This chapter considers whether and how the All-Affected Principle (AAP) ought to be extended to large-scale, Western-based INGOs such as Oxfam and Care. These INGOs are frequently criticized for being undemocratic. Would more compliance with the AAP make them more democratic? I consider two possible ways of extending the APP to INGOs. The AAP’s “inclusive face” analogizes INGOs to governments and suggests that they should be more inclusive. It thus offers only a limited basis for critique. The AAP’s “exclusive face” points out that INGOs are unaffected, and tells us that they should therefore be excluded. The AAP’s exclusive face therefore offers a more radical basis for critiquing INGOs than its inclusive face. However, even the AAP’s exclusive face has serious limitations in the context of INGOs. This is because INGOs face the involvement/influence dilemma: they can be involved in addressing social problems or they can avoid undue influence, but it is difficult for them to do both simultaneously. I therefore turn to three organizations that directly and intentionally address this dilemma: SURJ, Thousand Currents, and the Solidaire Network. I show that these organizations reinterpret the AAP in ways that are relevant to, and generative for, other similarly-situated entities, such as INGOs.

This chapter introduces an idea that has enjoyed a remarkable, if hotly contested, development in the post-Cold War era: humanitarian intervention. Based on a commitment to principles of humanity and respect for life, such action seeks to alleviate the unnecessary suffering caused by violent conflict through intervening in another state, with force under limited conditions. The chapter outlines the origins of humanitarianism and the history of humanitarian intervention before discussing the shift to the responsibility to protect (R2P). As world politics becomes ever more complex, debate about global responsibilities to protect suffering strangers will continue to shape the theory and practice of international relations. While abuse of human beings has not become less widespread, the preoccupation with COVID-19 and domestic priorities meant that little consideration was given to robust action against middle powers perpetrating mass atrocities in such places as Myanmar and Tigray, let alone against major powers in Ukraine and Xinjiang.

Not only money crossed the ocean: letters between the French orphans and their benefactors went in each direction across the Atlantic. The correspondence between France’s orphans supported through the FCFS and their American benefactors revealed both the power of the connection and the power dynamic between the recipients and the “godparents.” Letters from the fatherless children of France told of the moral and psychological support that accompanied the financial assistance that sponsorships provided. And while it seems that the correspondence helped open an ocean of hope and fostered the conviction that France was not alone in its fight against Germany, the letters from France also reflected the power dynamic of the sponsorship: those in need had to keep the assistance coming. The letters also show the FCFS at work: the instructions to the recipients of aid as to how they were to communicate with donors; the typed transcription and translations of the letters, most likely carried out by women in the Paris and New York offices; and the messaging to the benefactors, who were reminded that mothers needed money, but children cared more for the attention from a far-away friend.

Ensuring the future of France – its children – meant fighting on multiple dimensions. One set of enemies included infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and the influenza pandemic; the other set comprises illnesses and infant mortality attendant to poverty and malnutrition. Thousands of volunteers from the United States fought these battles with treatment and prevention strategies. They toured the Franco-American colonies, organized large antiepidemic campaigns, and produced leaflets providing practical advice on managing the care of babies and children during wartime. With the help of the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross, the American Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division, thousands of leaflets were distributed to the Franco-American colonies of the CFAPCF, fatherless children supported through the FCFS, as well as to schools and mothers across France. With the spread of tuberculosis in 1917 and the 1918 influenza pandemic, American medical experts realized that a sanitary ironclad was needed to block the spread of contagious diseases to the United States: to protect France was to protect the United States.

As soon as World War I broke out, American citizens established an important wartime relief organization that was effective in providing refuge to child war victims from France’s northern and eastern regions. The Committee Franco-American for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier (CFAPCF), the first Franco-American response aimed at ensuring the protection of France’s children, provided financial and material assistance to rescue, shelter, heal, and educate displaced, injured, ill, and orphaned children. It collaborated with groups of nuns who ran some of the colonies, with teachers in charge of schooling and with American health experts overseeing provisions of sanitary conditions and hygiene. American women traveled to France and worked in the Franco-American colonies. In addition to caring for the children, they taught them about their friendly nation whose people were helping to ensure their survival. Running a network of colonies across France required considerable human and material resources, and the CFAPCF drew on social networks of wealthy French citizens and American expatriates eager to shield France’s children from hunger, destitution, and death. Shipments of clothing, garments, books, toys, and other gifts from the United States signaled the Americans’ mobilization to save France’s orphans.

In the aftermath of the war, a new form of commemoration and memorialization took place, centered around the adoption of fatherless children as a substitute to the loss of a son. French orphans were part of a process merging remembrance and humanitarian action. In vast cemeteries across France, the sacrifice of American soldiers was honored on special occasions, with the sponsored orphans and school children placing wreaths of flowers on their tombs. In parallel, the FCFS launched another campaign of sponsorships to reduce infant mortality. With its local branches across the United States, the FCFS capitalized on its ability to reach out to local communities and thus staved off the indifference that can set in after a crisis has seemed to pass. With its other communication strategies still in place, the FCFS saw continued success, testament to its deep popularity across the United States. Between the end of 1918 and 1921, the response of the United States was such that the number of sponsored orphans increased from 80,000 to 300,000.

In December 1916, in the winter snow of New York State, while Americans busied themselves with Christmas shopping and prepared festivities, a skinny twelve-year-old boy, poorly dressed and in ragged shoes, shouted at the top of his lungs: “Buy a Mirror fer a kid in France!” Every evening after school, James Prendergast Jackson Jr. stood on a street corner and sold copies of the newspaper to earn enough money to sponsor a French child whose father had been killed in the war in France. One of six children in a working-class family, James was determined to assist a child across the ocean who, as he had learned in school, desperately needed food and clothing. Ten cents each day would secure those necessities, and James promised himself he would get those 10 cents selling newspapers. He sold seventy copies of the paper a day, for which he earned 35 cents. From Greenville, New York, James wrote to the secretary of the Junior Committee of the Fatherless Children of France Society (FCFS) – the Franco-American organization matching American “godparents” with French children whose fathers had been killed in the war – and announced his intention of “adopting” a brother in France. With candor and determination, James announced his choice of child to support with his earnings: “I wood like a boy between ten and twelve if it is the same to you.” Attached to the letter was 85 cents that he had been given for his birthday. James was assigned André Leblanc, aged eleven, rue Dautancourt, Paris.

No foreign humanitarian organization garnered more support from Americans during (and after) World War I than did the Fatherless Children of France Society. From New York City, the Franco-American private philanthropic organization rapidly raised a wave of humanitarian response for the children of France’s war dead, doing so through strategic communication and tireless networking. Members of the FCFS toured US cities, states, and territories, opening chapters and addressing assembled crowds, constantly collecting funds. Speakers vividly described the plight of starving babies in devastated France and invited those who had witnessed the trauma of children to testify. Much of the campaigning was done by women representing local committees. Americans were offered a choice on how to spend their humanitarian dollars. From the moment they became sponsors, they could be involved in the process of selecting their orphans. Most importantly, the FCFS reached the wealthy, middle, and working classes alike. In involving school children, laborers, and members of churches, clubs, and associations, the FCFS encouraged a spirit of cooperative – and sometimes competitive – humanitarianism. As a result, the FCFS mobilized large sections of US society to “adopt” some 300,000 French children who were victims of war and kept the aid flowing from 1915 to 1921.

After Germany’s capitulation and surrender in November 1918, physicians, nurses, and health care experts crossed the former front lines and realized that four years of malnutrition had significantly affected children’s health and physical development. Milk, butter, eggs, potatoes, and fresh vegetables were scarce or available only at prohibitive prices. Americans who saw firsthand the devastation of the formerly occupied regions of northern France committed themselves to feeding and clothing destitute inhabitants. These leaders and visionaries harnessed the compassion, energy, expertise, and generosity of US citizens who were willing to work tirelessly at home and abroad in France to alleviate suffering. The American Committee for Devastated France was not the only postwar initiative formed by Americans to alleviate suffering and restore health and infrastructure in the devastated regions of France. From Jessie Carson’s efforts to create lending libraries with thousands of donated books to the engineering assistance of Harvard University undergraduates in rebuilding French industries to open-air schools, hospitals, and preventoriums (facilities for infants infected with tuberculosis but not with active disease), American individuals and organizations continued the generosity that the United States had shown during the war, even though their country’s leaders were not supporting the resuscitation of their ally.

Philanthropic organizations generally operate through networks of political and social élites, mobilizing the wealthy and influential. That was no less true during World War I. The colonies established by the CFAPCF were under the direct patronage of wealthy individuals – Americans who donated parts of their fortune and lent their properties to care for and house relatively small groups of children who were victims of the war: ill, injured, or displaced. The FCFS, which provided money directly to war widows caring for their fatherless children, marshaled the empathy and energies of the American public – initially expatriate Americans in France but eventually wide cross-sections of American society – to support some 300,000 children.

This chapter focusses on the rise of humanitarian literature relating to the southern hemisphere settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the 1830s, when humanitarian concerns about the treatment of Indigenous peoples coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery and the proliferation of coerced and indentured labour. It examines how travel writing and poetry of witness encouraged humanitarian intervention on colonial frontiers, often by ventriloquising the voices of Indigenous peoples in the aftermath of violent massacres. It considers the wider networks and print media in which humanitarian literatures originated, such as open letters, religious tracts, treaties, and petitions. The chapter argues for the importance of a sentimentalised aesthetics of eyewitness immediatism drawn from abolitionist literature in shaping (and distorting) attitudes towards Indigenous peoples. It considers what the framework of humanitarianism can tell us about the literary culture of the 1830s and about the period’s cultural politics of emotion, as metropolitan social commentators sought to redirect sympathetic norms away from distant suffering and towards white poverty at home.

Existing research on the rise of precarious forms of employment has paid little attention to gender and diversity challenges. Yet precarious work has damaging effects for vulnerable demographics, with women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities more considerably affected. This volume unpacks this research and offers insights into the role of organisations in fostering inclusive change.

In appreciating the institutional perpetuity of war, while simultaneously acknowledging the historically informed, inherent limitations of attempts to bound its conduct by international law, this chapter introduces the three interrelated questions that serve as the organising themes of this volume: first, is there a historical continuity with legal protections in war being informed by notions of ‘civility’ and ‘barbarity’?; second, what is the relationship between the ideals and operational realities in international humanitarian law (IHL)?; and third, what are the limitations of international laws designed to restrain excess in war? Via a brief overview of the divergent evolutions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello law, this introductory chapter further explores the sub-themes present in this volume: universalism and its shortcomings; problems with punishing violations of IHL; and the degree to which modern laws of war legitimate activities that should otherwise be prohibited.

Until quite recently, international relations theory neglected the role of emotions. This chapter surveys the rehabilitation of emotions and moral sentiment in political and international relations theory with a view to examining the cultivation of sympathy as a normative and historical condition of international humanitarian law as a ‘civilising process’. The chapter argues that, as part of a broader ‘civilising process’ to alleviate unnecessary human suffering, moral sentiment has been an indispensable, if ambivalent, factor in the historical pursuit of humanitarian action. The chapter argues that the modern codification of international humanitarian law is predicated on the cultivation of moral sentiments such as sympathy and compassion being extended to those injured or killed on the battlefields.