Yugoslav Interventions in the International Humanitarian Debates in the 1970s

This paper explores interventions into the international humanitarian conversations that were undertaken by the Red Cross of Yugoslavia in the 1970s. Inspired by the political vocabularies of socialism and the Non-Aligned Movement, the Red Cross of Yugoslavia initiated a series of actions inviting the International Red Cross Movement to reconsider its humanitarian principles and include perspectives from the countries belonging to the Non-Aligned Movement. The organization proposed an alternative humanitarian imaginary in order to actively participate in the conversations after the Second World War about how to organize international relations. According to the Yugoslav Red Cross interpretation, peace work should include supporting the freedom fighters against the colonizers in the Non-Aligned World and actively fighting against racial discrimination. The Yugoslav proposal provoked multiple heated discussions in the International Red Cross Movement over the meaning of “humanitarianism,” “racism”, “neutrality,” and “peace.” The humanitarian proposals of the Red Cross of Yugoslavia had an ambivalent relationship with racialization. The push for the perspectives of non-aligned countries to be better represented within the International Red Cross Movement resulted in an ambivalent humanitarian imaginary that both challenged and reproduced the premises of the humanitarian sector in the West.

Čarna Brković is a cultural anthropologist and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Mainz. Her research interests include humanitarianism, neoliberalism, social transformations, and the anthropology of Southeast Europe. Professor Brković is the author of Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism Became the Norm in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is currently completing her second book, Worldmakings: Realigning Humanitarianism from Yugoslav Socialism to Neoliberal Capitalism in the Balkans. As Principal Investigator of the CHANSE-funded Redigim project, she examines new redistributive imaginaries in Europe. She is an active member of several editorial and executive boards and co-founded EASA’s Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network.