Every year, millions of people are forced to leave their homes due to armed conflict and “natural” disasters. While distinct humanitarian challenges invoke civil society, governments, and intergovernmental organisations to act, the immediate pressure confronting protagonists in the field tends to squeeze history out of the analytical framework of humanitarianism. Relief agencies all too easily ignore alternative ways of operating as they move from one crisis to the next. Nevertheless, the past remains ingrained in humanitarian practice, creating a tension between intervention legacies and current missions. Another tension prevails between emergency relief as an episodic initiative with no strings attached and development planning as a future-orientated investment to be evaluated by its long-term efficiency.

By illuminating the historicity of humanitarian efforts in the context of concrete conflicts and by dissecting the imagined futures of the past, this panel aims to advance a more thorough understanding of the trajectories of current humanitarian aspiration and practice.

Contributors are expected to address key concepts and their meaning for different actors in different circumstances; the interactions of civil society, states, and UN agencies; and the emergence of epistemic communities among them; the interplay of political, commercial or (imagined) ethnic / historical links in the decisions of states or individuals to intervene in humanitarianism or conflict resolution; or the political and economic embeddedness of humanitarian efforts. Historical case studies are welcome.