned in the Syrian armed conflict of 2011–2022 is then examined. This case shows a very complicated relationship between the ICRC and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, between these two actors and various fighting parties, chief among which was the Assad government. The ICRC was compelled to abandon a fully Dunantist posture in the Syrian complex conflict. Comparisons are made with other organizations and conflicts.

This telling fusion of humanitarianism, interventionism and imperialism can, however, also be found in altogether different parts of the world. Chapter 8 accordingly considers three key case studies of collective European great power intervention for the protection of Ottoman Christians, in the imperial context of the so-called ‘Eastern Question’. The first of these cases is the intervention in the Greek war of independence of 1821–30. The chapter argues that the European reaction was decisively conditioned by abolitionist ideas and was based on the very conception of humanitarian intervention that had crystallised in the fight against the slave trade. The intervention in Greece did mark a precedent in its novel linkage between abolitionist themes and those of the protection of minorities, with a distinct narrowing of the idea of international protection to the Christian population. This selective conception of intervention was then ready to be reactivated by the European powersagainst the Ottoman Empire – as testified to by the crises in Lebanon (1860–61) and the Balkans (1876–78). What is remarkable about these instances of intervention is the increasing degree to which practices of international governance emerged in the form of international commissions alongside rudimentary forms of international criminal prosecution and minority protection. Above all, however, this period witnessed the consolidation in international law of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, with the decisive impetus coming from the fight against the slave trade on the one hand and the relief of Christian minorities on the other.

Part III discusses the striking triangular relationship between humanitarianism, interventionism, and colonialism and imperialism in various parts of the world. It asks to what extent the idea of humanitarian intervention solidified in international politics as a colonial and imperial practice. Indeed, Chapter 7 will show how closely the struggle against the slave trade was intertwined with the colonial and imperial penetration of Africa. In West Africa British anti-slavery measures, which for strategic reasons increasingly shifted from seaborne military operations to dry land, led to direct interference in the internal affairs of African principalities. A particularly prominent case was Lagos, which ended up being formally annexed by the United Kingdom. From the middle of the century onwards, the by now tried and tested intervention measures came to serve as an example for the suppression of the slave trade in East Africa, increasingly turning the idea of abolition into a decisive catalyst and trailblazer for European expansionism across the African continent. At two international conferences – first in Berlin (1884–85) and then in Brussels (1889–90) – the ‘civilised’ states signed treaties by which they gave themselves a mandate in international law and thereby an effective carte blanche for direct intervention, in the name of civilisation, in the internal affairs of African realms.

Chapter 9 looks at the United States, which serves as something of an extra-European mirror in which European practices of intervention are reflected. The first conclusion to draw is that the US government regarded interventions by the Concert of Europe in the internal affairs of sovereign states as a colonial threat to its own national security interests, which led to the formulation in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine and its paradigm of non-intervention. A fundamental change, however, came when the United States embarked on its own course of colonial expansion and increasingly came to adapt the practice of intervention to its own purposes. The key role here was played by the Caribbean island of Cuba, where a war of independence precipitated a humanitarian crisis. In the context of that crisis, the US government began to invoke European interventions as precedents and examples by which its own military action against Spain might be justified both legally and morally. The United States can thus be seen to have claimed the same right to humanitarian intervention in international politics in order to assert its own role as arbiter of power in the western hemisphere and as such to uphold by force the principles of civilisation and humanity – even against a Christian European state. Set alongside European interventions, the American case vividly shows how closely the idea of humanitarianism was interwoven with colonialism and imperialism.

How does the prospect of endless war against a terrifying abstraction mobilize and perpetuate support for its cause? While the war on terror clearly trades in notions of fear, outrage, and horror it also mobilizes a whole set of feelings less obviously associated with terror – the condescending, intimate colonial desires associated with “soft” power and humanitarian tactics. Considering romance as a lens through which to understand popular narratives about the war on terror, this essay explores intimacy and desire – as well as their intersections with discourses of happiness and honor – as forms of affective capture that serve to perpetuate the war on terror. Though the war on terror is most often associated with a mood of fear, popular stories framed through liberal individualism suggest that it also cultivates an attachment to the affective assemblage of security-happiness-compassion, echoed in the tactics of humanitarian or “soft” power.